ABSTRACT
In doing research of any kind, there is an implicit assumption that we are investigating something ‘outside’ ourselves, that the knowledge we seek cannot be gained solely or simply through introspection. This is true for both the social and natural sciences, although in the latter the separation of researcher and research object may appear both more self-evident and more readily attainable. On the other hand, we cannot research something with which we have no contact, from which we are completely isolated. All researchers are to some degree connected to, a part of, the object of their research. And, depending on the extent and nature of these connections, questions arise as to whether the results of research are artefacts of the researcher’s presence and inevitable influence on the research process. For these reasons, considerations of reflexivity are important for all forms of research. Although the connection between an astronomer and distant stellar events may seem very tenuous indeed, no more than an ability to observe secondary indications of such events by means of sophisticated extensions of human sensory equipment, even astronomers take account of their relationship to these occurrences, for example in discarding assumptions about simultaneity of observation and event. And in the realm of particle physics, questions about the effects of observers on their observations are of fundamental importance. If reflexivity is an issue for these most objective of sciences, then clearly it is of central importance for social research, where the connection between researcher and research setting – the social world – is clearly much closer and where the nature of research objects – as conscious and self-aware beings – make influences by the researcher and the research process on its outcome both more likely and less predictable. These issues are particularly central to the practice of ethnographic research where the relationship between researcher and researched is
typically even more intimate, long-term and multi-stranded, and the complexities introduced by the self-consciousness of the objects of research have even greater scope.
