Reflexivity is vital in social research projects, but there remains relatively little advice on how to execute it in practice. This book provides social science researchers with both a strong rationale for the importance of thinking reflexively and a practical guide to doing reflexivity within their research. The first book on the subject to build primarily on the theoretical and empirical contributions of Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive work, it combines academic analysis with practical examples and case studies, drawing both on recent reflexive research projects and original empirical data from new projects conducted by the author. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the book will be of interest to researchers from all career stages and disciplinary backgrounds, but especially early-career researchers and students who are struggling with subjectivity, positionality, and the realities of being reflexive.
1 ONE Introduction: a rationale for reflexivity I know a scrupulous adherence to rules of method will not lead to objective truth. Surely this is in part because being a social scientist does not preclude having strong opinions, values, or feelings. But here it demands a willingness to be public about the way they affect one’s standards and the claims one makes. One of the great barriers to maintaining standards is the strong attachment one develops with one’s subjects, which can lead to emotions that make the idea of social science less than realistic
33 THREE Putting yourself in? Bourdieu’s reflexive project Bourdieusian reflexivity can be read first as the requirement for researchers to be aware of their own habitus, such as their own predispositions, knowledges, and competences while undertaking research, in order to produce if not objective, then honest and open research. This adherence to or belief in epistemic reflexivity is presented as a regulative idea which should undergird intellectual and methodological practice. For example, in The Weight of the World Bourdieu and colleagues (1999) argued
179 EIGHT Orthodoxy and reflexivity in international comparative analysis Ben Valkenburg and Jens Lind Introduction Life is easy for social scientists engaged in international comparative research. Yet, at the same time, it is also hard. Within the social sciences, this kind of research is regarded as the ultimate in terms of scientific quality, especially when the results are international publications. The interest in international comparative research among policy makers has been growing over the years, due to, among others, processes of globalisation
65 FIVE Reflexivity in the field: four case studies So far, our examination of reflexivity has stayed largely theoretical and structural. In focusing on Bourdieu, the feminist contribution to method, and various other examples, the previous chapters have sought to provide the reader with a concrete rationale for doing reflexivity, to highlight how it is a potentially political process within research, and to introduce some of the myriad ways it can emerge as a research issue. This chapter, however, moves on to more empirical material. It draws on recent
113 SEVEN The reflexive me To find the source of trouble we must look into our own heads. (Saul Bellow) In Shamus Khan’s (2011) research at St. Paul’s there was an instant where he went from being a figure of suspicion, to being accepted and rewarded with access. Khan only found himself on the side of his colleagues after several months in the field when he stood up to school management and demanded staff reject a new policy on grounds of academic inadequacy. By chance, it enabled a bond of trust to be built. In one encounter in my own research, I found
children. At the core of such precedence is children’s voice about the social phenomenon of interest. Here, research is thus understood as a social process, contoured by power and privilege, which urges strategies for reflexivity framed by the relational and ontological contexts of childhoods examined. Within my own studies, reflexivity underscored the implicit and explicit tensions between academia, the site and ‘self’. It is important to note, however, that the performativity of reflexivity cannot be contained within the privileged realms of the researcher or issued as
Summary Positionality refers to your impact on the research because of your demographics and experiences, and reflexivity (which is increasingly viewed as essential when undertaking research) is the process of assessing one’s positionality . You may be new to the concept of positionality ; it may not have been covered in your research methods teaching to date, especially if your course has a positivistic lens on the construction of knowledge. However, ethical practice and reflexivity go hand in hand; you cannot have one without the other. In this
243 Postlude Notes on reflexive methods: past, present, and future In the Prelude I mentioned that this book is not the one I envisioned when I began this project. This is not the first time in my research career that I had an inkling of a certain kind of project that morphed into something else. Indeed, the same could be said of all of my past work about inequality and education: without fail, the process of reflexive qualitative research has led me to rethink and reshape my questions, my interpretations, and my understanding of my roles and
