ABSTRACT
Many contemporary researchers, particularly qualitative, adhere to a notion of ‘trustworthiness’ to replace that of validity and reliability. Within this notion, the emphasis is on the refl exive process, which largely involves the extent to which the researcher has problematized their positionality in the research. My concern is that some of the refl exive accounts that address this question offer a kind of ‘positional piety’ in which either moral authority is claimed through an affi nity with subjects (such as working-class woman) or through a confessional declaration of difference and relative privilege (such as white middle-class man). While researcher refl exivity does indeed include attention to the biographies we bring to the research setting, I shall argue that we need an expansive view as to what we might mean by this.
