The shamefulness of boredom: Are good researchers allowed to be bored?

Being bored is an anathema for the sociological researcher. While nearly every academic is well-acquainted with boredom, boredom is shameful; it goes against the very idea of what social scientific inquiry should be. Both its ubiquity and its negative effects on scholars should be reason enough to take the experience of boredom in research seriously. Yet, as Giardina and Newman (2011) have argued, even qualitative researchers rarely explore how they become entangled in and positioned by a whole range of emotional experiences, including boredom. In their view, researchers need to do more than intellectually reflect on their position and the ways they are complicit with the problems they are trying to address. They need to find ways to write about research experiences that include bodily sensations, emotions, feelings of unease and excitement by making them an integral part of the analysis itself. In this chapter, Davis examines the painful experience of being bored in the context of research using one of her own research experiences as a case in point. She begins by arguing why boredom should not be viewed as a non-issue or an embarrassment to be quickly forgotten, nor dismissed as a universal existential condition or inescapable artefact of modernity. Instead she suggests that becoming aware of boredom creates an uncomfortable moment which can tell us something important about our research. She argues that rather than ignoring or repressing the shame and discomfort of being bored, we should embrace it as a helpmeet for understanding our interview partners, the situations in which we do research, the topics we are investigating, and, last but least, ourselves as researchers