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

Macbeth, Douglas. (2001). Qualitative Inquiry, 7 (1), 35-68.

According to Macbeth, reflexivity in qualitative research is a "deconstructive exercise for locating
the intersections of author, other, text, and world, and for penetrating the representational
exercise itself" (p. 35).

He finds contemporary expressions of reflexivity in cultural and radical relativism, which problematizes meaning and values as well as representation. Thus, he conceives relativism and reflexivity, intertwined in the crisis of objectivism and totalizing discourses, as a feature of a postmodern condition.

Macbeth categorizes reflexivity into three domains: positional, textual, and constitutive.

By positional reflexivity, he means self-referential analytic exercise that attempts to deconstruct the duality of power and antipower, hegemony and resistance, and insider and outsider. Macbeth notes that positional reflexivity becomes the very methods of qualitative methodology in particular in educational research, thus it "becomes an obliged topic, if not method", for qualitative researchers.

Macbeth finds the root of textual reflexivity in anthropology that threw skepticism on the correspondence between representation (ethnographic reports) and object (view and beliefs). In Macbeth’s treatment, textual reflexivity is a mode of writing that disrupts both the realist assumption of representation in text and the text itself by various devices and experiments. [Jay Ruby delves into this kind of reflexivity]

Lastly, Macbeth looks for reflexivity in an ethnomethodological sense. Harold Garfinkel, in his seminal work "Studies in Ethnomethodology" (1967), defined the term ethnomethodology as "the investigation of the rational properties of indexical expressions and other practical actions as contingent ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life" (p. 11). In other words, ethnomethodology is a study of ways in which people make sense of their everyday activities. Ethnomethodological reflexivity is an ordinary activity that constitutes "world making" (p. 49) and points to "the organization of ordinary sense and meaning...reflexively made of the social technologies for producing and detecting them" (p. 49). Macbeth states that for EM, reflexivity is far from professional or methodological senses. Rather it is the organization of routine grounds of everyday life.

For instance, in reviewing a videotape in a classroom, Macbeth recognizes that students become analysts in their choices in class and understanding of the sequential organizations through reflexive activities. They make sense of their environment and cohort it through reflexivity. Here reflexivity is inherent in people's action. Thus Macbeth writes about the reflexivity in EM mode: "A constitutive reflexivity thus has no use for nonreflexive worlds and makes no sense as a demarcation exercise" (p. 55).