How to locate yourself (and others!) in the research process: The role of positionality

Abstract

Recently, a colleague shared a manuscript review that she was struggling with. This colleague—a long-time emergency physician—had studied physicians' experiences of moral distress in the emergency room (ER) during the pandemic. Many of us would believe her own experiences as an ER physician make her ideal for this exploration. However, the reviewers held a different perspective about the role of the researcher in the research process. Their critiques included comments such as, ‘Should you be studying the ER context? Aren't you biased?’. While questions like these can be frustrating, they capture a pressing need to better explore the concept of positionality in qualitative research. Embedded in such reviews is a desire to better understand who the researcher is and how they shaped the results.

The challenge for Health Professions Education Research (HPER) is that to-date, positionality has either been approached like a checklist, through the lens of ‘bias’, or not at all. The problem with this approach is threefold. First, it leaves readers to infer and assess a component of rigour on their own, making it difficult to learn how to apply these principles in their own work. Second, it can generate misleading questions about implicit bias, inter-rater reliability and so on, that can undermine the coherence between research design and communication of results. Finally, it can generate reflexive statements that merely list identity categories without articulating why this is meaningful and how it impacted the study. Below, we unpack the concept of positionality and its relevance to each phase of qualitative research. In doing so, we make the connection between positionality and reflexivity clearer and provide researchers with practical questions to guide them through this process.

Positionality is dynamic, contextual and informed by broader power relations. One's positionality can shift over time and place, within an institution and in relation to different research projects.⁵

Commonly in HPER, positionality has often been conflated with bias, and researchers have been asked to account for how they mitigated its effects. However, we posit that mitigating the researcher's perspective (i.e., bias) is not as productive as asking, How did one's positionality shape the study and what were the affordances and limitations of the study because of it? If producing rigorous research is the goal, using positionality to engage in deeper reflexive practice—questioning how power shapes one's knowledge, assumptions, experiences and position in the world⁶—may be more fruitful and meaningful.

Positionality, then, is a critical component of reflexivity, but the terms should not be conflated.⁵ Positionality is a tool to understand who we are in relation to our research/institutions/social worlds, and reflexivity asks us to critically reflect on how our positionality shaped knowledge production.^5-7

Positionality can help produce more ethical work.⁷ For instance, you may realise you are an outsider to a particular community, and an advisory group would help ensure that a community's voice is reflected throughout the research process. Indigenous communities have created very clear guidelines to this effect, particularly for researchers who are not community members.⁸

Positionality can improve the work's coherence. Our research choices do not suddenly appear nor can they be entirely explained in empiric terms. They are often a combination of who we (and our teams) are, who participants are and what scholarly approaches we choose.^{2, 5} When we are clear on why we (and not other people) are studying a particular topic, how we are approaching knowledge production and how we are making meaning from the data, we can offer a more coherent research narrative for participants and readers.

Finally, positionality can help us answer questions we commonly receive in the field. For instance, participants sometimes ask, ‘Who are you? Why are you doing this work? Why should I trust you?’ These questions are not only about scholarly integrity, but also about our positionality. Reviewers ask these same questions, as in the example we opened with. Engaging in this inquiry from the early stages of research design may bring more rigour and authenticity to the research process.

Below, we provide an outline for how positionality informs each phase of research and some questions to guide reflexivity.

Emily Field: Conceptualization; writing—original draft. Erin Kennedy: Conceptualization; writing—original draft. Sayra Cristancho: Conceptualization; writing—original draft.

The authors have no conflict of interest to disclose.

The authors have no ethical statement to declare.