Exploring Participant-centred Reflexivity in the Research Interview

Kathleen Riach. (2009). Sociology, 43(2), 356–370.

[Her participant-driven reflexivity compensates for researcher-oriented reflexivity that predominates massive literature.]

Riach remarks that reflexivity, which evolved primarily from feminist research, becomes a primary agenda in social science research concerning the construction of knowledge and power.

Criticizing the traditional interview method of tape recording followed by transcription, Riach introduces a new interview method based on interviewees' reflexivity. She contends, "a participant-centred reading of interview transcripts and consideration of personal biographies can be a source of participant-focussed reflexivity" (p. 357).

Riach develops the notion of reflexivity from Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, which seeks to escape from 'self-fascinated observation of the observer’s writings and feelings’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 72). Here the notion of epistemic reflexivity is developed where "the processes
of objectification we undertake as researchers become the focus of analysis itself" (p. 359).

Drawn from Bourdieu's conceptual work of reflexivity, Riach rejects reducing the notion of reflexivity to critical reflection, contending that "the notion of displacement opens up a more radical mode of reflexivity where not only may the individual reflect on the situation or positionality per se, but interrogate their own way of understanding that world, a mode of thinking that requires some form of epistemological interruption" (p. 360). Here displacement means "the potential to 'objectify' and distance ourselves from our own bodies whilst still being situated within them" (p. 360). In so doing, Riach asserts that reflexivity is in tune with Bourdieu's spectivism, "multiple perspectives that correspond to the multiplicity of coexisting, and sometimes directly competing, points of view" (Bourdieu et al., 1999: 3; p. 360).

Concerning ethical issues related to reflexivity, Riach writes that "reflexivity, along with social trends relating to feminism, diversity and multi-culturalism, has resulted in social science research becoming answerable to wider ethical or political debates, particularly in relation to the research interaction" (p.367). Within this context, she calls for integration of reflexivity into both theoretical commitments and analyses.