It could even be suggested that readers derive a greater benefit from seeing what has gone on “behind closed doors” than from learning the study’s results.
Tuval-Mashiach, R. (2017). Raising the curtain: The importance of transparency in qualitative research. Qualitative Psychology, 4(2), 126–138. https://doi.org/10.1037/qup0000062
When I read this quote now, I think about discussions about reflexivity in qualitative research more broadly and Applied Linguistics more narrowly: how oftentimes discussions of reflexivity dovetail from discussions of positionality, which more often highlight identities over activities. What I mean by that is researchers find it more urgent to account for variation and perceived power dynamics in the identity of the researcher and the identity of the participant rather than talking about research activity itself. Even though nowadays more discussions on reflexivity are trending towards this direction, I’m more intrigued by the role that transparency and reflexivity will play while viewing qualitative research through a literary lens. I have been on a fiction kick lately, and reading fiction gives me a different viewpoint on positionality, point of view, and reflexivity, particularly novels written in first person, where a reader not only needs to make sense of the events described by the author but also needs to make sense of the author’s interpretation of those events to make an evaluation on the narrator’s reliability. Yet to say that a novel has a reliable or an unreliable narrator is itself also a fall into post-positivist creep that presupposes an objective reality that one can document if one separates the interpretation from the bias. A different way to read fiction is to appreciate the account of the narrator as one that is rich, complex, and irreparably partial, separating one’s view of positionality as a bias-mitigating process and towards a storytelling perspective that is critical but not apologetic of the inevitability of perspective.
I’d argue many people lean on the partiality of perspective in spatial terms, negotiating the boundaries of what is within the realm of one’s awareness or knowledge and what exists beyond the bounds of one’s perspective. But time also plays a crucial role in the development of perspective. I’m currently starting my dissertation fieldwork, an ethnography of a multidisciplinary science policy graduate student organization, and even as I look at interview data thus far and begin to narrate tentative live discourse analysis, I don’t see just the partiality of my own authorial perspective but rather two partialities passing in the night yet colliding. In many examples, I ask a question and a participant launches into a story or an account of their experiences in science policy, in particular the meaning that they assign to those experiences. Many such conversations hinge on distinctions drawn between siloed academic spaces and relationship-building policy places, and as I listen to myself listening and reformulating what I hear, I tune in not necessarily to what I ascertain correctly or incorrectly but rather what I orient to in a participant’s account, sometimes even mistaking participants’ evaluations of their own account. I remember one time a PhD student in bioinformatics ended an account by evaluating its adequacy, saying that she wasn’t sure if she was answering my question and that she was dancing around something.
When I later reinvoke this image of dancing around an unspeakable thing, I self-interestedly link this to the meaning that she describes to the graduate student organization, when in reality what she really dances around is the catharsis she once felt talking about political uncertainties in late 2024 and early 2025, a sort of powerful awakening for early career STEM scholars who felt their research funding under more salient attack. Strikingly, despite my misappraisal of her account, she ultimately got the last word, finishing the reformulation of her account by saying that she does not know how to articulate something, a refusal that I then learn to accept. In this sense, I’m starting to treat interview data not as a participant-produced object to analyze, as a window to experience, as we often treat survey data, but rather as an interactional event where my participation necessarily shapes the movement and storytelling and sense-making produced not by the participant alone but by us together.
As a qualitative scholar with a literary problem, I bring authorship but not sole authority. Therefore, my current plan is to write a short discourse analysis of this case above and actually share it with participants, my conversation partners. I don’t aim to find a definitive closure in the hermeneutic circle, but rather aim to continue narrating scenes from the room behind closed doors, recognizing that, paradoxically, I carry authorial responsibility for my research while also recognizing that that authorship is always built through mutually co-constituted interaction and storytelling. My goal in sharing this brief interpretation with participants is not to produce a thumbs-down, thumbs-up member check, but to create a new floor for shared meaning-making, to reveal once-invisible doors so that activity beyond those doors can continue. Of course, there must be a stopping point. This is the tragedy of the Chinese character 文 (wén): an act of inscription, a fixation of meaning at one particular point in space and time. But that inscription need not be a final word. It is not a necessary stopping point. It is a stopping here for now because of external constraints, such as the need to finish a dissertation and graduate. It also can create the generative link in a chain of meaning, capable of colliding with the partial perspectives of scholars, scientists, or graduate students and restart the perspective-building all over again.
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