Ethics and Feelings!

I really enjoyed the discussion in class today about the differences between empathy and sympathy, and the ways the bias of the researcher can be involved in face-to-face research. These sorts of ideas are things I've never really considered, because I haven't really done any social research like the kind we discuss in class. The research I have done has been with end users, testing interfaces or labelling. That's not to say that there aren't issues of bias and things to consider when doing user research (I always changed what I was wearing depending on the interviewee), but I feel like the stakes aren't as high. I'm not going to be horribly offended if a person that I'm interviewing doesn't like the way the global menu is organized, like I might be if I were interviewing a person who thought that women shouldn't be allowed to have access to birth control. There are a lot more angles to research in the social sciences that I won't ever really get to explore, but I find the discussions about them to be fascinating. I don't see many problems with empathizing with research subjects, but I think once you start to sympathize with them, it's a bit of a slippery slope. It's deceptively easy to start subconsciously leading people to certain responses, and I think that the more you sympathize and identify with someone, the more you want to see that their point of view resembles your predetermined biases or conclusions.