Positionality—An analytical building block

The most resonant aspect of qualitative inquiry for me has always been its utter humanness—messy and context-driven. Moral judgment of right and wrong disappears; insight prevails. When done well, qualitative methods transcend our limited, biased understandings and generate profound insights on the human condition unobtainable through other approaches. Among such processes, reflexive attention to one’s social position is foundational for a qualitative study, but while we recognize it as important, we tend not to think of such attention as an analytic tool. Arguably, for the astute qualitative researcher, the heart of Dunbar, Rodriguez, and Parker’s direction depends on acknowledging and—to use Forrest Stuart’s term—embracing our positionality (Stuart, 2017). In this essay, I revisit the concept of positionality—that of the researcher and the participants—and how it can be leveraged to reveal aspects of the lived experience that might otherwise remain hidden, a process which includes accepting the transgressive role of researcher (Stuart, 2017) and actively searching for information that disconfirms working theories and hypotheses (Gilgun, 2006, 2015). In doing so, I demonstrate how both researchers’ and respondents’ positionality can be used to enhance the rigor of qualitative research.