Reflexive Research Practice Research Articles

Outsiders and learners: Negotiating meaning in comparative European social work research practice

This paper draws on two experiences of undertaking comparative research in England, Sweden and Italy, and offers a discussion of the kinds of dilemmas raised in relation to language and meaning surfaced by these. Its primary focus is to examine the reflexive construction of meaning, both in relation generally to the workings of an international research team and, more specifically, how such construction of meaning impacts on the process of qualitative interviewing across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The article argues that a culture of reflexive research practice is helpful for approaching national differences, to facilitate understanding in internationally mixed research teams and to support and empower participants in research, in second languages and differing cultures. Overall, the paper attempts to advance some tentative ideas that other international researchers may be able to consider and deploy in relation to their own research ambitions.

A Qualitative Evaluation of Participants Experience of Stammering Awareness Training

Narratives by people who stammer are often ones of difficulty in social situations and experience of negative reactions (Crichton-Smith, 2002) these responses can have a significant impact on how an individual responds to and copes with stammering (Plexico, Manning and Levitt, 2009) and patterns of avoidance can emerge which lead to lack of access to services. Research has shown that the general public do hold negative attitudes and stereotypes of people who stammer (Boyle, Blood and Blood, 2009; MacKinnon, Hall and MacInttyre, 2007) Many of these studies have used a quantitative questionnaire method. Few (Hughes, Gabel, Irani and Schlagheck, 2010) have used qualitative methods to further explore this Furthermore there have been a very few studies (Flynn and St Louis, 2011; Hughes, Gabel, Roseman and Daniels, 2013) to investigate if attitude can be changed by awareness raising activities. This presentation reports some of the key themes emerging from a qualitative investigation of the experience of front of house staff in the National Health Service (NHS) who have attended an awareness raising session delivered by adults who stammer (AWS) and an speech and language therapist (SLT). The method was a qualitative approach. Phenomenology was the guiding approach and data collected in focus groups. Each focus group was conducted by the first author. The first focus group was observed by a Highly Specialist SLT with experience in qualitative researching. The subsequent two focus groups were observed by an SLT who was given training. Transcripts of each group were made and analysed by the first author using a descriptive phenomenological approach (Finlay, 2011). Reflexive research practice was maintained throughout the process through reflective discussion with the group observers and note and diary keeping throughout analysis. Participants identified that the course had increased their awareness of how to support people who stammer and changed their approach when dealing with them face to face. They described understanding that things they thought were helpful (such as finishing sentences) were not and that they were more patient. Involvement of people who stammer in the training was seen as a key factor for them in affecting this change as this allowed for open discussion about and observation of stammering. Participants still reported that situations where they were on the phone or where they were under time pressure were situations when they were less confident in being able to support people who stammer in the way they would like to. Interaction with AWS resulted in reports of both attitude and behaviour change. Of all the aspects of the awareness raising session interaction with people who stammer was seen as the most important and this suggests that AWS or children who stammer should always be involved in awareness rising. Participants’ reports of situations which they find more difficult mirror those often reported by AWS (Crichton-Smith, 2002). This small scale study is limited in its generalisability, nevertheless this qualitative method has allowed for in depth understanding of the factors affecting reported change in this group.

Public harm or public value? Towards coproduction in research with communities

This paper develops a critique of the current model of research governance ethics which casts communities as vulnerable subjects. The paper constructs an alternative approach to thinking about the twin challenges of research governance and reflexive research practice through reframing ideas of public value and rejecting a public harm model. We use the insights of coproduction as a way of positively rethinking the relationship between researchers and ‘the researched’ to create new ways of thinking about public value. We argue that reflexive research practice should draw upon the principles and examples of empowerment within governance. These aspire to work ‘with’ communities and create space for greater community control in defining and creating publically valuable research.

The Aporias of Reflexivity: Standpoint, Position, and Non-normative Childhoods

In social work practice and research, both researchers and practitioners are required to be self-reflexive in order to produce authorized knowledge. In this article I examine the aporias of reflexivity, using aporia as a concept for dealing with and discussing the dilemmas, limitations, and shortcomings of reflexive methodology. To examine in a concrete and detailed way related issues involving the aporias of reflexivity, this article describes a project focused on non-normative childhoods in which reflexive research practice raised many, often highly ambiguous, questions concerning the processes of marginalization and domination as well as ethical considerations.

Situational analysis and mapping for use in education research: a reflexive methodology?

In the quest for a better reflexive research practice and to respond to the challenge of expanding on an education research repertoire, the authors consider situational analysis, proposed as a post-modern approach to grounded theory using maps. Originally situating their research projects within a social constructivist theoretical frame, the authors apply situational analysis to a qualitative study on how new joiners to an academic community come to understand the local assessment processes and the meaning of associated criteria and standards in higher education. They conclude that, although situational analysis offers important research prompts which can lead to an enhanced reflexive research practice for the educational researcher, they struggle to reconcile its postmodern approach in some of its elements with a commitment to a reflexivity agenda in the way that they have come to understand it.

Dreaming the research process: a psychotherapeutic contribution to the culture of healthcare research

This paper challenges the neglect of psychotherapeutic methods in therapy research and discusses the use of methods arising directly from therapy practice to generate research data. Recent developments in therapy research culture are critiqued in order to contextualise the present contribution. The research design and methodology evolve from the scrutiny of a dream sequence, using Jungian analytic techniques as a means of data analysis. Methods familiar in psychotherapy practice are found to generate data and offer a meta-commentary on the research process, also enabling the researcher to continue a journey of individuation through healing splits between binary opposites of internal and external, psychological and spiritual, research and practice. Stories emerging from one individual's experience may resonate with others and suggest different ways of engaging in reflexive research practices, which can contribute to healing a perceived split between therapy research and practice.

In-between practice: working in the ‘thirdspace’ of sensory and multimodal methodology

This article discusses how emergent sensory and multimodal methodologies can work in interaction to produce innovative social enquiry. A juxtaposition of two research projects — an ethnography of corridors and a mixed methods study of multimodal authoring and ‘reading’ practices — opened up this encounter. Sensory ethnography within social research methods aims to create empathetic, experiential ways of knowing participants’ and researchers’ worlds. The linguistic field of multimodality offers a rather different framework for research attending to the visual, material and acoustic textures of participants’ interactions. While both these approaches address the multidimensional character of social worlds, the ‘sensory turn’ centres the sensuous, bodied person — participant, researcher and audience/reader — as the ‘place’ for intimate, affective forms of knowing. In contrast, multimodal knowledge production is premised on multiple analytic gaps — between modes and media, participants and materials, recording and representation. Eliciting the tensions between sensorial closeness and modal distances offers a new space for reflexive research practice and multiple ways of knowing social worlds.

Multimedia Use in a Sport Setting: Communication Technologies at Off-Track Betting Facilities

Although there is a growing body of research on public social practices related to the use of mobile phones, internet terminals, and laptops, there are few integrated analyses of the uses of multiple interactive technologies in public settings, and especially those involving sports. This article looks at one such space in which technology is embedded in a complicated network of social and economic relations: the screen dominated pari-mutuel horse race wagering facility. Specifically, the paper examines the relationship that built environments, public screen, and communication technologies have on social practices, and considers the juxtaposition of different places in the quotidian, and in a place of reflexive research practice.

Dangerously important moment(s) in reflexive research practices with immigrant youth

As a white, working middle‐class adult queer from the Southwest USA, my subjective relation to the Mexican (im)migrant, poor, working, straight adolescent boys in California participating in my study was tentative, politicized, controversial, and surveilled from both social and individual lenses. Our relationships were also mutually caring, loving, supportive, stimulating, and challenging. Our ethnographic encounters carried with them some long‐standing and dynamic social narratives that surround relations between and across groups of relative privilege and oppression. These narratives produced ‘ethically important moments’ wherein I confronted microethics of research practices that remained largely under‐theorized and misunderstood in methodological literature. By critically examining my reflexive processes and practices within one of these moments, insights into the workings of social narratives about race, class, and sexuality are revealed that can potentially assist future researchers as they confront the politics and microethics of working within and across the intersectionalities of oppression and marginalization.

`Knowledge Once Divided Can Be Hard to Put Together Again'

This article critically examines team and collaborative research as an `academic mode of production'. Our main argument is that while theoretically qualitative social science research is rooted within a postfoundational epistemological paradigm, normative team-based research practices embody foundational principles. Team research relies on a division of labour that creates divisions and hierarchies of knowledge, particularly between researchers who gather embodied and contextual knowledge `in the field' and those who produce textual knowledge `in the office'. We argue that a theoretical commitment to a postfoundational epistemology demands that we translate this into concrete research practices that rely on concerted team-based relations rather than divisions of labour, and a reflexive research practice that strives to involve all team members in all aspects of knowledge construction processes.

Det tänkandeskrivande subjektet

This article is an experimental and critical text with the aim of addressing methodological issues of forms for academic writing in Swedish gender research. In the focus of interest lays a methodological paradox: at the same time as gender research sets out to analyse complex issues of power relations and normativity, dominance and homogeneity, mainstream theory has continued to dominate through traditional forms of academic writing. The thinkingwriting subject can be understood as a strategy for academic writing across genre, stile, time and space, and a commitment to critical reflexive research practice. The article applies a personal narrative approach and argues for a post/academic writing strategy, which make use of a style and tone to present authoring as active and powerful, and as a process between and beyond personal, essayist and discursive. The interweaving of textuality, visuality, spatiality and voice characterises the process of writing, and doubts are represented as an important impetus in relation to time and change. The question of what is an author is elaborated through the text, for example by seeking dialogue with other researchers through memory and letter writing. The reader is invited to reconsider moments where the methodological postulate is challenged. The article concludes by providing the reader extra material about the article and the author.

Understanding and Reflexivity in Researching Religion, Spirituality and Aging

ABSTRACT When examining issues of religion, spirituality, and aging, core values of the researcher or dominant culture may unduly influence study design, interpretation, and representation of findings. Awareness of the process of understanding and the role of preunderstandings provides the conceptual underpinnings for expansion of reflexive research practice, especially when investigating value-laden phenomena. Starting with Gadamer's framework for understanding, this discussion explores how attending to reflexivity can help researchers recognize, address and account for prejudices and preunderstandings that may hinder appreciation of religious traditions and spiritual stances that are very different from their own.

Understanding Community Capacity Using Adaptive and Reflexive Research Practices: Lessons From Two Canadian Biosphere Reserves

Community-based ecosystem management requires understanding a community's capacity. We argue that communities can make important contributions not only to specific assessments of community capacity, but also to the conceptualization of the term itself through community-based research methods that are both adaptive and reflexive. A research initiative that illustrates such practices is reported here. We begin by describing our initial conceptual framework of community capacity that identified resource capitals and mobilizing factors. In focus groups, residents of two Canadian biosphere reserves used this framework to assess their capacity to meet biosphere reserve mandates and to provide critical reflections that helped to drive revisions to the framework. Our new framework is more sensitive to temporal and spatial dimensions of capacity, local social relations, and local culture. We conclude that adaptive and reflexive community-based offer methodological alternatives for research, help advance conceptions of community capacity, and help produce social change.

Reflexivity, Relationism, & Research

Pierre Bourdieu’s “epistemic reflexivity” is the cornerstone of his intellectual enterprise, underpinning his claims to provide distinctive and scientific knowledge of the social world. This article considers what this notion offers for research and how it needs to be developed further to underpin progress in social science. Many reflexive research practices are sociological, individualistic, and narcissistic, and the article contrasts this to Bourdieu’s conception of reflexivity as epistemological, collective, and objective. The author then illustrates how, despite Bourdieu’s intentions, this conception when enacted tends toward the very pitfalls it is intended to avoid. Building on a developing conceptualization of the relations of knowledge, the author identifies this problem as intrinsic to Bourdieu’s framework, showing how it bypasses the significance of knowledge structures and so provides the social but not the epistemological conditions for social scientific knowledge. Bourdieu’s reflexivity objectifies objectification but needs development to help achieve objective knowledge. The article concludes by introducing the notion of “epistemic capital” as a first step toward developing a properly epistemic reflexivity and so realizing the potential of Bourdieu’s enterprise.