Reflexivity
The practice of critically examining how a researcher's background, assumptions, and choices shape the research process and its findings.
Reflexivity is the ongoing practice of examining how you, as the researcher, influence your research. It involves considering how your background, beliefs, relationships with participants, and analytic choices shape what data you collect and how you interpret it. Rather than claiming to eliminate this influence, reflexive researchers make it visible, often through reflective journals or memos kept throughout the project. In interpretive traditions it is treated as central to quality, not an optional extra.
In a thesis, reflexivity is expected in most qualitative work. A short positionality statement in the methodology chapter, plus honest discussion of how your perspective may have shaped recruitment, interviews, and coding, strengthens rather than weakens your credibility. Examiners read it as evidence that you understand interpretation is never neutral.
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