Qualitative research doesn’t pretend the researcher is a neutral instrument — who you are shapes what people tell you, what you notice in the data, and how you interpret it. Reflexivity is the practice of examining that influence deliberately, rather than leaving it unexamined. This guide covers what reflexivity actually involves, how positionality fits into it, and a genuine debate in the field about whether writing a reflexivity statement actually does what researchers hope it does.
What reflexivity actually is
Reflexivity is a continuous practice of examining how a researcher’s identity, assumptions, and context shape every stage of a study — not just data collection, but the questions asked, what gets coded as significant, and how findings get interpreted (Berger, 2015; Olmos-Vega, Stalmeijer, Varpio, & Kahlke, 2022; Ademolu, 2023). It’s easy to reduce this to “acknowledge your bias in a paragraph,” but the more substantive version of the practice runs throughout a project: noticing, during data collection, when a participant seems to be answering differently because of who’s asking; revisiting early coding decisions once the researcher recognizes their own assumptions shaping them; and being explicit, in the write-up, about the interpretive choices that were made and why.
Positionality: insider, outsider, and the space between
Positionality refers specifically to where a researcher stands in relation to the people and phenomenon being studied — shared identity and experience, or distance from it. Neither position is automatically better. An insider researcher studying their own community may build trust and access faster, but risks assuming shared meaning that isn’t actually there. An outsider may see patterns an insider takes for granted, but can miss context or struggle to build the same trust.
The insider/outsider line is also less fixed than it sounds. One study of reflexivity in cross-cultural research describes a researcher who shared national and ethnic background with participants but was still positioned as an outsider along other lines — class, migration status, education — showing that “insider” and “outsider” aren’t a single switch but several overlapping dimensions that can pull in different directions within the same study (Ademolu, 2023).
The real debate: does a reflexivity statement actually work?
Reflexivity, done well throughout a study, is broadly associated with improved plausibility and trustworthiness of qualitative findings. But there’s a genuine, more skeptical strand in the methodological literature worth knowing about: a reflexivity statement written once, often near the end of a paper, is increasingly questioned as an adequate tool for actually controlling researcher bias (Berger, 2015; Olmos-Vega et al., 2022; Savolainen, Casey, McBrayer, & Schwerdtle, 2023). The concern isn’t that reflexivity is pointless — it’s that a short, retrospective statement can function as a box-ticking gesture that signals awareness without actually changing how the analysis was done.
The practical implication is where reflexivity happens matters as much as whether it happens. A single paragraph in the discussion section is weaker evidence of genuine reflexive practice than visible signs of it running through the study — memos written during data collection about the researcher’s own reactions, documented moments where an initial interpretation was revised, or explicit discussion of specific decisions the researcher’s position plausibly shaped.
Making reflexivity visible in a project
In practice, this means treating reflexivity as something to document as you go, not reconstruct afterward: keeping researcher memos alongside your coded data, noting moments where your own reaction to a participant’s answer might be shaping how you’re coding it, and being specific in the methods section about concrete decisions your positionality plausibly influenced — not just a general acknowledgment that positionality exists.
Reflexive memos in Byleron QDA: memos attach directly to the segment or code they’re about, so a note like “noticed I coded this differently than a similar quote earlier — my own assumption about X may be showing” stays exactly where it happened in the analysis, not in a separate journal disconnected from the data it’s about.
References
- Ademolu, E. (2023). Birds of a feather (don’t always) flock together: Critical reflexivity of ‘Outsiderness’ as an ‘Insider’ doing qualitative research with one’s ‘Own People’. Qualitative Research, 24, 344–366. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941221149596
- Berger, R. (2015). Now I see it, now I don’t: researcher’s position and reflexivity in qualitative research. Qualitative Research, 15, 219–234. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794112468475
- Olmos-Vega, F., Stalmeijer, R., Varpio, L., & Kahlke, R. (2022). A practical guide to reflexivity in qualitative research: AMEE Guide No. 149. Medical Teacher, 45, 241–251. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159x.2022.2057287
- Savolainen, J., Casey, P. J., McBrayer, J. P., & Schwerdtle, P. (2023). Positionality and Its Problems: Questioning the Value of Reflexivity Statements in Research. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18, 1331–1338. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221144988