Abstract
This essay explores social science researchers with ‘insider status’. This term describes a researcher who is a member of the population they are studying. The research in question involved a birth mother studying the impact of compulsory child adoption on birth mothers. Research that grows from traumatic experiences may involve a researcher revisiting painful memories through her interactions with participants. She may hold unconscious biases and preconceptions. If not exposed or addressed, this raises ethical implications and can negatively affect the reliability of the findings. Personally motivated research can be validated with the use of reflexivity. Often used in feminist methodology, it demands that the researcher examines her own feelings, reactions, and motives, and how these influence the interactions with participants, the analysis and findings. This essay shows how these philosophies behind reflexivity operate in practice. By reflexively aligning my own personal journey alongside birth mothers’ narrative, I was able to recognise and validate the role of myself in my research. This allowed me to face up to and challenge my biases and to avoid hierarchy that commonly exists between researcher and participants. For me this process went beyond simply being ethical practice, opening up opportunities for both creative and personal transformations.
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Notes
Before the study commenced, ethical approval was obtained in accordance with the University of Plymouth Research Ethics Policy, see https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/governance/research-ethics-policy. Accessed 24 October 2021.
Excerpt from interview with Karen. ‘Karen’ was a pseudonym so that the birth mother’s identity was protected in accordance with the Plymouth Research Ethics Policy and research with vulnerable subjects.
Stigma was defined by Erving Goffman (1963, 9–13) as “the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance” and “an attribute that is deeply discrediting, something unusual or bad about the moral status of the person”.
All of the participants’ names and personal information was removed from the transcripts in accordance with the Plymouth Research Ethics Policy. They were identified by way of numbers and in the finished work were given pseudonyms that were not connected to their identities.
Excerpts from my reflexive journal were included as appendices in the published study to allow the reader to access the reflexive process (Deblasio 2018).
Verbatim responses are a valid method of presenting data in the text where the intention is to avoid reducing responses down to numerically coded categories.
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Deblasio, L. Using Reflexivity as a Tool to Validate Feminist Research Based on Personal Trauma. Fem Leg Stud 30, 355–365 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-022-09487-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-022-09487-5