ABSTRACT
Any critical study worth its salt, CDA and CMS agree, should also be selfcritical, refl ecting on what it does, why, and how; with the researcher asking whether they might have gone about things differently and if so, what advantages and drawbacks the chosen route had. For obvious reasons, refl exivity is easier to call for in programmatic statements of research philosophy than to pull off in real projects. There is a danger that what started out as a self-effacing theoretical exercise may lead to the researcher conniving in his or her own destruction, even if all that the critique reveals is that alternative approaches would have led to different problems rather than fewer. However, it is only by consciously facing up to this risk that choices made along the way can be properly evaluated. Certain views open up only when you put your head above the parapet. On the other hand, one ought to be forgiven for wanting to exercise caution in doing so. As Baker so aptly observes (2006, 11), “we need to be aware that our research is constructed, but we shouldn’t deconstruct it out of existence”.
