Respuestas Emocionales ante Incidentes Críticos: Una aproximación metodológico-conceptual desde dos estudios de caso en docentes chilenos

Abstract

The study proposes a methodological–conceptual approach to examining teachers’ emotions through the analysis of Emotional Responses (ER) to Critical Incidents (CI), understanding affective experience as embodied, dynamic and culturally mediated. Drawing on an interdisciplinary perspective, in dialogue with sociocultural and critical approaches, it challenges the notion of emotions as fixed or irrational categories and instead conceptualises them as contextually grounded narratives. The research adopts a qualitative descriptive–interpretative design based on two case studies with Chilean early childhood and primary teachers. The corpus comprised 228 CIs collected through the Critical Incident Analysis Technique, from which the CI Description and Emotions sections were analysed. A narrative–thematic analysis combining deductive coding of emotions and inductive coding of narrative categories yielded two core analytical dimensions: the qualitative
sensitivity to the emotional object and the richness of the emotional response. The findings show that ERs extend the reading of CIs beyond affective labelling, offering an analytical pathway to understanding the complexity of teachers’ emotions and the tensions that shape their professional practice.