ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how researchers continuously balance moments of insiderness and outsiderness while conducting qualitative research. It provides three cases that illustrate the researcher's fluid position. The cases originate from a research project that involved a wide-scale quantitative survey with extensive longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork with 90 youngsters of Chinese, Belgian, Moroccan, Polish and Turkish backgrounds in Belgium. Consequently, reflexivity of the researchers' position on the insider/outsider continuum is of key importance in qualitative methodologies. The examples provided in the chapter are based on interview data, field notes and reflexive accounts of three researchers, Edith Piqueray, Joris Michielsen and Rilke Mahieu. Within the research project, Edith was responsible for the ethnographic fieldwork with people of Polish backgrounds. Edith's research experience also clearly illustrates the role of language in affecting the position of the researcher in qualitative research projects with migrant populations. Traditionally, insiderness is perceived as being based on shared citizenship, ethnicity, language, religion, gender, socioeconomic class and/or cultural identity.
