In this issue…A reader’s positionality

Abstract

Welcome to this issue of Qualitative Social Work. As a new addition to the editorial team, I have been pleasantly surprised by howmuch I have enjoyed crafting these “In this issue” pieces. Prior to taking on this role, my engagement with academic journals was primarily instrumental and focused on finding empirical or conceptual discussions directly relevant to my own areas of interest. Working as an assistant editor pushes me to carefully read a variety of studies outside my tiny little bubble. While contemplating how to distill the insights from these wonderful studies into concise and accessible summaries for our readers, I am prompted to constantly ask myself questions such as: Who am I as a social work researcher? What connections can I draw between these studies and my own? What are my personal intuitions, biases, and blind spots when attempting to glean insights from these articles? How have my understandings (or the lack thereof) in these various topical, conceptual, or methodological domains shaped my approaches to social work research? I realized that these are questions about positionality—my positionality, as a reader, when I try to engage in dialogue with the intellectual community. In her opening editorial, Lissette M. Piedra draws our attention to positionality—a widely discussed topic in qualitative research. However, Piedra presents a unique perspective on this matter by viewing positionality not simply as a reflexive assessment of potential researcher bias, but as a dynamic “analytical building block” internal to qualitative research process. She encourages us to explore how the researcher’s positionality directly influences their decisions throughout the research design and execution processes. Furthermore, she emphasizes that participants’ positionality also plays a crucial role in shaping their interactions with the researcher, a critical examination of which could enhance analyses of the studied phenomenon. We invite you, our readers, to actively bring your own positionality into dialogue with the 10 studies featured in this issue, since reading itself is an analytical process of integrating new ideas into your own systems of knowledge. This issue starts with two articles exploring the merits of two participatory research methodologies in social work. McGookin utilized photovoice as the primary data