Goals

After reading this article, you will be able to do the following:

1. Identify how the researcher’s positionality is important to social research, including ethnographic interviews.
2. Reflect on and assess your own positionality and the way it relates to your specific research topic and ethnography in general.
3. Predict and evaluate how your own position will affect an interview and interview subject.
4. Create a positionality statement that addresses your own position in relation to your research subject, participants, and the research process.

Why the Interviewer Matters

You might be wondering why it matters who you are if your research focus is the informant, meaning the person who you are interviewing for ethnographic information? After all, they are the interview subject, and your job as the interviewer is just to get information about them, right? Well, not exactly. An interview, like any conversation, is a two-way street.

Your interaction style and qualities, such as your rapport with the informant, the vocabulary you use, your research purpose, and so on can influence your relationship with your informant and the information your informant gives you. This relationship that you build with your informant can also change—informants who were hesitant to speak at first can open up and become very valuable interviewees. The opposite is also true—an informant who is eager to participate at first can become quiet or even uncooperative if they aren’t comfortable or they don’t understand the interview’s purpose. You’ve probably experienced this if you’ve conducted interviews before, and it goes to show you how an interview’s success doesn’t just fall on the informant—it depends on the interviewer as well.

Coproduction

Sometimes, we think of research as objective: a detached process where it doesn’t matter who the researcher is and that their worldview or background doesn’t affect the information they get from their informant. In ethnography however, this is not true. It matters quite a bit what the interviewer as a person brings to the interview, both in positive and negative ways. Because certain biases get in the way of building understanding, you must be very aware of how you as an individual person influence your ethnographic research to ensure you get the positive outcomes you want. After all, in ethnography, the best interview results rely on coproduction—two-way communication between the interviewer and interviewee, which collaboratively brings out knowledge and ideas (Khanal, 2016).

The Researcher’s Position

This is why it matters for you as an ethnographer to think about your position. Position is all your particular background qualities, your identity, and your perspective, which influence the way you see the world—things that shed light on where you stand in the social world. These qualities include both fixed traits and traits that can change over time, such as your age, race, gender, ethnicity, political beliefs, economic class, and even education—all can impact your social worldview. While these qualities have an impact, they don’t control the way you see things, so it’s important not to make assumptions about someone’s political or social views based on parts of their identity like race or gender. However, all qualities do have an undeniable effect on the lens through which you see the world—helping to create an overall window through which you see and interpret things. This is your positionality.

The Reflexivity Principle

So, as ethnographic researchers, if we can’t help but be influenced by our positionality, yet we want to understand and share cultural views that are not their own, how can we address the biases, assumptions, and blind spots that we all have? The reflexivity principle tells us that the best thing to do is to be open, honest, and reflective about our positionality—to disclose these qualities to our research audience (Holmes, 2020).

Creating Your Own Positionality Statement

One way ethnographic researchers address potential personal biases is to create a positionality statement. This is usually a short statement, generally about one paragraph, that gives you the opportunity to identify your own background in a way that is relevant to the topic you’re studying.

When you first start thinking about your own background and situation, writing a positionality statement might seem difficult, inconvenient, or even awkward. This is extra work, after all, that doesn’t seem to be about your research topic. And for many students, it can be strange to talk about their own identity explicitly through lenses like race or gender or economic class. Remember, though, that you are asking your informants to open up in earnest and share with you their own complex and very personal worldviews and ideas about themselves and their culture. For the same reason, you as the interviewer—the other half in the ethnography equation—can help your audience and your informants by being open about yourself.

Your Positionality Statement’s Purpose

Actually, your positionality statement’s purpose is to provide more information about your research topic, because as discussed earlier, building new knowledge through ethnography is coproductive, and understanding your lenses will help your audience understand the subject that they are looking at through your perspective in your work.

The key is to be honest and sincerely reflective about who you are in relation to your project. Don’t be afraid to express yourself sincerely, and don’t be afraid that you will be judged for revealing who you are. Own your words and your reflection, which are themselves a part of your position (Quash, 2022). Use your own voice the way you would in a conversation about yourself with a professor, a classmate, or an informant. Let’s talk about the information to include in your positionality statement and then look at some examples.

What to Include in Your Positionality Statement

Include relevant information about how your position relates to the topic you’re studying. Think about what assumptions someone in your position is likely to make. And what ideas are you bringing to the conversation about this particular topic that others might not have? You will want to ask yourself what background elements connect with the issue you’re studying and how significant are those elements in how you think about yourself? These questions will help you identify what biases you might bring to your research (Abdelghaffar, n.d.).

Also, include information about how your position relates to the people involved in your research, especially when it comes to ethnographic interviews. How does your position relate to your informants? Is there something about how you view yourself or how other people view you that might affect your viewpoint towards your informants’ culture? How do you view your specific informants? Particularly important is how closely related or similar your culture is to your informant’s culture. Would you consider yourself a fellow insider to your informant’s culture? Are you a total outsider? Or, are you somewhere in between? How do you think this will affect the way you interview your informants and the way you interpret what they say?

Also, acknowledge how your position relates to the research process itself. This means that you recognize that your background will influence the way you conduct research. It will influence the ideas you have about the ethnography field or other research fields, and your background will influence the ideas you have about the research purpose and ideas you have about how research should be done.

As you can probably tell, these main positionality points will often intersect with each other, and they can often overlap. You don’t have to separate them or answer a discrete question set one at a time. Don’t think that you must follow a preset formula for your own positionality statement. Instead, take the time to reflect carefully and sincerely about how your position affects all these ideas. While you do want to include information about your relationship to the subject, the participants, and the research process, the way you include and talk about that information is up to you. After reflecting and outlining the ideas you think are most important to include, organize your positionality statement in the way that works best for you—write the information in a way that seems natural to you—and include anything else that you think is important for your statement.

Positionality Statement Examples

Here are a few straightforward positionality statement examples from students who are conducting ethnographic interview projects. As you read them, think about 1) whether the statements include the main ingredients that we discussed in this chapter, 2) where and how the students choose to include that information, and 3) whether you think the statements provide you with useful information about why the researcher matters to the project.

Conclusion

Although these two students have different backgrounds and biases, both show in their positionality statements that they have reflected earnestly on what their positionality is, where it comes from, and how it might affect the research they’re conducting. There isn’t one right way to write a positionality statement. As long as you’re honest and take the time to consider your lenses, your statement will help your audience to understand your research more fully.

Practice

• Remember that your age, race, gender, ethnicity, political beliefs, economic class, and education all have an impact on the way you see the social world. Make a list of all the qualities that you think affect the way you see the world, using the examples above as a springboard for ideas.
• Next, make a list of the qualities you think affect the way others see you, such as potential interviewees. How do you think these two lists might affect the research you complete as an ethnographer?
• Answering the previous questions in written form will give you an early positionality statement draft to reflect on. Return to the student examples above to see if they remind you of other ideas that might be useful to include in your own statement. Remember you don’t have to make your own statement sound like anyone else’s—it’s much better to sound natural and like yourself instead.
• Read your rough draft out loud to yourself and ask someone you trust to read it as well. Does it sound like your own sincere voice? Is there related information someone who doesn’t know you would be interested in knowing?

References

Abdelghaffar, A. (n.d.) Positionality statements: A learning technique for grounding and contextualization. Loyola University Chicago. https://www.luc.edu/fcip/anti-racistpedagogy/anti-racistpedagogyresources/positionalitystatement/

Holmes, A. (2020). Researcher positionality – A consideration of its influence and place in qualitative research – A new researcher guide. Shanlax International Journal of Education, 8(4), 1-10.

Khanal, T. (2016). Interview in ethnographic study: Issues and challenges. International Journal of Contemporary Applied Sciences, 3(4), 102-119.

Quash, T. (2022). Dismantling the writing and teaching of the positionality statement. The American University. https://edspace.american.edu/thectrlbeat/2022/08/09/dismantling-and-teaching-the-positionality-statement/