Thinking About Me: Reflexivity in science and qualitative research

  It is common practice for researcher to keep a journal or diary during the research process, regardless of discipline or methodology. These are sometimes called reflexive diaries, self-reflexive journals, research journals or research diaries. They are all basically the same thing – a written (or verbal) record written by the researcher during the research process, detailing what they did and why.   Lincoln and Guba (1982)

  Training researchers to use qualitative software and helping people who get stuck with Quirkos, I get to see a lot of people’s coding frameworks. Most of the time they are great, often they are fine but have too many codes, but sometimes they just seem to lack a little balance. In good quality quantitative research, you should see the researchers have adopted a ‘null hypothesis’ before they start the analysis. In

Reflexivity is a process (and it should be a continuing process) of reflecting on how the researcher could be influencing a research project. In a traditional positivist research paradigm, the researcher attempts to be a neutral influence on  research. They make rational and logical interpretations, and assume a ‘null hypothesis’, in which they expect all experiments to have no effect, and have no pre-defined concept of what