Reflexive Practice and my new book (ICYMI)

My book Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone: An Essential Toolkit is to be published by Policy Press in March.

One of the things I discuss in Chapter 2 is what Michaela Benson and I call reflexive practice (see our Open Access article, below).

First, we use the concept of reflexive practice to emphasise that being reflexive is a process not a one-off act. It is not reflecting or looking back, it is looking back and forward, and thinking and acting.

So, a bit of reflection on how you might have affected your study stuck in at the end of a report or article is not being reflexive. Nor is a bit of self-reflection on how you might affect your study.

Reflexive practice is active, adaptive, collaborative, responsible, iterative, engaged, agile, and creative.

It is based on a simple understanding that every single one of us – researchers and otherwise – makes decisions about the actions we take through reflexive action, through looking, considering, thinking, imagining, and planning. That is social life.

If we accept that, then we have to accept that during research we are all being reflexive beings. But this does not mean we should try to clean ourselves out of our research. Positivist approaches that attempt to be objective through standardisation, inflexibility, or fixed hypotheses, merely reproduce the misunderstandings that both researchers and participants brought to the interaction.

Instead, we have to think about how who we are (our positionality) might and does affect our relationships throughout the research (our positioning).

Reflexive practice involves reflexive positioning: being aware of your, and your participants’, attributes or positions in an ongoing way continually reflecting on how such attributes shape the interaction during the interview, focus group, ethnography or whatever. Who we are can be an attribute, a strength, or a limitation, at different times with different people.

Reflexive practice involves reflexive navigating: working reflexively – through constant and conscious changes, developments, and responses – as our research shapeshifts in real time. It involves navigating our relationship with the research reflexively. It is acting reflexively, learning and adapting as we go. Who we are and how we relate to others (even what we talk about with whom) is not fixed for all time; we can be dynamic and agile.

Reflexive practice involves reflexive interpreting: this involves an awareness of our role in the interpretation of ‘data’ and that such interpretations of the social world are made through and informed by our engagement with it. It recognises that we in turn are shaping the social world that we are part of, while the social world and the individuals within it are also adapting to and negotiating changes and developments.

Reflexive interpreting requires us to intellectually tune in to the ebbs and flows of daily social life for all human individuals engaged in it, to eschew static and superficial interpretations and representations.

Reflective journaling is a great aid to reflexive practice. Here I use the word reflective consciously. You are going to have to read the book for a bit more on this, and for how to include reflexive practice in your analysis and writing.

Benson, M. and O’Reilly, K. (2020) Reflexive Practice in Live Sociology: Lessons fromresearching Brexit in the lives of British Citizens living in the EU-27, QualitativeResearch