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Abstract

Qualitative researchers are increasingly utilising reflexive practices to ensure transparency and assure quality. Current researcher reflexivity, we show, often hinges upon a set of assumptions about reflexivity itself. Through a critical literature review combined with reflexive vignettes, we offer an epistemological critique of reflexivity. We advocate for robust reflexivity, a practice that critically reflects on reflexivity itself. We thus encourage qualitative researchers to critique their reflexive practices in four ways: (1) we challenge the idea that reflexivity leads to revelation, and show the ways this idea reintroduces positivist notions of Truth under a constructionist guise; (2) we challenge simple binaries within many positionality statements, nuancing ideas of insider and outsider status, affinity and difference, and the dynamism of identity over time; (3) we show how reflexivity is a socially and culturally embedded practice, rather than a neutral and universal cognitive practice; and (4) we foreground the power dynamics of reflexivity, cautioning against the co-option of reflexivity in ways that perpetuate social inequities and mask hierarchies within research. To support robust reflexive practices, we offer a toolkit of questions that can act as prompts for critical engagements with reflexivity, and argue for the creation of more robustly reflexive methodological resources.

Keywords

reflexivity reflection positionality robust reflexivity qualitative research radical reflexivity

Introduction

Reflexivity is an increasingly valued component of the qualitative research process. Qualitative scholars utilise reflexivity to help ensure qualitative rigour, transparency, and ethical robustness (Canosa et al., 2018; Guillemin & Gillam, 2004). Examples of reflexive practices within qualitative research are increasingly diverse. They include autobiographical narratives (Olmos-Vega et al., 2023), subjectivity statements (Roulston, 2010) autoethnography (Ellis, 1999; Koopman et al., 2020) and field journals (Barrett et al., 2020). They also encompass co-constructed processes such as why interviews (Maso, 2003), memos (Birks et al., 2008), bracketing interviews (Roulston, 2010), team reflexivity sessions (Leggatt-Cook et al., 2011; Linabary et al., 2020) and member checking reflection (Olmos-Vega et al., 2023).

The ‘reflexive turn’ is associated with the broader postmodern turn of the 1980s (e.g. Clifford & Marcus, 1986) which foregrounded issues of representation and questioned singular, grand narratives of history and social life. Whereas the postmodern turn challenged the notion of objective truth more broadly, the reflexive turn emerged as a response to critiques of research methods, their claims to truth, and their representational power (Lumsden et al., 2019). Practices of researcher reflexivity have many antecedents and can be traced back to the candid diaries of early anthropologists and sociologists, such as Malinowski (1967) and Dumont (1978). Early twentieth century scholars such as Zora Neale Hurston (1935) and Eslana Goode Robeson (1945) described how their identities and approaches as Black female scholars shaped the conversations and trust possible with community interlocutors, and they were also influential in developing innovative, first-person writing styles.

From the 1970s, feminist scholars offered one foundation for reflexivity in the form of Standpoint Theory, proposing that understanding how one’s social position shaped one’s capacity to know could be revealed through consciousness raising (Cesara, 1982; Collins, 2003; Harding, 1986; Lewin, 2006). Moreover, Indigenous Standpoint Theory (Moreton-Robinson, 2013; Nakata, 2007) has foregrounded Indigenous ways of knowing, exploring how Indigenous peoples have been required to understand themselves through outsider representations and stereotypes, and how they have resisted these representational harms.

Varied disciplines offer reflexive rationales for reflexive practices, including education, Indigenous studies, psychology, and social work (Bennet et al., 2016; Foley, 2003; Rosen et al., 2017; Sisneros, 2008; Teh & Lek, 2018; Zeichner & Liston, 1996). For example, anthropology developed practices of reflexive writing as a response to its historical entanglement with colonial systems and its desire to understand the power dynamics of research and created collaborative, polyphonic alternatives (Ellis, 1999). Health science scholars developed reflexivity tools in part to help justify qualitative research when speaking to positivist medical audiences, in which justification for a subjective voice must be clearly articulated in relation to questions of rigour and benefit (Olmos-Vega et al., 2023). And the disciplines of education and social work have grappled with reflexivity to confront how these ‘helping’ disciplines have reproduced inequalities and unequal power dynamics, embracing methods of critical cultural self-reflection in order to build cultural safety and encourage positions of humility amongst educators and social workers, thus recognising the agency and diverse knowledges of students and clients (Bennet et al., 2016).

In this article, we contribute to methodological discussions of reflexivity by advocating for robust reflexivity. We argue that robust reflexivity entails a more critical engagement with reflexivity itself – being reflexive about reflexivity – which allows more nuanced and careful practices to emerge. Our intervention is thus an epistemological critique of reflexivity, rather than a step-by-step prescription for methods. In offering an epistemological critique, we build upon Duggleby and Williams ‘epistemological considerations’ (Duggleby and Williams, 2016), which seeks to uncover and make visible the epistemological assumptions of different qualitative methods. By invoking critique, we engage with critical theory’s goal of denaturalizing normative social values that have become ubiquitous and, by calling them into question, allow new values and practices to emerge (Butler, 2002).

To offer an epistemological critique, we combine a critical literature review with reflexive fieldwork examples. These examples are not presented as comprehensive empirical data, but instead are offered as grounded illustrations of the complexities of reflexivity in practice. In exploring the literature, as well as drawing upon our own experiences and observations of qualitative research, we challenge four commonplace assumptions regarding reflexive practice. These include challenging the idea that reflexivity leads to revelation, the common binary assumptions of positionality within reflexivity, that reflexivity is universal and culturally neutral, and a common lack of reflection regarding hierarchy and power within practices of reflexivity. We then offer a flexible toolkit in the form of a series of staggered questions that can drive robust reflexive practice in qualitative research, and which encourages scholars to critically reflect upon their reflexive practice and its impacts on their research. To conclude, we suggest ways for qualitative researchers to collectively support and build resources to help develop greater capacity in robust reflexivity across disciplines.

Towards Robust Reflexivity in Qualitative Research

Through reflexivity, researchers attempt to systematically reflect upon their experiences, social position, worldviews, and reactions to the research process. They introspect to uncover the ways in which their subjectivities and research approaches shape the research process and the production of knowledge (Darawsheh, 2014; Davies, 2012; Finlay and Gough 2008). Beyond self-introspection, reflexivity helps uncover how the intersubjective dynamics of research relationships – within researcher teams and institutions, and between researchers and participants – influence the production of research questions, methods, data, and analysis (van Stapele, 2014). Moreover, reflexivity supports researchers to appraise and understand the ways in which wider socio-cultural contexts impact the research journey (Fook, 1999, 2004). In other words, the reflexive researcher sees knowledge not as a detached process of collecting and observing truth, but one in which the researcher, the methods of research, and the knowledge produced are entangled.

This definition spotlights a gradual shift within qualitative research away from previous more positivist approaches to reflexivity that sought to bracket bias and neutralise the impact of the research on the researched (e.g. Gearing, 2004). As Olmos-Vega and colleagues note, reflexivity is increasingly “rooted in a respect for and a valuing of subjectivity. It is part of how qualitative researchers account for the significance of the intertwined personal, interpersonal, methodological, and contextual factors that bring research into being” (Olmos-Vega et al., 2023: 242, see also Finlay, 2002). As such, reflexivity within teams does not aim to arrive at a singular interpretation across viewpoints, but rather acts to “negotiate different understandings without imposing commonly shared meanings” (Finefter-Rosenbluh, 2017: 7).

And yet, as many scholars have noted (Ng et al., 2020; Russel 2020; Schön, 1983; Thompson & Pascal, 2012) practices of reflexivity in institutional settings can easily be reduced to a form of “technical rationality” (Schön, 1983). Such “audit culture” (Strathern, 2000) aligns with a checklist approach to research and teaching, and a preoccupation with risk and labour management (Shore & Wright, 2003; Valenzuela, 2021). This risks producing superficial rather than nuanced and intersectional understandings of relationships and relational difference, while ignoring systemic factors.

A range of useful resources now exist to encourage robust approaches to reflexivity. These caution against “weak conceptualisations” (Olmos-Vega et al., 2023: 242) of reflexivity, which tend to superficially note the subjective and contextual influences upon research and data but do not delve into the specificities of how, why, and when such factors were impactful (Case, 2017). Scholars encourage researchers to treat reflexivity as an ongoing project (Finlay, 2002; Mao et al., 2016) that does not stop at project design but continues throughout data collection, during transcription decisions, analysis, and writing (Bischoping, 2018; Roulston, 2010), and in reflexively considering the impact of results once released. It is necessary at the very level of awareness regarding the impacts of our own subconscious linguistic utterances and use of categories across research (Alejandro, 2021). And it is necessary with regard to the non-linguistic dimensions of research interactions, for example to the role of interview locations on the shape and flow of conversation (Dordah & Horsbøl, 2021). Scholars have, moreover, challenged qualitative researchers to move beyond shallow and brief descriptions of reflexivity in research articles (positionality statements) towards more ‘radical reflexivity’ (Leary et al., 2009; Smith & Luke, 2021): a more thorough and thoughtful foregrounding and interweaving of reflexive insights throughout our publications. Proponents of reflexivity have, furthermore, argued for greater engagement in reflexive processes beyond researchers to include a wide range of research partners, such as interpreters, research site brokers and gatekeepers, and research participants (e.g. Sanderson et al., 2013), as well as more honest reflexive transparency about the dynamics between student researchers and their mentors and supervisors (Woodley & Smith, 2020).

Reflexivity has not escaped critique. Some scholars see the line between reflexivity and self-indulgent narcissism as thin (Olmos-Vega et al., 2023), and that the process of ongoing reflection is a potentially “infinite regress” of introspection (Finley 2002: 226). Our own critique of reflexivity comes from a different angle. We seek to encourage a more critical conceptualisation and practice of reflexivity itself. Reflexive practices in qualitative research rarely culturally situate, nor thoroughly politically interrogate the reflexive practices themselves. In response, we offer four critical reflections on reflexivity. These points draw upon experiences and insights from our collective 70 years as qualitative researchers. Collectively we have worked in varied fields, including anthropology, public health, development studies, geography, criminology, social pharmacology, social epidemiology, and legal studies, and have conducted diverse modes of qualitative research, from interviewing, surveys, focus groups, population studies, participatory methods, and creative methods. We have also worked with varied groups, including industry, state and local government, community groups, NGOs and charities, and health consultancies (Khan et al., 2021, 2022; Phillips, 2010, 2012; Phillips et al., 2024; Trnka & Trundle, 2017; Trundle, 2012; Wilding et al., 2024; Winarnita & Araujo, 2016).

Beyond Reflexive Revelation

Researchers often treat reflexivity as a revelatory process. This means they understand reflexivity as leading to a better, more clear-eyed viewpoint of the self and the world. According to this logic, reflexivity helps to “dismantle the smokescreen” (England, 1994: 81), revealing the inner self and its relation to others. While commonly framed as a process that champions a subjective point of view, a revelatory understanding of reflexivity can inadvertently reinforce a more positivist ideal of objective knowledge. Reflexivity can slip towards seeking to offer a truer ‘truth’ (Salzman, 2002).

As Trundle (2014: 176) notes of the revelatory ideal of reflexivity, “this claim relies upon an essentialized and psychologized version of an ‘inner self’ that can be uncovered through introspection and self-knowledge.” Reflexivity appears as a neutral universal process of uncovering the self. However, Nikolas Rose’s influential work on the early twentieth century rise of the psy-disciplines challenges such assumptions, historicizing such a self and placing recent reflexive practices within a wider cultural context (1996). His work charts how a new psychologized notion of personhood rose to cultural dominance within western medicine, a self with a psychic interior core that could be therapeutically revealed.

Drawing upon the influence of Foucault (1986), Rose shows that these values brought a specific cultural ‘regime of the self’ into being, where “human beings have come to understand and relate to themselves as ‘psychological’ beings, to interrogate and narrate themselves in terms of a psychological ‘inner life’ that holds the secrets of their identity, which they are to discover and fulfil, which is the standard against which the living of an ‘authentic’ life should be judged” (Rose, 1996: 22). Such a process, as Foucault demonstrates (1986), was entangled with increasingly medicalised ideas of pathology and normalcy, and the institutional governance of ‘abnormal’ persons and psyches, such as the ‘criminal’, the ‘insane’, and the ‘sexual deviant’. This work encourages us to consider how reflexive practices both reveal and constitute our subjectivities in the same moment. As Lian (2019) argues, reflexivity does not simply expose a researcher’s fixed and already formed positionality, but the process of doing research and reflecting upon it shapes the researcher self and their positionality.

Salzman (2002: 809) also critiques reflexivity as revelation. He argues that people rarely approach reflexivity neutrally, nor on the whole demonstrate robust skills in knowing their interior worlds, their deeper motivations, and their complex effects on their environments. Self-narratives are, moreover, commonly inflected by anticipations about what the audience expects and desires of the narrator. As Salzman rather cynically argues (2002: 809),

misrepresenting oneself to others is perhaps the species’ most popular sport, self-deception is one of the most valued human skills. How many reflexive self-reports are uncontaminated with wish fulfilment, ideal presentation of self, or creative manipulation of image? As Fredrik Barth so mildly puts it, “There is reason to distrust our own description of ourselves” (1994: 354).

As researchers, we are conducting reflexive practices within social, institutional, and disciplinary settings. Given the competitive, performance-based nature of many research environments, Salzman’s critique should be taken seriously. Methodologically, robust reflexivity, requires honest conversations about how the performative requirements of reflexive methods might achieve particular social goals and shape what can and cannot be said. This includes careful consideration of how reflexive methods are being formally or subconsciously driven by a desire or need to enhance the legitimacy of the researchers and research.

An example from within the field of anthropology reveals how methodological conventions of reflexivity are tied to performing researcher legitimacy. ‘Tales of rapport’ within ethnographic writing are commonplace. Such tales reflexively recount initial moments in fieldwork when the ethnographer struggled to understand social life and make social connections, and committed various social faux pas. The narratives then typically detail lightbulb moments of cultural understanding and shared experiences with participants. Through these, the ethnographer demonstrates how they gained participants’ trust and built genuine friendships (Clifford, 1983; Trundle & Phillips, 2024). Such tales work in “the construction of ethnographic credibility and authenticity, and the creation of images of anthropologists as social persons” (Ben-Ari, 1987: 63). These stories act to bolster the credibility of the study by demonstrating the sound experiential and relational basis of research, methodological bedrocks highly valued in the field of anthropology (Clifford, 1983). They reinforce narrowly constructed notions of what constitutes ‘good’ research and uphold problematic mythologies of the ‘heroic’ researcher (Douglas-Jones et al., 2020) At the same time, such tales downplay the complexity of social disconnection, failed rapport, hierarchy, and even conflict that are common within ethnographic fieldwork (Trundle, 2018).

If taken seriously, the experience of disconnection and failed rapport can spark deeper reflexive thinking about one’s own power and positionality. This was the case for Tarryn Phillips during her doctoral research, which examined medical and legal disputes over whether workers were suffering from workplace chemical injuries (Phillips, 2015). She sought to interview people on all sides of the debate, including both workers and employers, sympathetic and sceptical experts. She was careful to use agnostic language in her recruitment material. And yet, from the outset, almost all of the employers and sceptical experts were reluctant to speak to her and either ignored or outwardly denied her requests. The ethnographic material she gathered, and the rapport she developed, were disproportionately shaped by time spent with workers, their families and sympathetic experts. At first, she reflexively narrativized this partiality by pointing out that employers and their allies have lower levels of emotional investment in the topic, and economic vested interests in the condition remaining unrecognised. Upon deeper reflection, however, Tarryn’s political and disciplinary tendency to side with the subaltern – in this case the workers and sympathetic experts – was subtly perceptible in many facets of the research title, design and focus. This likely made the research feel unsafe for sceptics to be open and honest about their views, lest they be maligned or misrepresented. This reflexive realisation was not unveiled and heroically rectified during the fieldwork, but rather lingered afterwards as an unresolved methodological dilemma.

The performative dimensions of social life are not the only reasons reflexivity does not operate as a straightforward revelatory tool. Even when researchers develop useful skills and understandings of reflexivity, research shows they often remain inconsistent or partial in their methodological practices of reflexivity. In studying Canadian health and school educators’ reflexive practice, Ng and colleagues (2020: 163) showed that, “Being critically reflective was not an all-or-nothing way of being and seeing; individuals who demonstrated instances of critical reflection also exhibited missed opportunities for such.” Reflexivity is thus commonly unevenly applied over time and across contexts (Fook, 2012). Methodologically, robust reflexivity requires critically attending to the unevenness of our reflexive capacities. It entails asking why such unevenness develops, what social factors shape this unevenness, and what are its effects. This in turn prompts us to develop methods to extend reflexivity out of comfort zones into unreflective areas of our practice.

Challenging Binary-Thinking in Reflexivity

Positionality statements laying out similarities and differences between researchers and research participants have emerged as a commonly expected element of qualitative outputs. While useful, positionality statements can, in their brevity, contain a set of simplistic and problematic binary assumptions about identity and experience, and difference and affinity (Gani & Khan, 2024; Savolinen et al., 2023). These statements commonly focus on identities of class, ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, educational background and other social categories. In revealing what the researcher and their participants share, such statements often evoke rapport, shared experience, and mutual understanding. But difference does not neatly equal distance, and affinity does not always equal connection and understanding. Insider and outsider statuses represent positionalities socially negotiated between the researcher and their participants that contain graduations, shifts, and are both internally and externally defined by self and others (Araujo, 2018; Kim, 2024), the subtleties of which are often only revealed during fieldwork (Joseph et al., 2021).

As Jacobson and Mustafa (2019) note, both researchers and participants’ understandings and awareness of their social identity and its impacts on a research encounter are also shaped by their cultural context, with different facets of our social identities becoming generational focal points over time, for example the rising public awareness of gender, sexuality and racial identity in recent decades in different local contexts. Conversely, recent challenges to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in a range of settings reveal how political forces shape the valuing and visibility of identities, or even the very ability to name and discuss such identities.

Sumaira Khan offers a poignant example of moving beyond simple and fixed binaries. She is a recent migrant and a PhD scholar of South Asian origin who studies South Asian migrant women living with type-2 diabetes mellitus in Melbourne, Australia through a feminist lens. At the beginning of her research, she expected that her insider status would ensure easy rapport, connection and shared understandings with her participants. By contrast, she found that significant differences emerged between herself and her participants in terms of age, life stage, marital status and educational background. Affinities were soon complicated by a heightened awareness of shades of difference between them.

She increasingly recognised that being a feminist researcher of women’s health in her late 20s, with little clue of how marriage and motherhood would unfold for her, shaped the ways in which she subconsciously appraised her participants’ life narratives. When participants talked about taking care of themselves in relation to diabetes, and prioritising such care over other life responsibilities, she interpreted this as ‘empowerment’. This usually happened when the participants were similar to her, such as single working women with no partner or children. By contrast, she felt a sense of ‘disappointment’ when participants revealed how other life responsibilities presented barriers to self-care. This usually happened when the participant was married with multiple children and received minimal support from her partner in domestic tasks. Going further, she felt a sense of being ‘perplexed and lost’ when participants said that they did not bother much with trying to take care of themselves as they were being taken care of by their partner and were happy with domestic duties and taking care of their children.

These reflections led her to understand the specificity of place and history and its impact on reflexivity (Bönisch-Brednich & Trundle, 2016). They helped her to decentre her own assumptions stemming from her generational experiences, as well as her urban, middle class and English-educated background, all of which shaped how she approached empowerment. Her ideal of empowerment, she realised, was inherited from within colonial and cosmopolitan modes of feminism that centre individualized agency as power (Araujo & Peterson, 2021; Nazneen & Sultan, 2014). This in turn allowed her to notice less obvious everyday forms of resistance and relational modes of agency in participants’ narratives, which these women enacted in the face of challenging life circumstances.

This example reveals how the interpersonal dynamics of research relationships are continually shaping the generation of data in dynamic ways. Discussions of positionality thus need to avoid static and categorical accounts of identity, affinity and difference, and instead spotlight the complexities and ongoing negotiations. As Sumaira’s experiences also show, moving beyond a simple understanding of positionality helps the researcher to recognise how feelings of affinity can lead to misguided assumptions of fully understanding participants’ lives, while unacknowledged differences can lead to research moments of disconnection and subconscious judgement. Recognising this allow greater empathy, curiosity and openness towards participants and their stories.

Greater empathy, curiosity and openness are also reflexively developed over time, often while engaging with the data/participants at different stages of the research process and negotiating with one’s own changing positionality. For instance, for Sumaira, decentring her assumptions about empowerment came with both engaging with her respondents’ accounts as well as settling in as a migrant in Australia. When Sumaira was new to Australia, she was more attuned to active forms of resistance and grand narratives of empowerment among her participants as she was personally experiencing cultural alienation. Over time, she became comfortable with her own migrant ‘inbetween-ness’ and hence more attuned to less obvious form of resistance and narratives in her participants’ narratives.

The Social Construction of Reflexive Values

In qualitative research, reflexivity is often regarded as a universal cognitive process. Giddens (1976, 1991), for example, treats reflexivity as central to human experience, a required practice for all members of society. Yet reflexivity in such accounts is often constructed as a profoundly individualistic process, driven by a relationship with the self (Adams, 2003). This self is often assumed to be “transparent,” independent, and infallible in its self-knowledge (Haggerty, 2003). In reality, practices of reflexivity are socio-culturally constituted and relational. How we reflect, what we reflect upon, and what we ignore, are determined by cultural context and values regarding what is worthy of reflexive focus, and what is not.

Ilana Gershon’s (2006) discussion of diverse reflexivities enacted in the interactions between Samoan migrants and Californian government bureaucracies is a vivid example of how reflexive practices produce particular social orders, cultural ideals, and systems of power. She notes that “bureaucrats often require that community representatives or family members stand for and translate their cultur[e]. … To serve in this capacity, however, requires that they reframe the culture they represent to make it fit the parameters of the bureaucrat’s system” (539). Bureaucrats required community representatives to perform a strategic reflexivity, asking representatives to translate and present Samoan culture as having unified cultural needs. By contrast, the government bureaucrats thought of their own organisations as a-cultural. Their own reflexivity was reserved for considering how well the ‘system’ and their roles within it worked to reproduce institutional values. While both groups enacted reflexivity in their interaction, such reflexivities acted to both reveal and conceal, which had the effect of reproducing Samoan identity and bureaucratic identity as very different forms.

In conducting research on British military veterans seeking compensation from the state for service-related injuries, Catherine Trundle found, over five years of ethnographic fieldwork, that participants had a shifting idea of how she should perform her reflexivity. In more informal settings and especially at the beginning of research relationships, they appreciated her positionality statements, and liked her to acknowledge the similarities and differences that existed between herself and participants, based on age and generation, gender and military service, and their impacts on how well she could know and represent their lives. Reflexivity here functioned as a form of researcher modesty that offered participants authority over their stories. Participants reminded her that there were things she could not really understand. But as fieldwork progressed, trust grew, and her knowledge increased, expectations of ‘positionality talk’ changed. Where she could be perceived as an expert of their claims, such as in the company of lawyers and government officials, participants expected her to silence such positionalities. Instead, she needed to present as an objective and scientific seeker of truth who was socially detached from research relationships and the ‘biases’ they might bring to her findings. This positionality was far more useful in supporting their claims than the collaborative and socially embedded scholar (Trundle, 2018).

As these examples show, reflexivities are locally emergent and driven by diverse social and cultural goals. This insight applies equally to the researcher’s own institutional world. Performing robust reflexivity requires turning the lens upon academia’s own social values and asking how disciplines, institutions, and wider cultural contexts shape the ways researchers understand and enact reflexivity, what values they embed within reflexivity, and what tensions and pressures these generate (Downey et al., 2024). The next and final point asks researchers to reflexively consider the power relations in which they and their reflexive work are entangled.

Interrogating the Power Dynamics within Reflexivity

The increasingly normalisation of reflexive qualitative research has raised awareness of how positionality shapes knowledge production in academia (Baum et al., 2006; Lenette, 2022; Viswanathan et al., 2004). However, rhetorical performances of reflexivity without genuine critical engagement or political action can reproduce historically entrenched inequalities. There is, for example, an irony that occurs when academics who research vulnerable populations write eloquent self-reflections about their privileged positionality. While such publications benefit the academic’s own career, they typically affect little change in the everyday lives of those they write about, and can thus “reinscribe” inequalities (Land, 2015; Pease, 2006).

The language of reflexivity – as with the concept of decolonisation - can be co-opted in counterproductive ways. Referring to the “decolonial bandwagon”, Moosavi argues that some literature that claims to be decolonial is in fact further colonising, because it neglects decolonial literature from the Global South, misunderstands the complexity of marginalisation in academia, and can be highly tokenistic (Moosavi, 2020: 332). Similarly, while collaboration with communities is sometimes offered as an antidote to historical power imbalances, these too can be practised and articulated in tokenistic ways. Collaborative methods do not necessarily mean non-hierarchical, and non-hierarchical does not necessarily mean non-exploitative, as Finley describes: “Preoccupations with collaboration and egalitarianism can result in claims which disguise the inequalities actually present. Paradoxically, attempts to critically evaluate and deconstruct become, themselves, rhetorical strategies to claim authority and credibility” (Finley 2002: 226, see also Stacey, 1988). To ensure robust self-reflection and safeguard against the trap of tokenism, Russel (2020) offers the ‘so what’ test:

It is easy to say, I’m a White middle-class, middle-aged immigrant woman from England. But, so what? It is not enough to just identify who we are, or even to make visible the identities that are so normalised that we forget we have them. We also need to critique how this influences and impacts on our interactions […] and most importantly, how we interact with and benefit from existing social structures (36).

Mary Garrett (2013) encourages us to go even further than articulating the ‘so what’ of our perceptions and subjectivities. We must also explore the “why so” (247). This requires interrogating how the very institutional environment of a research project may limit the extent to which a researcher is able to be reflexive about aspects of their privilege and positionality. Reflecting on the production of her own doctoral thesis, for example, Garrett illustrated how the composition of the faculty in her department, the intellectual traditions that her training engaged and privileged, and her own practice of searching for familiar examples were unconsciously operationalised. While she questioned her own ethnocentricity and sought to be more reflexive, the cultural context of elite education in which her practices unfolded resulted in significant practical limitations to the effectiveness of self-reflexivity. She points out how uncritical self-reflexive practice may serve to reinforce the problematic exercise of power, and compound “the insulating effects of good intentions” (248). Garret’s work prompts us to systematically interrogate how the limits of self-reflexivity are shaped by “such factors as institutional contexts, academic training, and intellectual genealogy, with their accompanying epistemological commitments” (249).

Meaningful reflexivity, thus, requires one to acknowledge uncomfortable realities and hierarchies in the research process. In her seminal work on Decolonising Solidarity (2015), Clare Land warns researchers against confessional or redemptive arcs about themselves in their reflexive or autoethnographic writing, because such tropes seek to mend, resolve and absolve in problematic ways. Robust reflexivity points not to “simple or direct lines of action” but rather the need to engage with the complexities, contradictions, and often unresolvable tensions (Thompson & Pascal, 2012). We therefore encourage researchers to acknowledge rather than gloss over the inevitable messiness of their research processes and identities. Similar to Tuck and Yang’s evocative piece, Decolonization is not a metaphor (2012), reflexivity cannot end with reconciling “settler guilt and complicity” (3) but must necessarily remain unsettling. Such an unsettling sits at the heart of decolonising methods, which embed reflexivity at their core and offer a range of practical approaches to align reflexivity with ongoing critical exploration. These include, for example, carefully building research partnerships over time that embed ongoing conversations about power, no matter how uncomfortable, and creating bilingual texts that challenge academic representational authority and control (Lincoln & González y González, 2008).

Robust reflexivity sometimes collides with, and is disincentivised by, the systems we work within. For example, in a recent grant application, Tarryn Phillips was part of a team of Pacific and international scholars who designed a decolonial, collaborative and creative approach to better understand community engagement with healthcare in the Pacific. They were successful, at least in part because they demonstrated careful reflexivity about historical imbalances in research and the need for decoloniality in research teams. However, despite this rhetoric, and the good intentions and best efforts of the team, the grant budget was ultimately largely dedicated towards travel and teaching relief for Global North scholars, while the money spent on local Pacific scholars and communities paled in comparison. This emerges from systemic norms in which larger funding schemes are only available in Global North countries. Applications must be led by researchers at Global North institutions, and funding rules favour spending on teaching relief, travel costs and fieldwork expenses, while often disallowing salary, which would be a way to counterbalance the budget to materially support local partners. The starkness of this disparity was only rendered visible to Tarryn after the heady success of the grant, when the team began collectively looking at excel spreadsheet budgets, and electronic transfers were being made out to partners, which were unsettlingly minimal compared to the total grant awarded. This example highlights the ways in which certain elegant forms of reflexive rhetoric about inequality are culturally valued, normalised and regularly performed within the academy. However, actually addressing the messiness of inequality at a pragmatic, material level is systemically discouraged. Robust reflexivity thus requires the researcher to question how their projects might affect the lives of those they write about – relative to the benefits they themselves may derive – and how they could commit to more impactful advocacy and redistribution beyond academic papers (Baum et al., 2006; Viswanathan et al., 2004).

The Work of Ongoing Reflection: Stories of Robust Reflexivity

To demonstrate the nuanced and never-completed work of being reflexive in diverse contexts, we offer three stories below that spotlight, in different contexts and stages of research, the importance of critical reflections of reflexivity. They demonstrate how partial, iterative insights are built through reflection on reflexivity, insights that never claim to arrive at a perfect revelation or value-free viewpoint.

Sumaira Khan: Emotions, Unfolding Positionality, and Reflexive Dialogues

In conducting interviews with South Asian migrant women with diabetes in Melbourne, Australia, my supervisors encouraged me to reflect upon and journal my emotional reactions to interviews. This led me to unpack the multiple affinities and differences through which I engaged with my research questions and research participants, and how I interpreted my participants’ life narratives. I noted how throughout my meetings with participants, they prompted my reflexivity. Through asking me questions about myself, we built rapport, a reflexive dialogue in which my positionality was unfolding and implicated in the focus of the interview.

Some of my respondents perceived me as a highly educated young woman with specialised knowledge of research. Yet some of my participants also regarded me as a ‘kid in university’ who was unaware of how life changes course beyond one’s twenties. At the same time, some other participants also wondered how marriage might fit into my life considering my study trajectory and age.

These multi-layered perceptions led to participants initiating interviews with a raft of unsettling questions about my plans for the future. I did not know the answers to these questions, and my respondents prompted me to reflect on the roles of migration, marriage, and motherhood in my own life as well as my participants’ lives. These questions became focal points in our developing dialogue. Engaging reflexivity helped me to critically think through unexpected feelings that came up during the research process. These included the uprooting experience of migration and building a new life away from home, the discomfort of questions about marriage, and anxieties around making the “right” feminist choices for my own future.

Reflecting upon these feelings of unsettledness led me to understand my own thoughts and reactions during the interviews in a new light. I recognized how my positionality evoked certain kinds of conversations and framed the focus of my interviews. For instance, my feelings of disorientation were often apparent to my participants when I reached their homes exhausted or a little late, often because I could not figure out the city map or took the wrong public transport route due to the newness of the city. As this came up in conversation, it led participants to ask me further questions about my educational background, my family back home, how I experienced settling in Melbourne, and what my plans were for the future. In reflective dialogue, this led participants to recount their own initial experiences of migrating, settling, and building a home in Melbourne. This overture set the tone of the interview to follow, and shaped how participants narrated their life stories thereafter. Vulnerability, from both researcher and participants, underpinned the unsettling that allowed the interview to unfold (Behar, 2022). As Burkitt (2012) has noted, emotions form not just another element to be accounted for as part of reflexive practice, but a core element of the relational work of qualitative research.

Natalie Araújo: Imperfect Answers to Unsettling Questions – When Tensions Escape Us in the Field

It’s a long drive to the first of several farms we will be visiting as part of an applied project exploring challenges to the sustainability of Australia’s regional agrarian systems. My co-researchers and I discuss possible issues that could arise during the day, reflecting on our previous experiences and our knowledge of the communities we are visiting. Though we don’t use the word, we are engaged in reflexivity, trying to understand our relational positionality, guessing at potentialities, and calculating how we might best prepare ourselves.

Our first interview goes smoothly and, back in the car, we slip for a moment into self-congratulations. We prepared well, maintained rapport, maybe even proved a pleasant surprise to the farmer, notoriously, sceptical of outsiders. When we arrive at our second site, I shake the hand of Patrick, our interviewee, and then sit down at a table next to my colleague, Alice. I thank Patrick for agreeing to speak with us and tell him about why we are doing this research. Patrick looks over the ethics forms and signs them. He begins to push them toward me and I ask, “Do you have any questions?”

Patrick’s hand stops before the forms reach me. He meets my eyes and says, “Before I agree to talk to you, tell me, do you believe this climate change talk? Seems like there are a lot of people flying into my patch, this land that I’ve lived on my whole life, telling me what I should know and do.” I look down and see Alice’s hand balled into a tight fist. She glances at me, and I imagine that we are both thinking about what happens after my next words. We didn’t imagine this possibility. Our project is framed around sustainability. Sustainability and climate change are intimately bound in the academic circles within which Alice and I work.

I take another breath, mindful that my silence is being noted. I think of why we are doing this research—to understand the experiences of farmers like Patrick— and I try for a moment to imagine why Patrick is asking me this question. He knows that I believe in climate change. This isn’t the point. I respond, honestly, but carefully, “Well, the thing is I know what I’ve seen in my patch, and I think of it in terms of climate change. That makes sense to me based on the place I know. I don’t know your patch though, so I’m hoping that you might be willing to teach me what you know.” His eyes meet mine again. I can tell he’s entirely not convinced. He waits but then nods and agrees to continue.

Later in the car again, Alice confesses, “I wanted to say, Of course, I believe in climate change, but that didn’t seem right. You handled that well.” I shrug. I know that my reply was imperfect, strained, and inflected with contractions: a sincere conviction that individuals are the experts in their own experiences and a self-serving desire to keep the conversation going however I could. I felt Patrick’s frustration with the way fly-in city-dwellers devalue his expertise concerning his own land. I didn’t acknowledge it. On the other hand, maybe I should have said, “Of course,” as Alice would have. The project that has brought us here focuses on the sustainability of a system under threat, after all. For all our preparations, how could such obvious tensions have escaped our attention? I feel as though despite my years of experience I am forever a novice in my approach to reflexivity; when will I get it right? Alice’s voice breaks through my spiralling doubts, “We spend all this time thinking about how to conduct the research, but I feel like we are constantly having to recalibrate our expectations and understanding, you know?” Indeed.

Catherine Trundle: Beyond Good Intentions

We, the authors of this article, drink tea in my office, sharing stories of reflexivity together. As four women who share an ethnographic sensibility and feminist care ethic, there is a sense of camaraderie. I make sure to affirm to Sumaira that, despite the official hierarchy of supervisor and student, we’ll work democratically: her ideas will be valued equally and she has as much right as the three senior academic co-authors to edit, cut, and alter the text as we go. She looks nervous at the prospect, and also excited to be working alongside her supervisors in a new way. After a literature review and discussions on our own experiences of reflexivities, we divide up the article into thematic sections to each take a lead. Sumaira is in the midst of fieldwork and excited to reflect upon the unfolding experiences. We encourage her to reflexively share only what she is comfortable sharing.

Once we’ve collaborated on several rounds of refinement, we are ready to submit. Yet a feeling of discomfort niggles at the edge of my consciousness, barely perceptible. Sumaira is the only one who has personally described her own reflexive process in our article, and I dimly register that she, as a Woman of Colour from the Global South occupying the most junior position in our team, is the one performing the emotional labour and vulnerability of our piece. By contrast the three senior women in the team have focused on the emotionally safe and more detached work of theoretical and intellectual critique. We’ve ended up allowing her alone to take the emotional risks of reflexivity, and we have, inadvertently, assigned ourselves the work of theorising, a key marker of intellectual virtuosity and a means by which prestige is built within the discipline of anthropology. Yet I barely allow myself to register the unease.

We work hard on the article together and we’re all proud of it. It’s time to submit. I’m exhausted from a big year, a feeling of unrelenting pressure to get my fifth article in before my final annual performance review (a relatively low number of articles by the standards of the Department of Public Health in which I reside, but high for a medical anthropologist). Looking back later I can see how I avoided the discomforting reflections. When we receive the article peer review comments and they ask us to include many more personal reflexivity examples across the sections, I feel a strong sense of relief. I finally allow myself time with these earlier discomforts, try to work them out, and then discuss them with Sumaira. We frankly acknowledge the presence of the very dynamic I was trying to avoid as a white woman leading a research project. Afterwards, Sumaira begins a journal practice of reflecting upon how the dynamics of her supervisory relationships are shaping her ongoing reflexive awareness and practice, and I reflect within my own research journal, and consider how such opportunities for critical reflections might be foregrounded in the early stages of future collaborations.

Being reflexively honest and vulnerable means being prepared to acknowledge the messy, uncomfortable complexity of research collaborations (Madsen & O’Mullan, 2018), noticing when they veer towards an extractive ethics, and avoiding smoothing these dynamics with a veneer of effortless collaboration. As Phillips and colleagues argue (2013: 14) reflexive collaboration entails approaching “the production and communication of knowledge as intertwined processes” in which tensions are continually navigated, not tided up. It means facing the discomforting institutional pressures with which we align ourselves, and which shape who benefits from researcher reflexivity and how they benefit from their own or others’ reflexivity.

Questions to Encourage Robust and Critical Reflexivity

The preceding vignettes, illustrative of aspects of our four key points, reveal the ongoing work of reflexive thinking and writing. They are attempts to understand the power dynamics, the barriers, the relational consequences, and the emotional labours that are generated by and through reflexive practices themselves. These vignettes shift our focus from the epistemic to the applied. Setting out robust reflexivity as an epistemic orientation to research leads, necessarily, to a flexible practical approach. In this vein, we offer a tool that does not prescribe an exact ‘how to guide’ for reflexivity, but rather the questions to ask during diverse reflexive practices to ensure critical robustness surrounding reflexivity itself. First, we lay out four broad prompts that can be asked at any stage in the research. Then we offer a set of questions to encourage critical engagements with reflexivity across the diverse stages of research. This tool is meant to prompt introspection but also ongoing dialogues within research teams and with research partners and participants.

Robust Reflexivity Tool
Four broad prompts
• What do I hope my reflexivity will reveal?
• How am I engaging with my positionality and what are the consequences of this?
• What cultures of reflexivity exist in my social environment(s) and how do these shape me?
• Who benefits from my reflexivity?
Study conceptualization, design, and planning
1. What are my assumptions of reflexivity itself? How do I understand it to work, what do I expect it to do?
2. Towards what audience is my reflexivity directed? To whom am I enacting my reflexivity?
3. What are my conscious and unconscious goals and my desired endpoints in being reflexive?
4. Which social domains, experiences, relationships, structures and practices are the focus of my reflexive work? In putting my reflexive attention there, what am I not being reflexive of?
Data collection
1. Positionality: What roles are my participants asking me – and what roles am I asking them – to occupy in this moment?
2. What part of my/their positionality comes to the fore in different moments?
3. How are similarity and difference emphasised or noted in discussion between myself and my participants?
4. How do my participants and I engage with our differences and affinities? When are these shared and divergent experiences foregrounded, ignored, celebrated, worked upon, or acknowledged?
5. How do my emotional states and responses to research and research relationships shape my reflexivity and reflections? For example, how do my feelings of certain emotions (such as vulnerability, defensiveness, empathy, shame, joy, boredom, and disappointment) shape my reflections?
Data analysis
1. How does formal and informal reflexivity happen in analysis? Does it occur through introspection, through dialogue with others, through disagreements and tensions, through feedback from participants?
2. What does my reflexivity keep nudging me to notice in the data? What does this reveal about my own priorities, interests, fears and expectations?
3. How are the cultural values of my social environment impacting how I reflexively analyze?
4. What are the answers to my research questions that I least expect to hear in my data?
Writing and reporting
1. What answers to my research questions would be the least convenient, or least beneficial to me or to the solutions I think are needed? Are any of my data or results ‘uncomfortable’? Why?
2. What are my visceral reactions to these results? (Disappointed, relieved, proud, weary, excited, unsettled, ashamed)? Why? What goals are these reactions oriented towards? Are these the goals that I set out to achieve in this research?
3. Have my descriptions of my reflexive process smoothed out the messiness of research in order to provide a coherent story?
4. What silences have I introduced in my writing about reflexivity?

Conclusion

We have argued that reflexivity is only robust when scholars continue to critically reflect on reflexivity itself. Building upon radical reflexivity (Leary et al., 2009; Smith & Luke, 2021), we have argued that reflexivity is not a technical exercise in researcher transparency or quality appraisal. It is a complex, socially embedded process that contains its own politics and ethics. There is no perfect reflexive practice that escapes the political, ethical, and social contexts in which scholars work and research. This does not mean reflexivity is pointless, or endless, but rather that being robustly reflexive requires us to critically interrogate and unsettle reflexive practices as they solidify into habit and institutional norms. Robust reflexivity requires humbly acknowledging that our reflections are always partial, “a view from somewhere” (Haraway, 2013) and of ‘something’, that cannot capture the entirety of our research processes and their social complexities.

To write and share our work in robustly reflexive ways will require normalizing humility and vulnerability in discussions of researcher processes (Rosen et al., 2017; Trundle et al., 2019). It will require being more open about discomfort and failure in research (Eckert, 2020). This must replace the strategic descriptions of reflexivity commonplace within methods sections that use reflexivity to bolster and defend the robustness of the research while offering limited detail or insights about the researchers’ complex positionalities and their unfolding impacts on research.

There are varied ways to support robust reflexivity flourishing in qualitative research and qualitative research training. More empirical studies should include robust reflexive methodological discussions that can support scholars to learn, experiment, and develop reflexive skills. While best practice exemplars and models are common in many disciplines, reflexivity resources will be more useful if they do not simply offer stories of success that suggest reflexivity has reached its revelatory end point, that relational obstacles have been overcome, or that the complexities of researcher-participant positionalities have been resolved. Instead, a multiplicity of robustly reflexive accounts will begin to normalise the vulnerable, complex, and co-constructed realities of good qualitative research. Such accounts will, we hope, shift the direction of qualitative reflexivity away from pro forma positionality statements towards complex narratives of robust reflexivity.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all of our varied colleagues and research interlocutors who over many years have encouraged us to develop reflexive practices, challenged our assumptions, and prioritised honest, vulnerable modes of scholarship.

ORCID iDs

Catherine Trundle

Natalie Araújo

Sumaira Khan

Tarryn Phillips

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Beyond the Mirror: Challenging the Common Assumptions of Reflexivity in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Towards Robust Reflexivity in Qualitative Research

Beyond Reflexive Revelation

Challenging Binary-Thinking in Reflexivity

The Social Construction of Reflexive Values

Interrogating the Power Dynamics within Reflexivity

The Work of Ongoing Reflection: Stories of Robust Reflexivity

Sumaira Khan: Emotions, Unfolding Positionality, and Reflexive Dialogues

Natalie Araújo: Imperfect Answers to Unsettling Questions – When Tensions Escape Us in the Field

Catherine Trundle: Beyond Good Intentions

Questions to Encourage Robust and Critical Reflexivity

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

ORCID iDs

Funding

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

References