Current Issues in Qualitative Qualitative Research An Occasional Publication Pub lication for Field Fiel d Researchers from a Variety of Disciplines Discip lines ______________ _______ ______________ ______________ ______________ _______________ _______________ ______________ ______________ ______________ ______________ ______________ ______________ ________ _
Volume 1, Number 2 August 2010 ______________________ ___________ _______________________ _______________________ ______________________ ______________________ _______________________ __________________ ______
Reflexivity and Qualitative Research Jane F. Gilgun University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
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eflexivity is an important topic for qualitative researchers to consider and to experiment with. I believe that all researchers, no matter which methods and perspectives they use, must be reflexive if their research is to be useful. That researchers influence research processes and research processes influence researchers are givens in theoretical physics. These assumptions are also givens or basic methodological principles, in most forms of qualitative research. Finally, awareness of the importance of reflexivity is part of the human sciences, whose traditions extend back to the origins of social science research in the middle of the nineteenth century (Gilgun, in press). The Core of the Idea
The core concept of my working definition of reflexivity is the idea of awareness—that researchers are reflexive when they are aware of the multiple influences they have on research processes and on how research processes affect them. Researchers would do well to consider becoming beco ming reflexive in three general areas: •
•
•
the topics they wish to investigate. This means they account for the personal and professional meanings their topics have for them; the perspectives and experiences of the persons with whom they wish to do the research; this includes both informants/participants/subjects as well as research partners who have a stake in the research, such as funders and agencies/settings in which the research takes place, and the audiences to whom the research findings will be directed. This means that researchers write to specific audiences, presenting ideas and evidence for the ideas in language that audiences can understand. Furthermore, many audiences want to learn researchers’ thoughts on the meanings of informants’ experiences and actions that may be take in order to respond to informants.
About the author Jane F. Gilgun, Ph.D., LICSW, is a professor, School of Social Work, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA. Her articles, books, and children’s stories are available on Amazon Kindle, the Apple store, & scribd.com/professorjane for a variety of mobile devices.
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Accounting for all three of these areas enhances the quality of both processes and outcome. Furthermore, on-going reflection on my own and informants’ experiences helps me to deal with the power dimensions that are part of doing research. Finally, being reflexive in these areas increases researcher accountability, not only to the intellectual communities who are part of our audiences but to other audiences as well, such as practitioners who may apply findings to the lives of living, breathing human beings. Our own experiences and perspectives influence every aspect of the research we do. Creating awareness is an open and honest approach to doing and reporting research. An Example
As mentioned, reflexivity in research extends to the origins of social science research. John Dollard in his Caste and Class in a Southern Town, published Town, published in 1937, gave a first-person account that demonstrates that reflexivity in research was an issue then as it is today. For example, Dollard described the social awkwardness of being white in a southern town whose mores forbade treating "Negroes" as equals. Fearing that other white persons were watching as he talked to "Negroes" on his front porch, when he knew their "proper" place was at the back door, he wrote: My Negro friend brought still another Negro up on the porch to meet me. Should we shake hands? Would he be insulted if I did not, or would he accept the situation? I kept my hands in pockets and did not do it, a device that was often useful in resolving such a situation (p. 7). This description is a poignant verbal picture of a pivotal moment in Dollard's fieldwork and it is full of connotations about the racist social practices of the time. This excerpt illustrates a methodological point Small (1916) made in his essay on the first 50 years of sociological research in the U.S.: namely, the importance of going beyond "technical treatises" and providing first-person "frank judgments" that can help future generations interpret sociology. Without such contexts, "the historical significance of treatises will be misunderstood" (p. 722). Throughout his essay, Small used the first-person and provided his views--or frank judgments--on the events he narrated. Accounting for Reflexivity
We can account for our own reflexivity in a several ways and at different points in the research process: • • • • • •
before and during the design processes; during the implementation processes; while conducting the analysis; during the write-up; in the course of dissemination; and while applying findings to practice, teaching, and other research projects.
I have found both writing relevant thoughts, experiences, emotions, biases, favorite theories, etc., reflecting upon these, and talking to others about them engages researchers in processes of Current Issues in Qualitative Research, 1(2)
reflexivity. For example, researchers typically work in teams. While engaged in planning the research, I suggest that researchers begin the reflexivity process, first, by writing down their own perspectives about the three areas mentioned earlier and then sharing with other members of their team what they have written. Chances are team sharing will stimulate further thinking and dialogue that could deepen understanding of the topic area and contribute to a much better project than would have been possible had not the team engaged in group reflexivity. When such procedures become routine in team meetings, quality of the research and accountability to audiences increase. I do not believe that researchers are obligated to share sensitive personal information in team meetings, but they can share their own points of view and perspectives and engage in dialogue about them. They can keep reflective journals for more private considerations and have private dialogues with significant others if personal issues arise, which happens quite often in qualitative research. Much of qualitative research involves dealing with the sensitive personal issues of others. For instance, I have done for more than 25 years on interpersonal violence. Qualitative research in this area involves face-to-face contact with perpetrators and/or survivors. Few researchers have no emotional responses and have no memories or nightmares activated through contact with the traumas and violence that others experience and perpetrate. Write, Reflect, Discuss
Throughout the research process, researchers would do well to write, reflect upon, and discuss what is going on for them and how what they are doing may affect their research informants/participants/subjects, the nature and quality of the data, and how they will present findings. In these meetings, researchers can share not only their scholarly interpretations of what they are learning from informants, but also their personal and professional interpretations. There are many reasons to account for researchers to account for their own responses. Besides the promise of deepening and broadening understandings of the topical area to be researched, accounting for reflexivity can add to the integrity of the research. We researchers are subjective, fallible human beings who are full of biases and favorite theories. On-going scrutiny of ourselves is a way for us to “come clean” so that we are less likely to unwittingly impose our perspectives on the accounts and actions of research informants. If we share our own perspectives, expectations, experiences with others, or simply raise our own awareness through writing and reflection, we are more like to provide an open venue for the perspectives of our informants to blossom. Indeed, through engagement in such processes, the dependability and authenticity of our findings will be greatly enhanced. What to Include in Research Reports
An important consideration is how much of our own subjectivity do we put into research reports. I believe that we as researchers should include only those bits of reflexivity that add to understanding research processes, findings, and applications—no more and no less. Therefore, Current Issues in Qualitative Research, 1(2)
researchers must be highly reflexive about the purposes of their research reports and how accounts of reflexivity would enhance these reports. After all, the research is about informants and not about the researchers. Anything about researcher perspectives must advance the purposes of the report (Gilgun, 2005). Laura McLeod and I presented extended accounts of our reflexivity in our analysis of gender and violence in the transcripts of men who had been convicted of violent crimes. The following excerpts from our article called Gendering Violence (Gilgun & McLeod, 1999) explains our rationale and provides examples of how we did it. In preparing to write this paper, our emotions were deeply stirred as we struggled to understand the accounts of men who had committed violent acts. As women and members of a class oppressed by male violence, we often identified with the victims of these men, and we may even have been victimized at times by their words. Jane, the first author, experienced feelings of fear and vulnerability that she slowly learned to manage over the course of more than ten years of conducting research on violent men. To this day, she occasionally walks into her home wondering if a violent man has broken in and will be sitting in her living room waiting for her. The second author, Laura, was part of the project for almost two years. In a paper for one of her graduate classes, she wrote, "My readings of the transcripts about rapes and murders of women and girls brought out my vulnerabilities in very unexpected ways, making me feel permeable, without boundaries" (McLeod, 1995). Both of us developed deep insight into the phenomenology of victimization. Rather than acting as if we were kin to the Wizard of Oz, presenting our results in a disembodied, detached, and seamless voice, we chose to present "close ups" of some of our emotional reactions to the acts that we struggled to understand, along with our representations of our informants and our more "detached" analyses. As Bruner (1986) pointed out more than a decade ago, fieldwork involves "at least two double experiences:" researchers experiencing themselves, researchers experiencing informants, informants experiencing themselves, and informants experiencing researchers (p. 14). In our work, we are attempting to report on the first half of this double consciousness. We consciously, to use Fine’s (1994) words, were "unpacking the hyphen" of the self-other dichotomy; that is, challenging notions of "scientific neutrality, universal truths, and researcher dispassion" (p. 70). We created a multi-vocal text that experiments with writing that attempts to differentiate our representations of informants from our representations of ourselves. When we speak in our own voices, we state which of us is speaking; we did not have identical personal reactions to the men's words. Our representation of ourselves as women with emotion is a form of experimental writing (Richardson, 1994, 1997) that is part of feminist and postmodern thinking and practice. We expect our interpretations and reactions to the men's accounts to be similar in many respects to those of the audiences who read our work, but some of our responses could appear to be idiosyncratic and situated according to our personal histories and status. We also acknowledge that texts are open, and, therefore, readers' interpretations of Current Issues in Qualitative Research, 1(2)
our texts may be different from our own. Further, the interpretations of some readers may appear to be idiosyncratic to them. It is likely that individual interpretations, like the accounts of the informants of this study, may seem idiosyncratic but may actually represent enactments and particularizations of cultural themes and practices. Readers, researchers, and informants may all be involved in enacting and creating culture. The following excerpt shows how we handled our subjectivity/reflexivity in our article. We are quoting Don, one of two men who provided the material that we analyzed. I did the interview. "Just Grab Them:" Don's Sense of Entitlement
Both informants constructed themselves as entitled to having sex with others without including others in their decisions. For instance, Don said about his rapes, "if I can't get them this way [through mutual consent] then the other way to get them is, you know, to just grab them." Drawing from cultural images of "loose" women for whom rape supposedly has no meaning, his narrative is permeated with an "ideology of supremacy" (Connell, 1995, p. 83) and constructions of women as sexual objects for men (Donaldson, 1993). The following shows Don defining who the women were and what rape meant to them. He is imposing ideologies about women who are "loose sexually." This is hegemonic masculinity in action. Um, and if I take the right person, you know, it's not going to make a difference anyway. You know, because, like I said before, you know, the women I was, was raping were, you know, they'd been in that bar looking for guys anyway....You know, all my victims were, you know, they, my set up was that they'd been out in bars or loose sexually, kinds of people. So they had it coming, or they, you know, it didn't matter to them. So, so, you know, this wouldn't be a big, big thing to happen to them. After Don's statement that rape would not be "a big, big thing" to the women, I (Jane) was speechless for 20 seconds. When I finally was able to speak, I asked Don how he knew the women were loose. His answer revealed more of his hegemonic thinking: J: (10 sec) Yeah. (10 sec) Well, how did you know that they were at bars and were loose? What...[interrupted]. D: Well, I mean, I didn't actually know that. J: Oh. D:I, I knew, I knew that because that's the kind of people that were out at that time of night. J: Okay. So you would be looking at what time of night? D: Yeah. J: What, what time of night would you be out? Current Issues in Qualitative Research, 1(2)
D: Well generally the, and this, this is another thing that doesn't make sense because there was all kinds of times that I was out. J: Oh. D: But, J: (Laugh) D: Um, (5 sec) generally it would be late, like you know, midnight, one o'clock, two o'clock in the morning, that kind of thing. But you know I was out in, in the winter time sometimes after it got d ark, you know, or not right after it got dark but maybe at seven-thirty or eight o'clock, or something. inap propriate but it arose out of an enormous sense of incongruity incon gruity Jane: My laugh was inappropriate and perhaps hysteria. Here is this guy who looked so small to me sitting here making one-sided, hegemonic constructions of women who deserve to be raped and this same guy and guys like him terrorize women routinely. In some instances, they ruin the lives of women. He seems unable to understand the significance of what he did, what meanings his words and behaviors might have for women in general and his victims in particular. Based on our extensive conversations, I think he was so focused on himself that he was not able to step outside of his own frame of reference. In fact, he had a frame of reference that was outside of mine: the frame of reference of hegemonic masculinity. As we spoke, he seemed to hunched over, forehead wrinkled, working very hard to explain to me how he thought about his rapes. I was working hard to understand him. Laura: They had it coming. They deserved to be raped because he decided who they were, what they were doing. I'll punish them for not doing what they're supposed to be doing as women. Jane: Yes, for not being "virtuous" women. He has no idea who they were. He told me he wouldn't recognize any of his victims if they walked into the room. Yet, he's taking on a God-like function of naming them. He's constructing these women, creating them in images he chooses, independent of them. This is hegemony.
Ironically, Don could not see the holes in his own thinking. He had no basis except ideological for concluding that the women he raped were loose, and he never arrived at the conclusion that no one "deserves" to be raped, no matter what. To serve his own agenda, he chose a hegemonic ideology from a grab bag of possible ways of constructing women who drive their cars after dark. Don's views, however, may not be as extreme as we would like to believe. Many of the rapists in Scully's (1990) research also invoked negative cultural stereotypes and thus constructed the women in ways that may have helped them to rape: the women were seductresses, really wanted sex, and were not nice girls anyway. Although feminists have long challenged myths that portray rape victims as deserving of rape, as for example, Current Issues in Qualitative Research, 1(2)
when they hitchhike, get drunk, go to bars alone, or are prostitutes, these myths continued to be invoked and enacted. What’s Typical in Research Reports
Typically, only a fraction of researchers’ accounts of their own reflexivity appears in research reports. That is how it goes in good qualitative research: our research reports are only the best and most economical representation we can make of the phenomena of interest. This is no less true for our ever-growing understandings of what the research means to us, in other words, our accounts of our reflexivity. Articles about researchers’ experiences of research, however, can enlighten others about the nature of such research and help them to prepare for and grapple with their own responses to their own fieldwork. I have written two recent articles about my subjective reactions to research with men who have committed violent acts. One shows my growing awareness of the violence within me: at one point I envisioned a bullet hole between the eyes of a man telling me about a rape and murder he had committed. That image arose without my conscious awareness or will. I remember wondering how that bullet hole got there. Then I realized that I had shot him—not in actuality but in my imagination, which at that point had a will of its own. See Gilgun (2008) for more about these experiences. The other article describes 25 years of doing research on violence (Gilgun, in press). Write in the First Person
Finally, though I am unsure that reflexivity has anything to do with writing in the first person in research reports, repo rts, I do think that good science leads us u s to this practice (Gilgun, 2005). 2 005). Haraway (1988) terms third-person reports as pulling the “God trick” that represents authors as disembodied voices of all-knowing beings who exist in some exalted realm and not the fallible, fleshy human beings whom they are. First person writing has a long history, originating at least in the first part of the nineteenth century when Albion Small, the founder of the first department of sociology in the United States at the University of Chicago, recommended it as means of providing contexts in terms of which future scholars may understand historically-situated research (Gilgun, 1999). Conclusion
In conclusion, accounts of reflexivity enhance the quality of our processes and outcomes and increases our sensitivity to informants’ concerns, whether our not we include these accounts in the products of our research, although I can think of no reason not to include some in all reports. Reflexivity, then, is also an ethical issue in regard to clients and an accountability issue in terms of quality. One final note: we often are unaware of what we think and believe and the implications of our interactions until we write about them and discuss them with others. Thus, survey researchers and others who are more quantitatively oriented would enhance their work by engaging in these processes as well. Current Issues in Qualitative Research, 1(2)
References & Further Reading
Dollard, John (1937). Caste and class in a southern town. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gilgun, Jane F. (in press). Qualitative family research: Enduring themes and contemporary variations. To appear in Handbo in Handbook ok of Marriage and the Family (3rd ed.). Gary F. Peterson & Kevin Bush (Eds.), New York: Plenum. Gilgun, Jane F. (in press). Reflections on 25 years of research on violence. Reflection Reflections: s: Narratives Narratives of Profess Professional ional Helping. Helping. Gilgun, Jane F. (2008). Lived experience, reflexivity, and research on perpetrators of interpersonal violence. Qualitative Social Work, 7(2), 181-197. 181-197. Gilgun, Jane F. (2005). “Grab” and good science: Writing up the results of qualitative research. Qualitative Health Research, Research, 15(2), 256-262. Gilgun, Jane F. (1999). Methodological pluralism and qualitative family research. In Suzanne K. Steinmetz, Marvin B. Sussman, and Gary W. Peterson (Eds.), Handbo (Eds.), Handbook ok of Marriage Marriage and the Family (2nd ed.) (pp. 219-261). New York: Plenum. Gilgun, Jane F., & Laura McLeod (1999). Gendering violence. Studies in Symbolic Interaction Interactionism, ism, 22, 167-193 Haraway, Donna (1988). Situated knowledge. Feminist knowledge. Feminist Studies, 14, 14, 575-599. Small, Albion W. (1916). Fifty years of sociology sociology in the United States, 1865-1915. American Journal of Sociology, 21, 712-864. 21, 712-864. Note This is a revised version of Gilgun, Jane F. (2006). Commentary: On Susan Smith: Encouraging the use of reflexivity in the writing up of qualitative research. Internation International al Journal Journal of Therapy Therapy and Rehabilita Rehabilitation, tion, 13(5), 13(5), p. 215. About This Publication
Current Issues in Qualitative Research Research is an occasional publication for field researchers in a variety of disciplines. Jane F. Gilgun, Ph.D., LICSW, is the editor and publisher. To submit articles to this publication, Professor Gilgun cordially invites researchers to email brief articles of three to five pages to her at
[email protected] at
[email protected].. Field researchers are individuals who do in-depth work with informants in the settings in which informants live their lives. If they do interviews, the interviews are in-depth and seek to understand individuals within their particular situations.
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