‘Common-sense’ research: Senses, emotions and embodiment in researching stag tourism in Eastern Europe

The article reflects on the experience of conducting participatory research with all-male premarital stag tour groups in Krakow, Poland. The research therefore concerns the performative and embodied aspects of hegemonic male behaviour that are encouraged and enacted by the British men who take part in such tours. Vital to the process of gaining an ethnographic insight into the highly gendered leisure spaces of the stag tourism phenomenon was a willingness to centre sensory, emotional and embodied data in the research process. Methodological reflections, therefore, recall the effects of conducting research in a setting mediated by the consumption of alcohol and collective drunkenness and pervaded with sensory (the thump of nightclub bass speakers, the drunken cheers of stag group participants, the smell of vodka) and emotive (feelings of elation, amusement and disgust) stimuli. Particular importance can be given to the benefit of mutual ‘common-sense’ experiences in building rapport between researchers and their participants. Such insights are of considerable epistemological value. In closing the article it is suggested that learning to recognise and work with such aspects of the research process is vital in developing effective research competencies.