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This article discusses narrative practice and textile-making as two techniques of researcher reflexivity in diverse teams conducting qualitative-interpretive research. Specifically, it suggests definitional ceremonies—a collective structured method of storytelling and group resonances—as a useful tool to interweave diverse researchers as a team, wh...
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From a humanistic perspective, participatory processes in research find support on both ethical and moral grounds. In practical terms however, it is often difficult to establish protocols that best honour (i.e., elicit, capture, and integrate) the opinions of individuals and groups that represent the various specific stakeholders (e.g., from allied...
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... 3. For interpretivist forms of research, this could include a particular section on reflexivity (Fife & Gossner, 2024), where the researcher addresses how interpretive decisions about the outputs from AI tools could or did influence knowledge development from conceptualisation through to the processual and final stages of the project (Arias López et al., 2023;Berger, 2015). This section should include details to the extent of which AI tool was used for which task or activity, and how (Ngwenyama & Rowe, 2024)with baseline expectations that researchers are able to delineate whether their searches are returning data (articles) on the basis of content searching (ideas within an article) or metadata (keywords and authors). ...
Artificially intelligent (AI) tools hold significant potential for researchers during the processes of qualitative literature review. Beyond only literature retrieval, some AI tools describe their use-value as being able to appraise and synthesise contrasting evidence within and across papers; work like ‘Spotify’ to cultivate a personalised ecosystem of research articles that evolves via algorithmic learning; and suggest new directions for research based on existing evidence about a topic and an assessment of knowledge gaps. It is critical to explore how the emergence and evolution of tools which apply artificial intelligence might nuance processes and possibilities for qualitive thinking and knowledge development. Our manuscript engages with this critical challenge by using multi-layered forms of reasoning to develop a critical imagination for qualitative researchers integrating novel forms of AI into their literature review methodology. We outline the roles and functions of ten AI tools that identify their role in supporting researchers map, synthesise, and appraise knowledge – using the citation environment (i.e., Citation Tree, Semantic Scholar, Open Knowledge, Connected Papers, Inciteful), article content (i.e., Litmaps, VosViewer), and those suggested capable of assessing the literature to summarise key terrain or suggest next steps for inquiry (i.e., SciteAI, Elicit, Research Rabbit). We situate our critical imagination reflexively within the intellectual and lived histories which contour qualitative thinking and theorisation. We further elucidate how the evolving social construction of knowledge as a cultural good, in which AI tools and qualitative research/ers are both imbricated, requires a critical consciousness capable of illuminating how AI might nuance knowledge systems in which the interpretive work of qualitative research is also enfolded. From this juncture, we discuss ethical implications of the uncritical use of AI tools during review of literature and delineate essential reflexive responsibilities for researchers who integrate AI tools into their methodology for qualitative literature review.
... Data were collected using three techniques, namely observation, interviews, and document analysis. First, the technique of observation relates to collecting data by observing the object of research (Arias López et al., 2023;Svensson, 2024). In this study, observation involved observing the attitude and behavior of the principal in his leadership activities. ...
This paper explains the relationship between educational leadership and the strengthening of character education. One of the advances of the times is the development of technology, which has positive and negative impacts. One of the negative impacts is moral degradation among teenagers. This phenomenon compels educational institutions to strengthen character education. Therefore, this study sought to interpret how educational leadership strengthens school character education. A qualitative research method with phenomenological study approach was employed to investigate educational leadership at SMP (junior high school) Negeri Hindu 2 Sukawati. Data were collected through observation and interviews and supported by document analysis techniques. The research subjects as participants were the principal and nine teachers. Data analysis was conducted using the Moustakas model, assisted by qualitative data analysis software. Based on the existing findings, character education must be institutional, with school principals and teachers adopting an active role. This active role indicates that school principals and teachers are also responsible for strengthening character education. This is achieved through an exemplary attitude and behavior by principal and teachers, which leads to the internalization of values in character habituation among students. This attitude is essential to the Hindu-based leadership concept of Panca Sthiti Dharmaning Prabu. This research has the potential to increase the understanding of the importance of character education and to form part of a literature review for future research.
... Attending to aesthetic and embodied sensibilities (Ellingson, 2019), PNM asks researchers to reflexively engage with participants' stories, facilitating a process of deeper understanding, knowledge, and connection with research data (Lapum et al., 2015). Further, artmaking is a powerful analytic tool that has been employed to increase reflexivity and synergy among collaborative research teams effectively enhancing the rigor of findings (Arias López et al., 2021;Jellema et al., 2022;Kamlongera, 2023). Thus, to complement our textual analysis and facilitate a deeper knowing for ourselves and those who read this study, each author selected one participant book cover based on personal resonance (e.g., title and cover description) to illustrate by way of PNM as a further representation of a counter- narrative within each literary theme. ...
Guided by critical race theorizing (CRT) and arts-based methodologies (i.e., metaphor and pictorial narrative mapping [PNM]), the present study analyzed the healthcare (counter)narratives of 150 United States (U.S.) women of color (i.e., Black/African American, Hispanic/Latina, Native American/Alaska Native, and Multiracial) who have autoimmune disease. Sensitized by the metaphor of a library book, participants were asked to story their healthcare journey through identification of a title, chapters, genre, and book cover description (i.e., [Illness] Storybook Survey). Using critical thematic analysis, we first identified dominant and counter-narratives present in participant storybooks, categorized by literary supra-themes of characters (i.e., dominant narrative of me versus my body, counter-narratives of me versus the system and illness as lineal), plot (i.e., dominant narrative of a hero's journey, counter-narrative of chaos), and tone (i.e., dominant narrative of inspiration, counter-narratives of tangible self-help and humor). Next, guided by PNM, a data visualization technique, each author illustrated one counter-narrative within each literary supra-theme. Our analysis interrogates how participants' stories both reify and resist ideological and structural power at the intersections of their racial, gender, and illness identities. Collectively, this study offers unique contributions to critical, intersectional, and arts-based approaches to communication research, and forwards new methods for studying health narratives historically located in the margins.
... In interpretivist forms of qualitative research, reflexivity is a companion to trustworthiness that involves the researcher analyzing and critically challenging their own influence on the research process from study conceptualization throughout the final stages of the project (Arias López et al., 2023;Berger, 2015). As reflexivity involves becoming aware of the influence of previous understanding on the present project, it is closely aligned with theory selection and operationalization in DQA (Gilgun, 2013(Gilgun, , 2019. ...
Although qualitative research is often equated with inductive analysis, researchers may also use deductive qualitative approaches for certain types of research questions and purposes. Deductive qualitative research allows researchers to use existing theory to examine meanings, processes, and narratives of interpersonal and intrapersonal phenomena. Deductive qualitative analysis (DQA; Gilgun, 2005, 2019) is one form of deductive qualitative research that is suited to theory application, testing, and refinement. Within DQA, researchers combine deductive and inductive analysis to examine supporting, contradicting, refining, and expanding evidence for the theory or conceptual model being examined, resulting in a theory that better fits the present sample and accounts for increased diversity in the phenomenon being studied. This paper acts as a primer on DQA and presents two worked examples of DQA studies. Our discussion focuses on the five primary components of DQA: selecting a research question and guiding theory, operationalizing theory, collecting a purposive sample, coding and analyzing data, and theorizing. We highlight different ways of operationalizing theory as sensitizing constructs or as working hypotheses and discuss common pitfalls in theory operationalization. We divide the coding and analyzing process into two sections for parsimony: early analysis, focused on familiarity with the data, code generation, and identification of negative cases, and middle analysis, focused on developing a thorough understanding of evidence related to the guiding theory and negative cases that depart from the guiding theory. Theorizing occurs throughout as researchers consider ways in which the theory being examined is supported, refuted, refined, or expanded. We also discuss strengths and limitations of DQA and potential difficulties researchers may experience when utilizing this methodology.
... We recognized this would be a critical and challenging step due to our varied positionalities. As stated in Arias López et al. (2023), we had to address the question of how to do collaborative research when, geopolitically and socially, team members came from "evidently asymmetric contexts and positions of privilege" (p, 6). ...
This methodology paper introduces a collective, team-based approach to constructing narratives in narrative research. The goal of the larger study was to explore the pedagogical belief and practices of engineering faculty members. The newly formed team of researchers ranged from novices to experts in the field of qualitative research, and this space created a unique opportunity to reflect on and explore the co-construction of Cody’s narrative, the first narrative that the team constructed. The narrative was smoothed and constructed in a way that reduces some of the limitations inherent in narrative smoothing, through a deliberate and intentional negotiation process. We hope that this deeper exploration of our methods is helpful for other narrative researchers who are interested in team-based approaches to co-construction of narratives.
... In STS and social science research more widely, reflexivity has held a place as a central concern (Ashmore, 2015), an ethical and methodological virtue (Steen, 2013) and 'something to be practised daily' (Felt et al., 2017, p. 22). It has provided a way to position the researcher in relation to the social context of the study and to the power and differences embedded in research encounters with people and communities (Arias López et al., 2021;Holland et al., 2010). Reflexivity has informed planning and anticipation of engagement and has occurred in 'ethically important moments' (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004) as a navigational tool for ethical praxis in diverse stages of research, from researchers' self-scrutiny to representation (Hesse-Biber & Piatelli, 2012). ...
This chapter contributes to the theorisation of ‘careful engagement’ by exploring the affordances of the notion and praxis of response-ability for thinking about our engagements with the worlds of our enquiry. The present work stems from the recent upsurge of feminist new materialist and posthuman approaches that have spurred the reimagination of the ethics and politics of knowledge production and the rethinking of questions such as how we understand our role in shaping the world and with whom and what (else) we are engaging. These questions are underpinned by the understanding that knowing is a material doing with ethicality and care at its marrow. Inspired by this idea, this chapter employs the notion of response-ability to consider the ethics and politics of engagement in the authors’ participatory research and development process. Returning to their efforts to engage well and with reflexive sensitivity—and to articulate this effort as they have done over the years—the authors draw on response-ability to better capture the intricacies and trouble at stake in enacting and embodying care in their engaged practice. With the help of response-ability, the chapter brings forth the layers of careful engagement that become unveiled when the focus is shifted from the autonomous, reflexively aware researcher to the intra-active dynamisms of the world. For careful engagement, slowing down with this unfolds as a matter of attentive curiosity, responsiveness and commitment to stay with the trouble of the complexities of engaging in and as part of the world.
... This was even though the team members had their own personal insights and professional-academic knowledge about the arbitrariness with which young Colombians had often ended up in one or another armed group, be it through forced recruitment, for economic or self-protection reasons, or based on family, friendship, or romantic ties. Re ecting on such assumptions and biases in a processual and, where applicable, collective way (in a research team) is a prerequisite of con ictrelated eldwork (Arias López et al., 2021). ...
This chapter draws on the authors’ experiences of conducting fieldwork with a peace community in the Philippines and with former guerrilla fighters in Colombia, to unpack some of the major challenges of doing fieldwork with conflict-affected communities and (former) armed actors in areas of violent conflict and limited state authority. Guided by the notions of control, confusion, and failure, it discusses requirements of interviews and ethnographic observation in such contexts, raises ethical questions, and explores emotional issues relating to the role of empathy, seduction, and friendship. Examples from the authors’ own fieldwork experiences are used to illustrate core points. The chapter equips its readers with central questions fieldworkers in areas of violent conflict and limited state authority need to be prepared to answer in order to conduct ethical research that safeguards themselves, their collaborators, the research participants, and their wider communities, while also shedding light on the inevitable messiness of social-scientific fieldwork in practice.
... De este modo, la textilización no es solo un instrumento práctico innovador por medio del cual diferentes tradiciones de investigación dentro de las RRII pueden cultivar formas no propositivas de conocimiento, sino que también puede unir estas nuevas ideas con el conocimiento proposicional que ha sido tradicionalmente privilegiado por las RRII y entrelazar la teoría y la práctica dentro del ámbito académico de las RRII. Andrä, Christine et al. (2023) Textiling World Politics: Towards an extended epistemology, methodology, and ontology. Global Studies Quarterly , https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksad059 ...
... She grounded these metaphors not only in interviews with transitional justice practitioners in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia but also in her own material engagement with spinning, weaving, and stitching ( Santos 2021 ). Berit and Christine were among the co-curators of Stitched Voices , an exhibition of conflict textiles on display at Aberystwyth Arts Centre in 2017 ( Andrä et al. 2020 ), 4 and were part of a collaborative research project with Colombian colleagues that employed textile methods, especially embroidery and appliqué, to explore the changing subjectivities of former guerrilla fighters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the Colombian peace process and to conduct their own researcher reflexivity ( Arias López et al. 2020, 2023Andrä 2022b ). 5 In her work on cosmopraxis and relational cosmology, Amaya focused on textiles as other-than-human actors/beings and on textiling as ancestral language and decolonial practice. In particular, she used weaving as "a key metaphor of entanglement and interconnection, but also as a concrete practice that embodies the principles of cosmopraxis " ( Tickner and Querejazu 2021 , 391;cf. ...
This article argues that textiling—a particular kind of making that simultaneously constitutes a concept, a metaphor, and a practice—can facilitate a radical rethinking and redoing of the study of world politics. Specifically, we suggest three ways in which textiling, and the relationality it enables, facilitates this innovation: as a different way of theorizing in the discipline of international relations (IR), as a creative method and methodology for the empirical study of world politics, and as ontological world-making through cosmopraxis. These three ways open up possibilities of engaging the world and its politics differently by enabling an extended epistemology that accounts not only for propositional (abstract and textual) knowledge, but also for experiential, presentational, and practical ways of knowing. Thereby, textiling is not only an innovative practical instrument by means of which different research traditions within IR can cultivate non-propositional ways of knowing; it can also entangle these new insights with the propositional knowledge traditionally privileged by IR and interweave theory and practice in IR scholarship.
... Consequently, this creative process engenders personal reflections on the personal narratives being woven into the fabrics (Pérez-Bustos, 2021). One can perceive this as a device for thinking with and for generating various forms of expression (Arias-López et al., 2023). ...
In this paper, we examine the methodological possibilities of working with personal textile objects, such as clothes in need of mending, beloved personal blankets, and knotted rag dolls. Our focus is on a transdisciplinary project that sought to collectively explore how the bodies of professionals working for the Colombian Transitional Justice System are affected when engaging with narratives of war and conflict. We contend that textile making in this context serves a dual methodological purpose when facilitating spaces of careful research. Firstly, this material practice enables participants to pause and immerse themselves in their own experiences, something that in turn is generative of personal reflections. Secondly, the created objects become appreciation devices capable of documenting and eliciting memories that continually engage participants and researchers in new inquiries. Consequently, this paper contributes to the understanding of object-oriented methodologies as inherently relational and situated. Moreover, it aims to comprehend textile making practices as capable of unfolding care as a research practice.
... In autoethnographic research, reflexivity necessitates serious deliberation on the self, location/s, and culture where the researcher is cautiously exploring relationships to enrich the sense-making (Bochner & Ellis, 2016). The more dominant use of reflexive practice can be found in interpretive methodologies of autoethnography, ethnography, case study, and action research with practices of reflexive journaling, narrative records, and learning conversations by the researcher and participants (Arias López et al., 2021;Haynes, 2018;Watt, 2007). Reflexivity has challenges of representation ontologically (Maclean et al., 2012) with complexities and complications in how qualitative research is framed and communicated (Linabary et al., 2021). ...
... Like the detective analogy it is about "questioning what we, and others, might be taking for grantedwhat is being said and not said -and examining the impact this has or might have" (Cunliffe, 2016, p. 740). How to be reflexive involves humility (Alvesson and Sandberg, 2014;Arias López et al., 2021), critical examination, and the challenging of assumptions (Guba, 1981), impacts (intended and unintended), decisions, and interactions (Guba, 1981;Barbosa Neves et al., 2021). In the vignettes, reflexivity was evident at varying levels with awareness of being "more self-conscious about claims of authorship, authority, truth, validity, and reliability" as well as "some of the complex political/ideological agendas hidden in our writing" (Richardson, 2000a, pp. ...
In this autoethnographic exploration, we engage in a dialogic investigation to examine how templating and crystallization shape rigor in qualitative research. The use of templates in qualitative research has been widely used as a means of enhancing rigor in organizational research design yet comes with caveats especially when wanting to push boundaries. With the interplay of templates and crystallization, the researcher is encouraged to apply iterative and reflexive modes. The aim here is to inspire and invite researchers to pursue the multiplicity offered by qualitative methodologies and expand the discipline through authentic, trustworthy, and credible approaches. To explore the development of rigor we reflect on five narrative vignettes to abductively review the interplay of templating and crystallization within our academic experiences. The autoethnographic lens provided the scope to engage in our discourse, and practices and to question our emerging insights in pursuit of informed understandings. Whilst the focus is limited, we bring an organizational research view that highlights some of the challenges of the discipline. Three themes that we term tenets – purpose, reflexivity, and transparency – were key in the interplay of templates and the appreciation of crystallization. We found that utilizing a template is a valuable starting point for structure or direction, but the researcher must move beyond to find purpose, extend knowledge, and advance thinking. Transparency is essential to evidence the rigor, authenticity, and transferability of findings. This autoethnographic exploration adds value to the body of qualitative research as we call for rigor especially when there is a tendency for overuse or misuse of templates. To be clear, crystallization is not about doing as you please, but fostering rigor to encourage new ways of sense-making.
