Sociologists may encounter myriad obstacles in the research process that affect the
research design and outcomes. There is, for example, a certain measure of resistance
and hostility experienced in sociological research on distasteful social movements
that is seldom acknowledged or included in published findings. The present analysis
explores the emotional conflicts between the research program and the 'gatekeeping'
activities of research respondents and the professional academic community in the
USA. Politically sensitive, even volatile subjects such as the US immigration reform
movement may rest on the classic affective/cognitive dichotomy found in sociology. I
suggest that moralistic or politically positioned emotional resistance complicated
the research process in two ways: 1) academic associates and mentors likened
involvement with the immigration reform movement to scholarly complicity that
marginalized the study's validity; and, 2) activists were inherently distrustful of
the research and its goals given what they claimed to be a history of
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