Abstract
Drawing on a provocative metaphor from an award-winning novel, this article argues that reflexivity can be conceived as three gossamer walls through which researchers construct knowledge from within three sets of relationships, including relations with: oneself (and the ghosts that haunt us); with research participants; and with one’s readers, audiences, and epistemological communities. On the other side of a first gossamer wall are relations with our many selves as well as with ‘ghosts,’ deeply buried across time and space, that may come back to haunt us when we are physically and emotionally invested in our research. Behind a second gossamer wall are the multi-layered relations between researchers and research respondents, relationships that can involve oral, audible, physical, emotional, textual, embodied, as well as shifting theoretical and epistemological dimensions. Finally, a third gossamer wall lies between ourselves and our readers and audiences as well as the epistemological or epistemic communities wherein our work is located, read, reviewed, and received. Rooted in an ethnography of Canadian primary caregiving fathers, the article contributes to current discussions of reflexivity in qualitative research practice by expanding dominant understandings of reflexivity as a self-centered exercise towards a consideration of other critical relationships that are part of how we come to know and write about others. The metaphor of gossamer walls, combining the sheerness of gossamer and the solidity of walls, provides for creative ways of conceptualizing reflexivity in temporal and spatial terms as well as to consider the constantly shifting degrees of transparency and obscurity, connection and separation that recur in the multiple relations that constitute reflexive research and knowing.
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Notes
All names used in this article are pseudonyms.
While the Listening Guide was first developed over several years by Lyn Brown, Carol Gilligan and other researchers at the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (Brown et al. 1991; Brown and Gilligan 1992), it has been used, extended and adapted to diverse multi-disciplinary projects (i.e. Balan 2005; Brown 1998; Doucet 2006; Gilligan and Spencer 2003; Gilligan et al. 2005; Jack 1999; Mauthner 2002; Simmons 2002; Taylor et al. 1997; Tolman 2002; Way 1998).
I employed three other ‘readings’ of interview transcripts to the one detailed in this article. These included a second reading where I traced the ‘I’ or central protagonist within the narrative while a third and fourth readings drew the analysis out from the research subjects and their narratives to their nexus of social relationships and then even further into wider structural relations (see Mauthner and Doucet 1998, 2003; Doucet and Mauthner 2008; Doucet 2006). It is important to note that these readings are not entirely representative of how other researchers have used the Listening Guide but reflects the assumption that methods are not recipes that can be applied in uniform ways across projects (Law 2004, Charmaz 2006).
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Acknowledgements
For insightful critique and feedback I am grateful to four anonymous referees and to Javier Auyero; the Ph.D. students in the 2005–2006 tutorial at Carleton University ‘on knowing’ (Renuka Chaturvedi, Darryl Leroux, Tara Lyons, Lindsey McKay, Riva Soucie and Kevin Walby); and to Natasha Mauthner and Wallace Clement.
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Doucet, A. “From Her Side of the Gossamer Wall(s)”: Reflexivity and Relational Knowing. Qual Sociol 31, 73–87 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-007-9090-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-007-9090-9