Reflexivity In Qualitative Research Research Articles

Who cares about academic welfare in empirical data collection? Exploring the deficit in personal and psychological care for researchers in research ethics processes

ABSTRACT Ethics applications in academic research rarely account for the personal care and wellbeing of the researchers who undertake research. This paper reflects on the practice of carrying out research where the experiences of the participant and reflections of the researcher themselves are closely aligned. Such instances encourage the revisiting of difficult, troubling, and sometimes traumatic periods of the researchers’ personal life history. This article reflects on research conducted during a doctoral thesis which uses qualitative methods to understand the experiences of thirteen working-class professional services and administrative staff. I suggest that this type of personal reflection is involuntary, it is not actively pursued yet becomes inseparable from the conduct of research. Echoing the work of Brown and Wild ([2022]. Ethical Dilemmas in Education: Considering Challenges and Risks in Practice. Open University Press) this paper calls for additional support mechanisms to be implemented for researchers who conduct this sort of involuntary reflexivity in qualitative research, making suggestions for practical solutions within UK institutions.

Enhancing nurse practitioner research through reflexivity.

This article highlights the essential role of reflexivity in research, using a qualitative project involving interviews with nurse practitioners during the COVID-19 pandemic as an example. It discusses the potential biases inherent in research, particularly when the researcher's experiences closely align with those of the participants. Drawing on the perspective of a nurse practitioner engaged in both research and health care provision, this article explores the importance of reflexivity in addressing these biases. Examining the lead author's experiences conducting interviews with fellow nurse practitioners, the article illustrates how reflexivity was used, particularly in data collection and analysis, to enhance transparency and minimize subjectivity. By advocating for the integration of reflexivity in qualitative research, this article emphasizes the significance of shared experiences between nurse practitioner researchers and participants in reducing biases and improving research outcomes. It demonstrates how reflexivity contributes to a more authentic and comprehensive methodology, especially when researchers share similar experiences with participants. Furthermore, this article offers practical suggestions to assist nurse practitioners in enhancing reflexivity throughout the research process, thereby contributing to ongoing discussion and strategy development in the field.

The words may limit our understanding: reflexive research, affect and embodied writing

Drawing on a reflexive and embodied approach, this article examines the researcher’s narrative inquiry, consisting of the conflicting feelings and messy thoughts that arose through her interviews with adults who had experienced child sexual abuse. The article highlights how embodied writing can enable access to other worlds by activating the physical senses and bringing researchers back to core bodily ways of knowing; these latter may be evoked by preconceptions, entangled discourses and social views and taboos concerning child sexual abuse. The article speaks to the emerging field of Embodied Critical Thinking and the concept of emotional reflexivity in qualitative research on sensitive, challenging and difficult topics.

Learning to be Reflexive in Qualitative Research: Improving Training for Doctoral Students in Business Schools

Doctoral education in business schools is focused on a functional approach to research training. While this approach is necessary, it rarely encompasses reflexivity in qualitative research, despite its importance. This paper provides the groundwork for educators in business schools to reconsider the conventional approach to teaching qualitative methods. It draws on my personal and professional experience as a key resource to shape its examination of doctoral education in conducting qualitative research. The paper offers points of reflection on the struggle students may face in conducting rigorous qualitative research without appropriately understanding the influence of self with previous experience, preconceived ideas, feelings, and even appearance. By emphasizing reflexivity, this paper urges business schools to move away from functional training on research conventions to instead improve students’ process of discovery by emphasizing interactive and transformational components of qualitative research.

Applying reflexivity in qualitative research: case study of a Nigerian tourism researcher

Ontology and epistemology influence how a researcher sees the world, and thus approaches their research and interpret findings. This paper reflects on the journey of an indigenous tourism researcher, recording his encounter with his culture and explaining how it shaped his research journey. The researcher also shares his PhD fieldwork experiences and how reflexivity offered an opportunity to negotiate his position. The discussion highlights how a researcher’s encounter with their environment heightens subjectivity in qualitative research and influences the nature of the research, their research position and the design adopted. The paper concludes that early-career researchers should be encouraged to tell readers about their background as it enables one to evaluate the quality of findings, contextualize the research and comprehend it critically, which increases reflexivity needed for professional development.

How to be reflexive: Foucault, ethics and writing qualitative research as a technology of the self

ABSTRACT This paper explores reflexivity in qualitative research, challenging conventional perspectives that revolve around the binary of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ positioning. While traditionally reflexivity has been understood through the lens of a researcher's socio-historical positionality, we argue for a more dynamic understanding, emphasizing that academic self-formation is an ongoing process of self-creation. Drawing inspiration from the ancient Akadēmía, where writing was a method of self-reflection, we recontextualize reflexive qualitative writing, aligning it with Foucault's interpretations of Ancient Greek and Renaissance concepts. We posit that writing, especially in doctoral research, is not just a tool for communication but a means of self-formation. This perspective redefines reflexivity as a transformative intellectual and existential process. The paper critically examines the prevailing insider/outsider binary in the research literature, suggesting that researcher identities are fluid and constantly shaped by interactions. By integrating Foucault's later work on ethics, we explore the ethical dimensions of reflexivity and the formation of the ethical subject. Ultimately, this paper contributes to the academic discourse on reflexivity, offering a more fluid, transformative view of the doctoral process and reflexive writing in qualitative research.

At home in the field, in the field at home? Reflections on power and fieldwork in familiar settings

Critical epistemologies and methodologies have over time challenged the static and mono-dimensional approaches to fieldwork, allowing researchers to contemplate and conduct their research in spaces of in-betweenness. Despite this important shift, the essentialist idea that both ‘the field’ and ‘home’ in a fieldwork setting must be actual places persists. In this article, we challenge the conceptualization and operationalization of ‘home’ not only as the juxtaposition to ‘the field’, but also as the embodiment of a place in a specific temporality. We argue that the postulation of ‘home’ as a constant disregards the non-predetermined and unpredictable nature of fieldwork relationships that are often complicated by implicit and explicit power dynamics, especially in places researchers identify as ‘home’. We demonstrate that unequal power relations, especially (1) between the Global North and Global South, (2) between majority and minoritized groups, (3) among genders, and (4) between elites and non-elites, require us to envisage ‘the field’ and ‘home’ in relative terms. We propose the reconceptualization of fieldwork place as a hybridized space that conjoins ‘the field’ and ‘home’ as ‘field-home’, particularly at a time when research mobility is restricted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this way, we extend the literature on issues related to power, positionality and reflexivity in qualitative research, and provide practical insights for those preparing for fieldwork.

On studying those who study abroad

With the global as the dominating frame of reference, the international higher education landscape and its transients move to the forefront of discussions on whose and which education matters today. Embodying the internationalized university, the Global Southern international student turned into an early-career migrant researcher remains a valuable access point to consent and dissent from Western cultural hegemony at the European neoliberal university. Using Pitard’s term (2017) for reflexivity in qualitative research, this paper reflects on an “internal dialogue” of two women PhDs, one from North Macedonia and one from Brazil, studying international student mobility in continental Europe. From the position of “host-sponsored international students who study international students,” we discuss the ambiguity of embodying power and subservience. We conclude that the reflexivity demonstrated here, especially in South-South solidarity constellations, has the potential to reignite debates on global knowledge production today.

Post-research reflexivity in qualitative research: Through cloaks and cross-threading

This interdisciplinary Note is a creative form of writing that engages in post-research reflexivity through a process that it terms ‘cross-threading’. Using the trope of a cloak, which it links back to the author’s childhood imaginings of having an invisibility cloak, it cross-threads through the medium of this cloak a series of thoughts and feelings about a recently concluded research project (led by the author) exploring some of the ways that victims-/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence demonstrate resilience. Drawing on empirical data from Bosnia-Herzegovina, it illustrates the utility of the cloak as a thinking practice in relation to some of the stories that interviewees told, and it highlights the relevance of the cloak as a way of thinking about resilience. It also discusses the cloak as an identity, and in so doing it draws attention to an important aspect of the research process that is rarely talked about – the feelings, emotions and anxieties that researchers might experience when a major study or project ends. This Note concludes by underlining the potential benefits to researchers of having an acoustic cloak.

Reflexive Research Practice in Women’s Prison Research in Uganda

ABSTRACT Although much has been written about the centrality of reflexivity in qualitative research, the literature on researcher’s reflexivity in prison research is limited. I conducted a PhD qualitative study with a sample of 30 women convicted of murder from one female prison in Uganda. This paper demonstrates the value of reflexivity in research with respect to oppressed women. It does this by discussing what reflexivity is and at what stage of the research process reflexivity is deemed important. Most importantly, the paper discusses different forms of reflexivity that I exercised, which include personal reflexivity, feminist reflexivity, emotional reflexivity, methodological reflexivity and reflexivity on research context and participants. The paper demonstrates how these different forms of reflexivity helped in various research aspects such as the evolution of the topic that empowered women to tell their stories in a context that was without any research on women convicted of murder, in recruitment of participants, avoiding harming participants and in dealing with emotion during data collection.

Digital qualitative research workflows: a reflexivity framework for technological consequences

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a framework for reflexively generating a digital research workflow; that is, a qualitative research design that intentionally considers the consequences of using digital tools and spaces in meaningful ways. This framework articulates how considering technological consequences should be, and already are, a part of engaging in methodological reflexivity. While there is vast literature on reflexivity in qualitative research, little has been written about technological reflexivity. We propose four categories of consequences that should be closely considered when adopting digital tools and working within digital spaces in qualitative research designs. To conclude, we illustrate these consequence categories by drawing upon an example of a digital research workflow for transcription that we created in the context of a series of studies into how patient-centered communication skills were demonstrated by learners in the health professions at an American university.

Reflexivity in Qualitative Research on Female Adolescent Leadership

Reflexivity in Qualitative Research on Female Adolescent Leadership

A practical guide to reflexivity in qualitative research: AMEE Guide No. 149

Qualitative research relies on nuanced judgements that require researcher reflexivity, yet reflexivity is often addressed superficially or overlooked completely during the research process. In this AMEE Guide, we define reflexivity as a set of continuous, collaborative, and multifaceted practices through which researchers self-consciously critique, appraise, and evaluate how their subjectivity and context influence the research processes. We frame reflexivity as a way to embrace and value researchers’ subjectivity. We also describe the purposes that reflexivity can have depending on different paradigmatic choices. We then address how researchers can account for the significance of the intertwined personal, interpersonal, methodological, and contextual factors that bring research into being and offer specific strategies for communicating reflexivity in research dissemination. With the growth of qualitative research in health professions education, it is essential that qualitative researchers carefully consider their paradigmatic stance and use reflexive practices to align their decisions at all stages of their research. We hope this Guide will illuminate such a path, demonstrating how reflexivity can be used to develop and communicate rigorous qualitative research.

Ethical reflexivity in qualitative research: the use of cinematographic movies as an instrument for continuous training.

to analyze ethically, aesthetically and politically the cine-debate of the movie "Human", reflecting on training of researchers in qualitative research. the debate about moral questions as the essence of humanity was based on Narrative Bioethics; the comprehensive, relational and reflective character of qualitative methods; and the ethical and social sense of qualitative researches. the narratives of the experiences of morality, loaded with facts and valuations, highlighting the importance of reflexivity in all phases of the qualitative research process, from thinking about themes and research questions to fieldwork, from data analysis to the production of reports, fostering the researcher's responsibility both in the intervention for understanding and narrating the world, and in its possible transformation. cinematographic art becomes an instrument of reflexivity capable of affecting and mobilizing students, in a fusion of horizons of understanding of different universes that dialogue.

Reflexivity in a longitudinal narrative inquiry: in pursuit of clarity of interpretations

ABSTRACT The need for researcher reflexivity in qualitative research, especially where data are gathered through interview, is well documented. Studies employing a range of theoretical frameworks and methodologies are similarly affected, with researchers needing to consider specific contextual factors related to the design nuances of each project. This paper focuses on the need for reflexivity, including ethical concerns, in a longitudinal study using narrative inquiry and a Bourdieuian framework. The study included multiple interviews with thirteen students from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds over a four-year period to examine their experiences of studying at a regional Australian university. Issues around interviewer/interviewee relationships are outlined, along with possible mis/re/interpretations of data. Results demonstrate the critical nature of skilled and ethical interviewing techniques, emphasizing the importance of designing questions which do not pre-empt findings or skew results. Overall, the benefits for both researchers and interviewees of longitudinal studies allowing substantial time lapses facilitating reflexivity between interviews are made evident.

Reflexivity in Qualitative Research.

All qualitative research is contextual; it occurs within a specific time and place between two or more people. If a researcher clearly describes the contextual intersecting relationships between the participants and themselves (reflexivity), it not only increases the creditability of the findings but also deepens our understanding of the work. The issues surrounding the researchers' reflexivity are many and complex; however, journal space for discussing them may be very limited. Therefore the researcher has the responsibility of succinctly and clearly addressing these issues, so the reader can evaluate the research. Some of the ways that researchers can address reflexivity are discussed.

The interview as an opportunity for participant reflexivity

This article illustrates participant reflexivity in an interview. Even though scholars have called for ‘a consideration of real-time reflexivity as a means of reconfiguring the participant within epistemological research debates’ (Riach, 2009: 366) illustrations of real-time reflexivity are hard to locate in literature. Most accounts of reflexivity focus on the researcher, and are generally post-research reflections on the research process. This article presents a closely-analysed segment of a semi-structured interview, where the participant changes her position on militarisation in Sri Lankan universities during the interview. This is presented as an instance of realtime participant reflexivity. Using this interview, factors contributing towards reflexivity in interviews are examined and a case made for closer examination of the participant’s reflexivity in qualitative research.

The Learning Pathways Grid

The interview is an important data-gathering tool in qualitative research, since it allows researchers to gain insight into a person’s knowledge, understandings, perceptions, interpretations, and experiences. There are many definitions of reflexivity in qualitative research, one such definition being “Reflexivity is an attitude of attending systematically to the context of knowledge construction, especially to the effect of the researcher, at every step of the research processes.” The learning pathways grid (LPG) is a visual template used to assist analysis and interpretation of conversations, allowing educators, learners, and researchers, to discover links from cognition to action, usually in a retrospective manner. It is often used in simulation educational research, with a focus on understanding how learners access their cognitive frames and underlying beliefs. In this article, we describe the use of the LPG as a prospective adjunct to data collection for interviews and focus groups. We contextualize it within a study among medical interns and medical students who were engaged in high-fidelity simulation exploring open disclosure after a medication error. The LPG allowed future optimization of data collection and interpretation by ensuring reflexivity within the researchers, a vital part of research conduct. We conclude by suggesting the use of the LPG has a reasonable fit when taking a social constructivist approach and using qualitative analysis methods that make reflexivity explicit and visible, therefore ensuring it is truly considered, understood, and demonstrated by researchers.

Conflicted: An Autoethnography on Researching the Minority Swimming Gap

In this research note, I use an autoethnographic method to undertake the task of uncomfortable reflexivity to address the intra-conflict of being a Black woman researching the minority swimming gap, who, like my research participants, struggles with hair maintenance to engage in swimming activities. My uncomfortable reflexivity moves from stages of confession, self-discovery, catharsis and a plan to incorporate deeper reflexivity in future research and other academic practices. Reflexivity in qualitative research is used as a methodological practice to give validation and legitimacy to a research study. Oftentimes, a qualitative researcher will do a bracketed interview to become aware of existing biases, fix problems with an interview schedule, or to temporarily feel what their subjects may experience during an interview. Sometimes reflexivity is merely done as a step in the research process, never progressing to the point of real interrogation of self, the body, and, ultimately, application. I have been guilty of going through the motions of comfortable reflexivity.

Ethical dilemmas and reflexivity in qualitative research.

ContextFor medical education researchers, a key concern may be the practicalities of gaining ethical approval where this is a national or local requirement. However, in qualitative studies, where the dynamics of human interaction pervade, ethical considerations are an ongoing process which continues long after approval has been granted. Responding to ethical dilemmas arising ‘in the moment’ requires a reflexive approach whereby the researcher questions his/her own motivations, assumptions and interests. Drawing on empirical studies and their experiences in academic and clinical research practice, the authors share their reflections on adhering to ethical principles throughout the research process to illustrate the complexities and nuances involved.Objectives and findingsThese reflections offer critical insights into dilemmas arising in view of the ethical principles driving good conduct, and through domains which distinguish between procedural ethics, situational ethics, ethical relationships and ethical issues in exiting the study. The accounts consider integrity and altruism in research, gatekeeping and negotiating access, consent and confidentiality, power dynamics and role conflict, and challenges in dissemination of findings. The experiences are based on a range of examples of research in a UK context from managing difficult conversations in the classroom to video-ethnography in the operating theatre.Discussion and conclusionsThese critical reflections make visible the challenges encountered and decisions that must be taken in the moment and on reflection after the event. Through sharing our experiences and debating the decisions we made, we offer insights into reflexivity in qualitative research which will be of value to others.