When you first started postgraduate study, someone probably told you that you had to be reflexive. You may even have been told to include a section on reflexivity in your thesis. No, you don’t have to have a specific section called reflexivity in your thesis. But you probably do need to say something about it. That’s  because everyone doing research is expected to be reflexive, whether or not it ends up as a heading or sub-heading. 

First things first. It’s important to understand that reflexivity is not the same as reflection. They are sometimes confused and that’s understandable. The two words sound alike and they are often used in conversation as if they mean the same thing. Alas. They don’t. So let me try to pull them apart.

What is reflection? Reflection is looking back on something you have done and thinking seriously about it. The classic version of reflection comes from professional learning. Donald Schön wrote about the reflective practitioner –  the lecturer, teacher or nurse or social worker who thinks in and on their practice and uses the thinking to get better at it. You do something, you stop, you ask how it went, you work out what you would change next time. Reflective journals, learning logs and writing after a placement all sit here. 

Reflection is of course really useful. But the key thing to note is that reflection is related to experience. The object of your attention, the thing you are reflecting on, is what happened and what you can learn from it.

Reflexivity is something else. Reflexivity points back at you, the person doing the research, and at the conditions under which you are making knowledge. The researcher is not a neutral all-seeing eye floating above the field. You occupy a position. You have a history, a class trajectory, a disciplinary training, a stake in what you research and write. All of that shapes what you can see and say and what you can’t.

Part of being reflexive is tracing what has shaped how you see. Your life is important. Where you grew up, what you did for work, the schooling you had or wish you had –  all of this feeds into what you notice and what you take for granted. The scholarship you were trained in gave you a vocabulary, key concepts and a set of problems worth caring about. It gave you some key authors who have strongly influenced how you think and what you do. Your research education also pointed you to what counts as a sensible question. But none of these influences disqualify you from research or from analysing data. Being reflexive means knowing what all these influential things are, and how they might shape and steer how you understand your research. 

Reflexivity can be uncomfortable.  Being reflexive means asking hard questions. Such as asking yourself whether you are doing the very thing you have critiqued, the very thing you stand against. Yep. Being reflexive means that we routinely stop looking at others and look at ourselves instead – we ask how our own research might be adding to the very problem we set out to investigate. For example, we say are ethical researchers and then we ask people who are already stretched to give us their time, and we record it clinically, we call it data. We write about slow scholarship while building hyper-productive careers on the strength of it. The new terms we coin advance us in the field and do little for the people the labels get applied to. 

Asking ourselves reflexive questions about our own research practices rarely produces neat and tidy answers. The answers to our reflexive questions may mean we have to take particular care with aspects of our research or build in checks and critical readers. Being reflexive is also partly about our willingness to sit with discomfort and mess rather than tidy it away.

But, and this is a big but. A lot of what gets filed under reflexivity is confessional. “I felt nervous in my first interview.” “It was strange going back to my old workplace.” These are heading towards reflections. They tell us something about experience and your feelings. They don’t go on to think about what caused those feelings and what might be done to deal with them. What these kinds of statements don’t do is examine how your position shaped the knowledge you produced in that interview or workplace. 

Take the researcher going back to a university where they used to teach. Their reflective note says it felt odd to be on the other side of the lecture theatre. Reflexive questions would be different. What does their insider knowledge let them see that an outsider would miss, and what does it stop them seeing because they take it as normal? Why might lecturers tell a former colleague things they would not tell a stranger, and what might be held back precisely because they are one of them? Those questions are reflexive – they are about how the knowledge got made, not about how the researcher felt while making it and what they might do to become more confident.

Reflexivity is hard to bolt on at the end of a piece of writing in the same way that you might write a reflection. Reflexivity runs through the whole research and writing project. Who you are and what has formed you shapes the questions you thought to ask, the people who agreed to talk to you, what they said, what you noticed in the data and what slid past you. But being reflexive is not about confessing your biases and apologising for them. You are giving an account of the position this particular knowledge was generated from, so that you, and your reader, can weigh it up and address it if necessary.

In sum. Reflection helps you get better at what you do. Reflexivity helps make clear how your research came to know what it claims to know. You do not need a section heading to do that work. You need it whatever, and whenever, you are researching and writing.

Photo by José M. Reyes on Unsplash