Personal pasts become academic presents: engaging reflexivity and considering dual insider/outsider roles in physical cultural fieldwork
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When conducting qualitative research, researchers tend to find themselves closely connected to the participants in the field. This paper examines the complexities that existed for two researchers during time in the field conducting research closely related to their lived histories. Specifically, we consider the complicated dual role of insider/outsider that some researchers may occupy during field work when they ‘return home’ to a specific space or population that they did, or do, consider themselves to be a part of in order to conduct research. Through the use of vignettes, we detail the tensions that arose during the research process, discussing topics with which they were intimately connected. Additionally, this paper calls attention to important methodological concerns, considering the personal and public relationships at work in insider/outsider research, and examining the acute importance of reflexivity when the work requires a researcher to exist simultaneously as an insider/outsider. Our aim is to discuss the important, but complicated role of reflexivity as it is intricately woven into the field work, analysis, and personal process of research, specifically when the researcher is attempting to balance the roles of both insider and outsider perspectives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.111 | 0.103 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".