Love as Qualitative Inquiry
reflections on loving and being loved - part 2
In Part 1 of this series, I shared some reflections on Love from an emotional space, letting the lover girl in me shine through. In this post, I’m taking a more intellectual approach to examining loving and being loved. I draw from my experiences doing doctoral research, a process that is changing me fundamentally, in ways I never expected, and that I’ll have more language to describe once I am on the other side of it. I find it necessary to explore Love through both an emotional and intellectual lens because, in my experience, Love is both a feeling and a cognitive choice. The feelings shape our cognition, and the cognition shape our feelings as well. Being aware of our feelings and our thoughts, and letting both these aspects evolve as informed by our experiences, makes for a more organic, enriching experience of loving and being loved.
Love. A communal and iterative act in which multiple people’s actions and behaviors over time shape how we think and feel about it.
I wrote this statement in Part 1 of this series as a disclaimer before acknowledging that being loved in my light feels foreign to me because, in some of my most intimate relationships in the past, my sense of belonging felt limited by my light. That is, I did not feel seen, heard, recognized or affirmed in the ways I was brilliant, but felt all the above in my insecurities and weaknesses. The disclaimer felt necessary because Love is a particularly sticky topic, and I am learning that it is good practice to be mindful and clear about any claims I make that involve others. It also felt necessary because I’ve been reflecting on the idea of making meaning of things in general. How does the process of making meaning change when we involve others? What about the timing of when we’re making meaning: does that shift how we interpret an experience? These questions started coming up for me over the past five months as I have been immersed in qualitative data.
Qualitative Inquiry
Qualitative data, put simply, is data in the form of words. It is data that describes experiences or concepts and presents information that is non-numerical. I collected my qualitative data through in-depth interviews with key informants, people who have experience in my research topic. I recorded and transcribed the interviews, and have been poring over the transcripts and trying to wrap my head around the meaning of the words said during the interviews. The goal is to identify key themes—say three to six key themes— from the data and describe them comprehensively, while providing evidence of each theme in the form of a handful of quotes from the interviews. Just as qualitative researchers make meaning of their data, we also make meaning of our experiences in relationships. The way we interpret actions, words and gestures in relationships is shaped by our personal frameworks, just like data analysis is shaped by the researcher’s lens.
In qualitative inquiry, we often start with a conceptual framework, a predefined set of concepts developed by other researchers and applied in different research contexts or topics. These predefined concepts, technically referred to as ‘a priori codes’, provided some initial structure to facilitate the meaning-making process. For example, if a researcher was studying the experience of grief, they might use a conceptual framework informed by the stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, etc.) to guide their analysis of interview transcripts.
In qualitative research, you typically select your conceptual framework, study it and understand it before you collect any data. I knew the predefined concepts that my conceptual framework contained and I asked my interview questions expecting to get some insights into these concepts. It’s the equivalent of starting a conversation already knowing a few things you want to listen for. However, since questions are open-ended, other important issues related to the research topic often emerge. These issues or unplanned discoveries are technically referred to as ‘emergent codes’. They shape how you understand your research topic and are extremely important to highlight as you go about making meaning of the qualitative data.
As you can tell by now, the process of figuring out what qualitative data means is quite subjective. Even if I have a conceptual framework that gives some sort of structure, the way I determine if a chunk of text from an interview transcript describes that predefined concept is informed by my mind, my lens. This is an often-cited critique by non-qualitative researchers, though I don’t think the subjectivity of data analysis is unique to qualitative inquiry. All research involves interpretation, including quantitative studies, where choices are made about what to measure and how to measure it.
Nonetheless, in line with good practice to manage subjectivity, I engaged a second meaning-maker: another data analyst, to go through the interview transcripts with me, and discuss the meaning we were making of it. My second analyst and I reviewed the transcripts separately, assigned meaning (codes) to chunks of texts and then discussed the meanings we had assigned. Together, we refined the definitions of the predefined concepts (a priori codes) informed by how they were showing up in the data, and we identified and refined definitions of unplanned discoveries, the so-called emergent codes. We combined some codes that we realized were overlapping as we progressed with analyzing the transcripts, and we discarded others that seemed to be less relevant. This meant revisiting and reanalyzing previously reviewed interviews, and assigning new meanings based on our refined definitions.
The second analyst and I had the same professional background (Kenyan pharmacists), so we had a similar understanding of the topic. However, we had different kinds of work experience across different countries, so we didn’t always interpret things the same way. Talking through the meaning we were making, and coming up with a third meaning—one that was neither solely theirs nor mine—made for a rich, comprehensive analysis and some really interesting themes that I wrote about. The process was iterative and could be repeated using different predefined concepts and different analysts, which would result in a different set of themes that would likely be equally as interesting. That is, one can apply different instruments to the same dataset and come up with vastly different interpretations, none of which are superior to the other, nor mutually exclusive.
Love as Qualitative Inquiry
While undertaking my qualitative research, I have also been navigating significant transitions in several personal relationships. Some of these transitions involved re-evaluating long-standing dynamics, while others required me to examine what I wanted from relationships moving forward. Experiencing these things simultaneously got me thinking about how relational dynamics, and Love itself, function as a process of qualitative inquiry, and how our conceptual frameworks shape the meaning we make of them.
In the context of relationships, Love as a feeling and choice, emerges as a result of all the exchanges between us and the other. The words said, the actions performed, the services undertaken, the gifts bought, the details remembered and acted on, all of which we experience through our unique conceptual framework, inform the meaning that we make to come to the conclusion that there is Love in the relationship.
Our conceptual framework, shaped by upbringing, socialization, values and beliefs, forms the lens through which we experience relationships. It dictates how we show up in relationships and how we interpret the experiences we have in them. For instance, my own framework includes elements such as niceness, rigidity, and self-sacrifice, instilled in me by way of socialization (religion - Christianity, nationality - Kenyan, gender - woman). It also includes integrity and grace, instilled through both personal choice and socialization (religion - Christianity, upbringing - present, active, honest parenting). A practical example of how my conceptual framework has influenced my experiences in relationships is that being loved by me has often included some form of structure. I establish routines as a way of expressing Love, ensuring I’ve carved out time for the people I care about. And sometimes, I have felt a lack of Love when others didn’t do the same, failing to recognize that the concept of rigidity and need for structure, might come across to them as a lack of organic connection if their conceptual framework includes the opposite, say spontaneity or going with the flow. That is to say, conflict can arise between my conceptual framework and another’s, complicating the process of making meaning of our shared experiences. It is also important to note that conflict can exist within my own conceptual framework. Some of the predefined concepts within my framework contradict each other, and part of growing up has included expanding my capacity to hold contradictions (e.g., rigidity and grace) while shedding outdated beliefs (e.g., rigidity as a virtue).
Relationships flow most easily when conceptual frameworks are aligned. Perhaps that’s why making and sustaining relationships in childhood, adolescence and early adulthood felt effortless. Our conceptual frameworks were largely pre-set and shared. As we grow older and start making more intentional choices about values and beliefs, our individual conceptual frameworks evolve in different directions and relationships became much more complex. There is a unique kind of heartache in realizing how differently we’ve evolved relative to people we’ve been in long-standing relationships with. Grieving who we thought someone would be for us in our lives, and accepting who they are now is a necessary process. It doesn’t mean that these relationships must end. They just require some reconfiguration: a conscious effort to realign our conceptual frameworks to ensure we are clear about how each of us are making meaning of things. It involves making fewer assumptions, recognizing that our interpretations might differ, being more explicit about what we value, cultivating more curiosity about what others value and asking questions about what we are experiencing in relationship with each other before we assign meaning to it.
Ideally, the meaning that we construct in loving and being loved should be shared. A third meaning, developed from the interplay of individual perspectives. It’s an iterative, collaborative process; necessary work to sustain the shared experience of Love. This work demands both willingness, capacity and courage from all parties involved. A willingness to explore our individual conceptual frameworks, the capacity to discern when and where adjustments are needed, and the courage to make those adjustments. It requires genuine curiosity about our loved one’s conceptual framework, the capacity to identify points of friction, to understand why our frameworks might clash, and the courage to address, soothe, and resolve those conflicts. It requires the wisdom to recognize when our frameworks are fundamentally misaligned or incompatible, and the compassion to create space to minimize harm.
So, I’ll leave you with these reflective questions:
How do you make meaning of your experiences in relationships?
What conceptual frameworks inform how you think and feel about Love?
How often do you revisit, refine or even discard the definitions of the concepts in your conceptual framework?
Are you refining the definitions of these concepts alone or in community?
Who have you trusted to engage in this refinement process with?
Are they willing and able to hold the responsibility of knowing and shaping your conceptual framework?
I recognize that this post has been quite intellectual, and that was intentional. Understanding how we make meaning of things is helpful so that we are better equipped to nurture relationships in which we truly feel the Love we are all worthy of receiving. Regardless of how we make meaning of our experiences, it’s important to affirm ourselves through it all: we are loved, even in the moments when we don't think it or feel it.