Online Reflective Essays: A Guide for Qualitative Researchers

Abstract

Conducting research online is becoming more popular among researchers, especially qualitative researchers. As qualitative methodology gains more credibility and popularity, it is important to continue expanding and improving the qualitative research toolkit. This article offers a guide for qualitative researchers on how to methodologically use online reflective essays to collect rich qualitative data to answer their research questions. When developing a study, qualitative researchers should consider a set of factors, including the research question, the sensitivity of the research question, the amount of reflectivity required to answer the research question, the length it takes to answer the research question, and the type of population that will be used to answer the research question. This article discusses these factors and provides practical design suggestions using examples from a previous study that collected data using online reflective essays.

Introduction

Over the past several decades, qualitative methodology has made great strides, gaining increasing credibility among researchers (Bluhm et al., 2011; Burney et al., 2023; Renjith et al., 2021). As various methods journals continue to publish articles about new ways to conduct qualitative research as well as innovative ways to improve the existing qualitative research arsenal, researchers are able to produce higher quality research with rich details about various aspects of society. And this article offers a contribution that allows these qualitative researchers to improve the ways they conduct such research.

There are multiple methods that a researcher can choose to answer a qualitative research question. Some of the more known methods include ethnographic research, focus groups, participant observation, document analysis, and participatory action research (Denzin et al., 2023). However, while there are many methods available, perhaps the most popular qualitative method is interviewing, which is often used synonymously with qualitative research especially by those who had never taken a methods course (Trinczek, 2009, p. 204).

Deciding on which method to choose can be challenging, even for experienced researchers. Each qualitative method has different things to offer together with some benefits and disadvantages that are unique to each method, and when selecting a method, these considerations need to be taken into account. This article discusses how online reflective essays can be used as a data collection tool. Because these essays have the potential to yield data commensurate to the data gathered by conducting interviews, both methods are contrasted to illustrate circumstances when one method may be preferred over the other.

Online Data Collection Platforms

Online platforms have been increasingly used by social science and other researchers to collect data (Granello & Wheaton, 2004; Lefever et al., 2007; Zhang & Gearhart, 2020). While there are many such platforms available, and more are likely to come, currently some of the most popular and known platforms are Prolific, CloudResearch, and MTurk. Typically, people who want to get compensated for participating have to register with a specific platform and answer demographic and other questions. Some platforms also use a set of advanced mechanisms to ensure high-quality responses and to ensure that those who want to participate cannot create multiple accounts or use different devices. Similarly, some tend to have mechanisms in place to check people’s IP addresses to make sure that their declared place of location matches. Further, some platforms use unique screening systems, which place an emphasis on screening participants through open-ended responses. Others also randomly survey approved people to check how well they answer questions and pass attention checks. These and other mechanisms together are used with researcher feedback on participant performance, which allows such platforms to create an environment that leads to higher-quality responses.

Although online data collection platforms first started being used only for simple survey data, using their ingenuity researchers soon began conducting behavioral and other types of experiments (Almaatouq et al. 2020; Newman et al., 2020). The demand for good quality online data collection platforms started to increase the more researchers were able to publish journal articles using data collected online. And there is a growing body of literature comparing these and other platforms in terms of their data quality and describing other considerations, such as costs and participants’ demographics, which might be relevant when thinking about which platform to use (Berry et al., 2022; Peer et al., 2022). The most current research seems to suggest that Prolific is the most superior online data collection platform (Douglas et al., 2023). However, researchers who want to collect data online should strive to keep themselves informed and pick a platform that is the best according to the latest studies comparing such platforms.

While quantitative researchers were the first to try and succeed in utilizing online platforms for their own research, qualitative researchers have been less likely to join their quantitative colleagues. Being motivated to seek depth and richness in their data, they struggled to see how that could be achieved using online surveys. Some of these concerns were subsequently addressed by methodological literature, in which researchers discussed their own experiences with collecting qualitative data using online surveys and reporting positive results (Neville et al., 2016). Other researchers similarly reported positive experiences collecting qualitative data using online surveys and further explained how online surveys can be designed to address certain issues related to flexibility and suitability to answer specific research questions (Braun et al., 2021). This article builds on this foundation by taking a step further and offering another way to methodologically collect qualitative data.

What Is an Online Reflective Essay?

As many researchers know, writing can be challenging and intensive. Thus, when researchers are thinking about using an online reflective essay to answer their research question, one of the most important considerations when collecting data directly from participants should be participant fatigue (Fass-Holmes, 2022; Jeong et al., 2023; Le et al., 2021). There are several steps that should be taken to ensure the best possible engagement leading to the best quality data. First, all participant effort should be directed to working on the essay. This means that the participants should not be answering any traditional survey questions. Most online data platforms have a demographic targeting tool that allows researchers to select their target population and subsequently only show the study advertisement to that population. These platforms often have multiple screeners that can be used by researchers to target an incredibly specific population. For example, researchers can target men, who suffer from diabetes, who are U.S. veterans, who live in Alabama, and whose youngest child was born in 2010. Depending on their question, researchers should use these screeners accordingly. When the study advertisement is shown to only eligible participants, there is no need to pose these questions to people who agree to participate in the study. This allows the participants to focus their entire time on the most important task – writing a reflective essay.

Unlike a survey that has multiple open-ended questions, the proposed method relies on having the participant write only one essay. The study advertisement and the study instructions should highlight the fact that the task includes writing only one essay. This gives a signal to the participants that they will not have any follow-up questions that would need to be answered. Thus, they will be able to focus their time and effort on reflecting on only one prompt. Asking participants to write two or more separate responses means that the participants will have to divide their time to answer other questions. Not knowing how much time it will take to provide more than one sufficient response means that the participants might spend less time on one prompt and more time on other prompts. Focusing on only one prompt further allows for more reflection and thinking which are critical to produce a response with richness and depth.

Because the participants would be writing only one essay, the prompt presented to the participants must be carefully designed. Consistent with the previous section on participant fatigue, the prompt should not be too long, but it still needs to have several components. The first thing that the participant should see is a signal that the participant will only have to write one essay and that the participant will not have any follow-up questions. This could be achieved with the following signal: “Only 1 Essay. No follow-ups.” The next component that the prompt should address is the instructions. One sentence should be dedicated to the study goal, such as what the researcher is trying to learn about the participant. Another sentence needs to explain what the participant is expected to do, which is writing one essay. Finally, the prompt needs to provide a small, closely related set of guiding questions that the participant can use to write the essay. The participant should not be expected to spend more than 30–40 minutes on this intensive writing and reflective exercise. Thus, the questions cannot be too broad or too unrelated because the participant would not be able to write a cohesive essay. Researchers should conduct a pilot study and test their research prompt to ensure that participants understand what they are asked to do and that participant’s essays sufficiently address the research question. It is also recommended to suggest to the participants that there is no specific structure because this will give the participants more freedom to reflect and think about the essay prompt instead of worrying if their thoughts and reflections fit a specific predetermined structure. The main goal of using the proposed method to collect data is to allow participants to reflect on the subject matter and then spend the time on responding to the research prompt. Carefully crafting the prompt and then conducting a pilot study will allow the researcher to adjust the prompt, if needed. Having a prompt that has too many unrelated subjects or having a prompt that imposes multiple structural requirements can lower the quality of the essay because the participant will try to cover each unrelated question superficially or spend time trying to check the list of structural requirements of the essay that are not related to the subject matter and that can further impede the process of reflection about one subject.

Online Reflective Essays and Interviews

Interviews and online reflective essays are two separate data collection tools, and depending on the research question, conducting an interview might be the only way to collect data. However, there are several considerations that make using an online reflective essay to collect data comparable to conducting an interview and sometimes even better than conducting an interview. First, using an online reflective essay allows people to participate in a research study anonymously. This means that not only are the participants not required to disclose their name, but they also do not need to disclose their physical appearance or vocal characteristics. This type of anonymity coupled with the fact that the participants do need to worry about possible judgment or negative reaction from the interviewer is especially important when the subject being studied is sensitive. For example, as homosexuality is becoming more acceptable throughout many areas of the world, some people might feel uncomfortable expressing negative views toward homosexuality, especially to an interviewer who they suspect is not heterosexual. This issue has been observed in past research studying people’s attitudes toward gay rights and homosexuality (Jewell & Morrison, 2012). Online reflective essays can provide a heightened level of anonymity that makes them especially suitable for collecting sensitive data and helping to better alleviate social desirability bias. The anonymity consideration also applies to both sides because conducting sensitive research might be challenging for the researcher. For example, studying certain populations that have negative views about the group that the researcher belongs to might inadvertently affect how the researcher treats those populations or how the researcher reacts when interacting with those populations. Asking those populations to write an online reflective essay instead of, for example, conducting an interview might protect the researcher from unintentionally expressing disapproval or judgment to the participant, which could negatively affect the responses.

Asking the participants to write an online reflective essay also gives the participant the requisite amount of space to reflect in silence, which is much harder, if not impossible, to do in an interview. Asking the participant to answer an open-ended question that requires reflection in an interview can be challenging because the participants might feel uncomfortable when they have to sit and think in silence. While there are techniques that the researchers can use (Seidman, 2006; Gerson & Damske, 2020) and while sometimes conducting an interview is the only way to collect qualitative data, writing an essay in silence and without the presence of the researcher allows the participants to better engage with the research question, reflect and think about the research question, and subsequently allow for the possibility of a more thorough response. When providing that response, the participants can also go back and read the response and make necessary revisions, which cannot be done in the same way once something is said vocally. This allows the participants to have more control over their contribution to the study and also leads to more refined and coherent responses.

While pragmatic considerations should not be guiding the research question, these considerations often play an important role when creating a study for many researchers, especially graduate students and others who might have time constraints and financial limitations. If a researcher has an appropriate research question which can be explored through both an interview and an online reflective essay, doing so with the latter will be cheaper and faster. Conducting interviews subsequently requires transcribing the interviews, which requires paying for transcribing services or personally transcribing them. In addition, collecting data with interviews also takes more time, which includes setting up individual interviews and also conducting them; no such time is needed when collecting data through online reflective essays. Further, while it is important to spend sufficient time on designing an interview guide and an online reflective essay prompt, conducting interviews also requires skill and training, which is especially important when dealing with sensitive topics or unique populations. These skill and training concerns are alleviated by collecting data with an online reflective essay. Using online reflective essays to collect qualitative data on platforms such as Prolific also allows researchers to show the study advertisement to a specific pre-selected group of people who meet the inclusion criteria. This eliminates the possibility that unqualified people who wish to participate in the study sign up to participate dishonestly claiming that they meet the inclusion criteria, which sometimes happens with interview advertisements that are usually shown to the entire public. Finally, researchers who are interested in studying other people from different countries or harder-to-reach populations can also benefit from using online reflective essays. Online platforms such as Prolific allow researchers to show the study advertisement to people from different countries, which can be especially beneficial for researchers who have a difficult time recruiting participants from a different country because of a lack of resources or because of other logistical issues, such as the unique location and culture that can make the recruitment for international researchers much more challenging.

When Online Reflective Essays Should Not Be Used

While an online reflective essay offers a wide range of benefits for researchers who want to collect data, there are several instances where this data collection tool should not be used. As with most if not all research projects, knowing one’s research question is essential. Researchers should consider using an online reflective essay if they have a well-defined research question that can be explored with one 30–40-min reflective essay. While the guiding prompt should include a few related guiding questions for the participant, having too many questions in the prompt or having questions that are too unrelated will not work. The prompt is there to provide the participant with enough direction on how to write the essay but without having too many directions and questions which would make the participant provide separate answers to separate questions. For example, if a researcher wants to explore the challenges of new nurses working in the emergency room, it might be appropriate to provide a guiding prompt with questions asking about how they feel about working in the emergency room and whether there were things they wish they had known about this type of work before accepting that position. However, it would not be appropriate to also ask about their political beliefs, religious practices, or even their experiences at nursing school. While the first two are clearly not directly related to the research question, exploring the experiences at nursing school, while more relevant, would require a separate essay as asking the participants to reflect on their experiences at nursing school and their experiences as new nurses working in the emergency department would be too involved and time-consuming. Thus, the participants might spend too much time on describing their experiences at the nursing school, while not spending enough time on their experiences as new nurses working in the emergency room, which is the central research question.

Because online reflective essays require a clearly defined research question, researchers who are interested in broader questions should consider other data collection tools. For example, a researcher who is interested in understanding the experiences of an older refugee who has lived in multiple countries and has faced multiple persecutions should not use an online reflective essay and should instead consider using a semi-structured interview, perhaps even spanning over a few days. Similarly, the researcher might be interested in better understanding something very specialized which would require recruiting an expert in a specific field, and interviewing that expert might be the best way collect data (Doringer 2020). Further, online reflective essays should not be used to collect data from people who have an impairment that would significantly limit their ability to write an online reflective essay. For example, a 10-year-old child might not be able to utilize the guiding prompt to write an essay. Similarly, people with other impairments that would significantly impair their ability to process the prompt should not be asked to write an online reflective essay. Notably, people, including children, who are not able to speak could be asked to write an online reflective essay. However, while some guiding principles provided in this article should be considered when thinking about using an online reflective essay, this population might face unique challenges that are beyond the scope of this article.

Compensation

People decide to participate in research for many reasons, which include feelings of civic obligation, high interest in a specific topic, monetary incentives, and a combination of these and other factors (Groves et al., 2000; Singer & Kulka, 2002). Similarly, some people might agree to participate in a study solely because of monetary incentives, but they later discover the experience of participating in the study to be emotionally rewarding. It is also not uncommon for people to express gratitude for participating in research. For example, Masoumi (2024) explored monetary incentives and how they shape data collection. During the research process, the author noted several instances of people reaching out to the author to express gratitude for allowing them to participate in the interview study. The below-described study that used online reflective essays also observed several participants expressly thanking for allowing them to reflect on a sensitive subject by stating so in the actual essay or by personally sending a message after the study. Similarly, in a different study that explored people’s attitudes toward homosexuality, one of the participants wrote an essay about her biases and certain negative views that she had toward gay rights. The participant subsequently stated that participating in this format allowed her to reflect on her own biases without fearing that she would be judged because the participant was allowed to do so anonymously.

While someone may never reveal the true reason for deciding to participate in a study, the scholarly discussions over participant compensation and ethical implications are not new (Russell et al., 2000). One of the main considerations include conducting medical research and targeting vulnerable populations, both of which carry higher risks of incentivizing people in such a way that they agree to participate because they effectively cannot refuse to do so (Bracken-Roche et al., 2017; Sutton et al., 2003). However, completely withholding compensation when conducting research, especially social science research is rare, and a number of scholars argue that doing so might be borderline unethical (Head, 2009; Williamson, 2016). Further, providing appropriate compensation for people who agree to participate in a study is not only ethical, but it is also recommended because it might lead to higher engagement and better quality (Newman et al., 2020). Thus, today, the real question is not whether to pay but how much to pay.

Writing an online reflective essay and participating in an interview are similar in several important ways, which support a recommendation that people writing an online reflective essay should be provided the same rate of compensation as people participating in an interview. First, in both ways of collecting data, participants are usually asked open-ended questions that often require thinking and reflecting. The participants are then required to answer the questions either vocally or in writing. The way the questions are designed also often requires to not only have an answer but also to provide that answer eloquently. Further, as many researchers personally know, writing can be quite challenging, which could also make writing an online reflective essay even more difficult than participating in an interview. Because of these similarities, researchers should consider having the same rate of compensation for people who will write an online reflective essay and for people who will participate in an interview. Thus, if the compensation for a 1-hour interview is $30, then the compensation for a 30-minute online reflective essay should be $15. It is important to note that some online data collection platforms set a minimum compensation rate. For example, in May 2024, Prolific required researchers to pay at least $8 per hour. For the reasons mentioned above, researchers should not treat such minimum wage requirements as reasonable for writing an online reflective essay (or, for that matter, any other type of research activity). And, as with most social science research involving human subjects, the research protocol and the compensation rate must be approved by an appropriate research ethics board.

Analyzing Online Reflective Essays

While there are many different ways researchers can approach analyzing qualitative data, for analyzing specifically online reflective essays, this article recommends researchers to consider familiarizing themselves with thematic analysis, narrative analysis, and interpretive phenomenological analysis. While some aspects of these ways of thinking and analyzing qualitative data overlap, each of them has important differences that should be considered by the researcher. Below is a very brief overview with some key important considerations that each approach entails; however, researchers are strongly encouraged to familiarize themselves with the work done by key scholars for each approach.

Thematic analysis is a method that can help to identify, analyze, and report themes (Braun and Clarke 2006, 2015). This process begins with going through all of the data while also thinking about the data and reflecting on the data. The next step is systematically creating codes that capture the data and that help to answer the research question. The codes that encapsulate similar ideas are then clustered together to develop broader themes. The researcher names the theme in a way that encompasses what the theme represents. This way of approaching qualitative data helps to systematically report all themes that are relevant to the research question.

Narrative analysis is a method that can help to interpret, evaluate, and report individual stories (Riessman 1993, 2008). When people tell stories, they tend to organize and structure them in a specific way. People also tend to emphasize or discuss specific events to construct their stories. Narrative analysis helps the researcher to present those stories to the reader while also maintaining the storyteller’s voice. When using this method, the stories are not broken down into individual codes; instead, entire stories or larger story fragments are used to develop themes that are then reported to the reader. Unlike thematic analysis that can be used to approach very large qualitative data sets, conducting narrative analysis becomes more challenging, and arguably unworkable, the larger the qualitative data set is because this method focuses on individual stories which then still have to be reported.

Interpretative phenomenological analysis is a method that helps to report people’s lived experiences and how people make sense of their own lived experiences (Smith, 2011; Smith et al., 2022). The only focus of this approach is on the meaning of a specific lived experience to the participant, and exploring how that participant views that experience requires great emphasis on what specific words the participant uses to explore those experiences. Because of this emphasis and detail that is required for this method, only a handful of participants is necessary. For example, this method was used to understand how 11 people diagnosed with bipolar disorder experienced and subsequently recovered from their first episode of mania (Farr et al., 2022). When approaching data with this method, the data are not broken down into individual codes. While the researcher has to report the themes from those experiences, the focus is on the experiences and not on the entire story or how the story is told.

When analyzing online reflective essays, the research question should be used as the guiding principle for determining which of the described research methods is most suitable. For example, a researcher might be interested in understanding how a specific population thinks about a specific presidential candidate and why that specific population would vote for that candidate. Online reflective essays can be used to explore this research question, and thematic analysis might be subsequently employed to analyze and represent the findings of that study. The essays would be broken down into relevant codes, such as economy, culture, etc. Because the researcher is presumably not interested in the story that the participant told or a certain experience that participant shared, narrative analysis and interpretative phenomenological analysis would be less suited. Another researcher might be interested in better understanding how a specific population became Republican or Democrat and what the journey looked like. Online reflective essays can be used to answer this question, and participant stories or story fragments would be used to illustrate similarities between the participants in how their journeys to becoming affiliated with a political party were similar. Finally, a researcher might be interested in exploring the experiences of former-Republicans or former-Democrats voting for the opposite party for the first time and what that experience meant to them. Online reflective essays might be used to answer this question, and interpretative phenomenological analysis could be utilized because the focus would be on the experiences of those participants.

Example Study

Described below is a previous study that was done using online reflective essays and other methodological suggestions described in this article. The goal of the study was to explore how midlife and older gay men thought about being childless. The chosen online data collection platform was Prolific. People who want to get compensated for participating in studies on Prolific have to register and answer a set of demographic and other questions. When researchers create a study, they can specify a specific population that will see their advertisement. In this study, in order to participate in the study, each person had to meet the following criteria: (1) be a gay man; (2) be at least 50 years old; (3) have no children; and (4) reside in the United States. Prolific allows the researchers to select which devices the participants are allowed to use to take the study: Mobile, Tablet, and Desktop. In this study, because the task was to write an online reflective essay, participants were allowed to use Tablet or Desktop, but not Mobile. People with these criteria were shown the following advertisement:

Title: Write One Reflective Essay for 30–40 mins

In this study, you will be asked to spend 30–40 minutes writing one essay about your experiences and thoughts on having children and family formation.

After clicking on the advertisement, the participants were sent to the Qualtrics platform. This platform allows researchers to create surveys that then can be taken by participants. When conducting research, it is important to consider taking some data quality measures (Shamon & Berning, 2020; Reimers et al., 2022). As mentioned above, Prolific has a demographic targeting tool that allows researchers to show the study advertisement to a specific population based on a set of demographic characteristics, such as age or income. After participants enter the study, Prolific also collects their own submitted demographic data, which will include their age, sex, first language, current country of residence, country of birth, student status, and employment status. This information, if relevant, can be compared to the information the participants provide in the online reflective essay. Qualtrics is also able to show the approximate location of the participant and the time the participant took to write the essay. Finally, researchers should consider disabling the copy/paste function in Qualtrics.

After the participants were presented with a consent form, they had an opportunity to read through the form and then decide whether they wanted to participate. Those who agreed to participate were asked to type in their actual age. Then they were presented with an essay prompt. Consistent with recommendations in this article, a small pilot study was conducted to see how participants would react to the essay prompt. In the pilot study, the following prompt was used:

Tell us about your personal thoughts on having children. Is there a reason why you do not have children? Have you ever wanted to have children? What are your relationship dynamics/marital status? What kind of regrets, if any, do you have? Are there things you wish you had considered in terms of having children/forming a family? Are there any other reasons you do not have children? How do you feel about not having children now?

While the content and quality of the essays were exceptional, it was noted that several participants expressed what appeared to be defensiveness or rather strong feelings over the word “regret.” After reading the responses and reflecting on the research prompt, it was decided that the prompt that was used in the pilot study was too regret-focus, suggesting that the study was not about how midlife and older gay men thought about being childless but how these gay men thought about the concept of regret of not having children. Further, it was thought that invoking the concept of regret in the prompt would be suggestive or leading. As such, the essay prompt was reworded to shift the research focus from the concept of regret. The final version of the prompt that was used in the study was the following:

Only 1 Essay. No follow-ups.

Please spend at least 30–40 minutes on this essay. Please take your time.

We are interested in older gay men and their thoughts on having children, parenting, and family formation. Please help us by using the following guiding questions to write a response/essay. There is no specific structure. Thank you for your help!

Have you ever wanted to have children? How has your desire to have or not have children evolved over time? What kind of barriers/challenges related to having children have you encountered? How has your relationship status changed over time? Are there any relevant life events/circumstances? Looking back, are there any things you wish you had considered about parenting or children when you were younger? How do you feel about children now? Do you think you will feel the same in the future?

There were no follow-up questions. The study protocol was approved by an institutional review board. Over 20 participants agreed to participate. The data were collected in early 2024. The previous study used narrative analysis to analyze the data (Riessman, 2008). Below are two exemplar essays that were selected for the purposes of this article. A brief discussion of each essay is also included.

Full Online Reflective Essay 1. Respondent #21, Age 52

I am 52 years old, born in 1972, child of the 1980s. It was not a great time to be a gay kid, and of course the things that happen in one’s childhood have implications that last a lifetime. I have always had an outsider mentality, borne from not having a lot of friends. I like people, but I think differently than most of them and don’t fit in well socially. In groups especially, I tend to be discluded or ejected from the group (in college, my fraternity). I am considered weird, an oddball.

Growing up in this time period, already an outsider and deep in the closet about being gay, with gay marriage illegal and HIV/AIDS decimating the gay community, I never thought about marriage and kids except to think it would be a good way to maintain a “straight” cover. These were never plans, just abstract thoughts. Then I went off to the University of Virginia from my small southern town. I had fantasies of coming out of the closet and finding the liberal university accepting and warmly welcoming me and finding my place, finally. This is not exactly what happened.

I did find the gay community, and it wasn’t super welcoming towards me. I was considered weird even in a group of weirdos. I had fleeting fantasies about having the American dream of a house and picket fence and a long-term partner, but marriage was still illegal for gays, and without marriage a possibility, and being really bad at relationships generally, it never occurred to me to try to be a father. I did have occasional thoughts that I would be a good dad. And I would have been. Missing out on that is one of the great regrets of my life.

Gay marriage finally became legal around – I had to look it up, sorry – 2012. By that date I was 40 years old – over the hill in the gay community and not considered seriously as a partner by many guys. I also had added burdens in my life making me undatable. HIV and addiction. Even in recovery, addiction has such a stigma people don’t want to date you. And HIV, don’t even get me started. Lots of people understand technically what undetectable means, but none of them – and I mean none of them – believe it to be equivalent to being negative, even if the math says so. It’s a scarlet letter A (but not for adultery) that makes it that much harder to date.

I haven’t had a boyfriend since the 1990s, not a serious one. He’s someone I could have adopted a kid with. I'm getting older now. If I’d had kids like the straight people of my generation, my child would be in college now. That is wild to think of. My current semi-significant-other is only slightly older than that. Would I have a different attitude about being with someone so young if I had a child around the same age? Undoubtedly.

I hope we live multiple lives, and that in another life I can have children, or at least one. Hopefully a son. God, hope you’re listening.

This online reflective essay was chosen as an exemplar for several reasons. First, even though the essay prompt was centered around the thoughts on having children, it was emphasized that there was no specific structure. Having such freedom allowed this participant to reflect and decide where to start and what personal details to emphasize. As for many gay men, especially older gay men, coming out was an important event, and so he decided to start his essay by discussing his childhood. This participant wrote that he had faced various challenges that made it harder for him to be more social that subsequently affected his ability to find a partner. He wrote about his dream of having a husband and a family and how those dreams were affected by the legal and social environment. After having time to reflect and remember his dreams, the participant wrote about how not having a family was one of the biggest regrets of his life.

In addition to showing vulnerability and openness by discussing his difficult childhood, various social challenges, and his regrets, this participant also revealed another especially sensitive piece of information—his HIV status. He wrote about unique stigma that older gay men face in the gay community because of their age and the added challenges of being older and being HIV-positive. In his penultimate paragraph, he reflected on his current age, realizing that while he is childless, the children of his heterosexual counterparts are already in college. While the participant discussed many different aspects of his life, there was no discussion of his religiosity until the very end. After having space to reflect, he chose to finish his essay with what appears to be a prayer, in which this gay man asked God for a chance to be a father in a different life.

Full Online Reflective Essay 2. Respondent #13, Age 54

I have never assumed raising a child would be a possibility in my life. I’ve never had luck with serious relationships, which I always assumed to be a pre-requisite. I have especially never had luck with girls/women, which I further assumed to be a pre-requisite (and which really was a pre-requisite back then).

I didn’t enjoy my own childhood. What would make me think I could provide a child with a better one?

My unhappiness carried over through my late teens or early 20s. If I couldn’t figure out my own life, I shouldn’t be put in charge of someone else’s. My focus in life was very short-term. I didn’t plan properly for my career because I was so bogged down by immediate unhappiness. I’ve often thought I should have become a schoolteacher, but even that thought was shot down in my mind by concerns of how I’d handle kids.

As I became older, I switched from these thoughts to thoughts that it was becoming too late. Plus, I still had the problem of not having a long-term partner who I could parent with. Single parenting seemed too difficult for me and a bit unfair to the child. Perhaps I was influenced by my own childhood situation: two parents and four kids in a big suburban house. That’s how a childhood should be, I thought.

As I have gotten older, there have been times where I wished I had a child or two, a son (I don’t know how I’d relate to a daughter). I think about how I’d like to teach a child so many things. I feel smarter and wiser. I think I’d at least be a better parent now than I was back then, which mostly serves to reinforce my belief that I was correct not to parent back then. Maybe I set the bar too high?

But this is more a feeling of regret than of something I might do in the future. The ship has sailed. If I adopted a young child - I could never handle a baby - then how old would I be when he reached his teen years? And adopting an older child seems daunting. I don’t think I’d feel a natural parental love for an older child. Also, I don’t even own a house.

I suspect when I am even older, I will be somewhat haunted by never having kids. I will have left no legacy. However, I won’t that I missed my opportunity. I will feel that I just wasn’t up to it. I will regret that I couldn’t get my act together, couldn’t run my overall life properly (at least not until it was too late).

While there are some similarities between the stories of these two participants, the essays are quite different. This participant, unlike the previous participant, immediately started explaining why he was childless. After having time to reflect, he wrote about his preconceived notions of parenthood, specifically that being a father for him meant being in a relationship with a woman. He also shared some details about his short-term goals, which he explained affected the way he approached his life.

Having space to reflect allowed this participant to engage in a dialogue with himself which continued throughout the essay. He wrote about how he did not particularly enjoy his childhood, which led him to question himself over how he would be able to provide a happy childhood for his child. This participant also reflected on his younger years, asking himself whether he would have been able to be a wise parent back then. Realizing that he was comparing his current version of himself, someone with more experience and wisdom, to his younger version of himself, someone with less experience and wisdom, he asked himself if that maybe was unfair for him to do. In his final paragraphs, the participant continued engaging in a dialogue with himself. He wrote that at his age it was too late for him to be a parent to a young child. Even though he knew the answer, he still asked himself about what would happen if he adopted a young child and how old the participant would be when the child became a teenager. In addition to discussing his regret about being childless, this participant also explored how he would feel in the future, speculating that his sense of regret would only be higher as he gets older.

Conclusion

Conducting research online is becoming more popular among researchers, including qualitative researchers. As qualitative methodology gains more credibility and popularity it is important to continue to expand and improve the qualitative research toolkit. The guide outlined in this article contributes to the qualitative methodology literature by showing how researchers can methodologically utilize online reflective essays to answer their research questions. These essays are not a replacement for interviews or mixed-methods studies that have open-ended questions; rather researchers should consider incorporating online reflective essays as another tool in their qualitative research arsenal. When developing a study, qualitative researchers should consider a set of factors, including the research question, the sensitivity of the research question, the amount of reflectivity required to answer the research question, the length it takes to answer the research question, and the type of population that will be used to answer the research question. Depending on these factors, online reflective essays offer a unique, and sometimes the most superior, way to collect rich qualitative data.