The Notion of Reflexivity in Adopting an Ethnographic Perspective Research

This paper discusses the role of reflexivity in carrying out a qualitative based research. Qualitative based research is mainly an enterprise of knowledge construction. Thus, this active process involves reflection, examination, scrutiny and interrogation of the whole research process which includes the researcher, the research participants, the data and the context of research itself. Many researchers either indicate reflexivity in the various ways they write their research or by explicitly describing the self-reflexive analysis of the relationships between them and their research. One of the main contributions of reflexive practices in research, I believe, is in the “sharing” of these reflexive accounts by the researcher. This sharing contributes in bridging the gap between the abstract understanding of doing research and the actual practical details of the research process. Thus, this is the main purpose of this paper. I believe that making explicit a researcher’s reflexive accounts during the research processes will greatly benefit other researchers because this narrows the gap between theory and practice. This paper is based on the qualitative research I carried out for my doctoral study. In this paper, I explore reflexivity by focusing on issues related to the research process especially on power and ethnicity which were salient between the researcher and the participants under investigation. I particularly focus on how the similarities and the differences between myself, as the researcher, and the participants in my research affected the research process. This paper also highlights the notion that, reflexive process of the researcher is crucial in embracing the values and principles that underlie qualitative based research.