On “Reflexivity” in Qualitative Research: Two Readings, and a Third

Reflexivity has become a signal topic in contemporary discussions of qualitative research, especially in educational studies. It shows two general inflections in the literature. Positional reflexivity leads the analyst to examine place, biography, self, and other to understand how they shape the analytic exercise. Textual reflexivity leads the analyst to examine and then disrupt the very exercise of textual representation. The purpose of this article is to develop a critical reading of contemporary formulations of reflexivity in the literature and then reintroduce an earlier discussion in social science, Garfinkel’s ethno-methodological “constitutive reflexivity.” The author suggests that postmodern attachments not withstanding, positional and textual reflexivities may have far more in common with Enlightenment certainties than is commonly allowed. As for constitutive reflexivity, a brief analysis of a videotaped sequence from a fifth-grade classroom is offered as an example of its alternative program and topics.

[1]  A. Mchoul,et al.  The organization of turns at formal talk in the classroom , 1978, Language in Society.

[2]  Dana H. Davidson,et al.  The ethics of polyvocal ethnography: empowering vs. textualizing children and teachers , 1990 .

[3]  James Clifford.  The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art , 1988 .

[4]  N. Denzin.  Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century , 1996 .

[5]  Deborah P. Britzman.  “The question of belief”: writing poststructural ethnography , 1995 .

[6]  Sketching With Derrida: An Ethnography of a Researcher/Erotic Dancer , 1998 .

[7]  S. Harding.  Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives , 1993 .

[8]  Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre,et al.  Writing: A method of inquiry. , 1994 .

[9]  C. West,et al.  ETHNOGRAPHY AND ORTHOGRAPHY , 1996 .

[10]  and G E Marcus,et al.  Ethnographies as Texts , 1982 .

[11]  Paul L. Jalbert.  Media Studies: Ethnomethodological Approaches , 1999 .

[12]  Yvonna S. Lincoln,et al.  Judging the quality of case study reports , 1990 .

[13]  G. Anderson.  Critical Ethnography in Education: Origins, Current Status, and New Directions , 1989 .

[14]  Michael Lynch,et al.  Art and artifact in laboratory science , 1985 .

[15]  Don H. Zimmerman,et al.  Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences , 1994 .

[16]  Derek Freeman,et al.  Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth , 1983 .

[17]  Nancy S. Struever.  The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences , 1989 .

[18]  Wolfgang Spohn.  On Certainty* , 2001 .

[19]  B. Malinowski,et al.  A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term , 1968, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term.

[20]  H. Garfinkel,et al.  Two incommensurable, asymmetrically alternate technologies of social analysis , 1992 .

[21]  E. Goffman.  Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience , 1974 .

[22]  Norman K. Denzin,et al.  Harold and Agnes: A Feminist Narrative Undoing , 1990 .

[23]  P. Reason,et al.  A Participatory Inquiry Paradigm , 1997 .

[24]  P. Bourdieu,et al.  实践与反思 : 反思社会学导引 = An invitation to reflexive sociology , 1994 .

[25]  Douglas Macbeth.  2. Classrooms as Installations: Direct Instruction in the Early Grades , 2000 .

[26]  James L. Heap.  Applied ethnomethodology: Looking for the local rationality of reading activities , 1990 .

[27]  Paul Rabinow,et al.  Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco , 1977 .

[28]  James L. Heap.  Understanding Classroom Events: A Critique of Durkin, with an Alternative , 1982 .

[29]  Patti Lather.  Drawing the line at angels: Working the ruins of feminist ethnography , 1997 .

[30]  Steven C. Ward.  Reconfiguring Truth: Postmodernism, Science Studies, and the Search for a New Model of Knowledge , 1996 .

[31]  Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and education: An overview , 1992 .

[32]  A. Parry.  Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science , 1996 .

[33]  P. McIlvenny.  Situated Order: Studies in the Social Organisation of Talk and Embodied Activities , 1995 .

[34]  David Bogen,et al.  The Spectacle of History: Speech, Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings , 1998 .

[35]  D. Macbeth,et al.  Classroom Encounters with the Unspeakable: "Do You See, Danelle?". , 1994 .

[36]  David Francis,et al.  Local educational order : ethnomethodological studies of knowledge in action , 2000 .

[37]  P. Healy,et al.  Learning the lessons. , 1996, Nursing standard (Royal College of Nursing (Great Britain) : 1987).

[38]  G. Beer.  The Observers Observed , 1990 .

[39]  David L. Altheide,et al.  Criteria for assessing interpretive validity in qualitative research. , 1994 .

[40]  J. Birks.  The end of innocence , 1991, Nature.

[41]  Harry F. Wolcott,et al.  Writing Up Qualitative Research , 1990 .

[42]  D. Macbeth,et al.  Qualitative Methods and the ‘Analytic Gaze:’ An Affirmation of Scientism? , 1998 .

[43]  Marek Czyżewski,et al.  Reflexivity of Actors Versus Reflexivity of Accounts , 1994 .

[44]  Bernard J. Frieden,et al.  Notes on Methodology , 2020, Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies.

[45]  S. Ball,et al.  Self‐doubt and soft data: social and technical trajectories in ethnographic fieldwork , 1990 .

[46]  Patti Lather,et al.  This issue: Situated pedagogies—Classroom practices in postmodern times , 1996 .

[47]  Rosanna Hertz.  Introduction: Ethics, reflexivity and voice , 1996 .

[48]  M. Lynch.  Against Reflexivity as an Academic Virtue and Source of Privileged Knowledge , 2000 .

[49]  D. Macbeth,et al.  Teacher authority as practical action , 1991 .

[50]  L. Richardson.  The Collective Story: Postmodernism and the Writing of Sociology , 1988 .

[51]  E. Schwartz,et al.  The quest for certainty. , 1959, A.M.A. archives of neurology and psychiatry.

[52]  H. Whitney.  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men … , 2006, Drug intelligence & clinical pharmacy.

[53]  Bruno Latour,et al.  The politics of explanation: An alternative , 1988 .

[54]  Patti Lather.  Issues of validity in openly ideological research: Between a rock and a soft place , 1986 .

[55]  B. Asher.  The Professional Vision , 1994 .

[56]  N. Denzin.  The art and politics of interpretation. , 1994 .

[57]  M. Fine.  Working the hyphens: Reinventing self and other in qualitative research. , 1994 .

[58]  S. Harding.  Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology : What is « Strong Objectivity? » , 1992 .

[59]  R. Platt.  Reflexivity, Recursion and Social Life: Elements for a Postmodern Sociology , 1989 .

[60]  Reflections on the Purposes of Human Inquiry , 1996 .

[61]  James Clifford,et al.  On Ethnographic Authority , 1983 .

[62]  Y. Lincoln.  Emerging Criteria for Quality in Qualitative and Interpretive Research , 1995 .

[63]  A. Oakley.  Interviewing Women: an contradiction in terms? , 2013 .

[64]  E. Durkheim,et al.  Rules of Sociological Method , 1964 .

[65]  Kate Lenzo.  Validity and Self-Reflexivity Meet Poststructuralism: Scientific Ethos and the Transgressive Self , 1995 .

[66]  Malcolm Ashmore,et al.  The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting Sociology of Scientific Knowledge , 1989 .

[67]  W. Whyte.  In Defense of Street Corner Society , 1992 .

[68]  Elenore Smith Bowen.  Return to Laughter , 1964 .

[69]  N. Goodman,et al.  Ways of Worldmaking , 1980 .

[70]  R. Mackay.  Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology , 1987 .

[71]  Eric Livingston,et al.  Making Sense of Ethnomethodology , 1987 .

[72]  Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre.  Nomadic inquiry in the smooth spaces of the field: A preface , 1997 .

[73]  J. Spencer.  Anthropology as a Kind of Writing , 1989 .

[74]  Michelle D. Young,et al.  Coloring Epistemologies: Are Our Research Epistemologies Racially Biased? , 1997 .

[75]  Martyn Hammersley,et al.  Ethnography : Principles in Practice , 1983 .

[76]  E. Schegloff,et al.  A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation , 1974 .

[77]  Harvey Sacks,et al.  Appendix B. On "Understanding" in the Analysis of Natural Conversation , 1988 .

[78]  H. Garfinkel.  Studies in Ethnomethodology , 1968 .

[79]  David Hamilton.  Adam Smith and the Moral Economy of the Classroom System , 1980 .

[80]  On Becoming Italian American: An Autobiography of an Ethnic Identity , 1998 .

[81]  Patricia Hill Collins,et al.  Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought , 1986 .

[82]  E. Mishler.  Representing Discourse: The Rhetoric of Transcription , 1991 .

[83]  M. Maynes,et al.  Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives , 1989 .

[84]  Richard D. Heyman.  Formulating topic in the classroom , 1986 .

[85]  D. Maynard,et al.  Good reasons for bad testing performance: The interactional substrate of educational exams , 1992 .

[86]  D. Haraway.  Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective , 1988 .

[87]  Aaron V. Cicourel,et al.  Language Use and School Performance , 1974 .

[88]  Howard S. Becker,et al.  Whose Side are we on , 1967 .

[89]  P. Lather,et al.  Troubling the angels: women living with HIV/AIDS. , 2018 .

[90]  Peter McLaren.  Collisions with otherness: “traveling” theory, post‐colonial criticism, and the politics of ethnographic practice the mission of the wounded ethnographer , 1992 .

[91]  L. Ellingson.  "Then You Know How I Feel": Empathy, Identification, and Reflexivity in Fieldwork , 1998 .

[92]  Larry Cuban.  Persistent Instruction: The High School Classroom, 1900-1980. , 1982 .

[93]  S. Villenas.  The Colonizer/Colonized Chicana Ethnographer: Identity, Marginalization, and Co-optation in the Field. , 1996 .

[94]  J. Derrida.  Writing and Difference , 1967 .

[95]  Eric Livingston.  An anthropology of reading , 1996 .

[96]  Paul Atkinson,et al.  The Textual Turn@@@Understanding Ethnographic Texts.@@@A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility. , 1993 .

[97]  Patti Lather,et al.  Troubling Clarity: The Politics of Accessible Language , 1996 .

[98]  Carolyn D. Baker,et al.  Ethnomethodological Studies of Talk in Educational Settings , 1997 .

[99]  G. Payne,et al.  Teaching the Class: the practical management of a cohort , 1980 .