How to be a reflexive researcher

Abstract

The main purpose of this book is to enable qualitative and interpretive researchers to adopt reflexive practices, to make conscious choices that reflect an understanding of the academic debates that underpin the position they may take, and to consider the issues and implications that follow from those choices. Rooted in academic conversations about reflexivity, it suggests that researchers are often interested in reflexivity for one of twomain reasons; perhaps to compensate for ‘skew’ or bias in our perspectives that ‘causes us to see things in a certain individual way that may be atypical’ (2) or perhaps through a concern to speak authentically from our own experience and generate resonance amongst others. The author emphasises that reflexivity is very much a personal project whilst the literature reviewed is largely concerned with how reflexivity is used in the service of research, as a way of providing an account of how insights have been developed. How researchers will understand and apply reflexivity will depend on their ontological and epistemological commitments, the aims of their study and the claims they wish to make. The book opens with a compelling story that made me enthusiastic about what might be in store. Very quickly I began to see that the value of this book would lie in the questions that it prompted me to ask of myself and the work in which I am engaged.