ABSTRACT
Concepts of reflexivity are common in the social sciences, and especially in contemporary qualitative research methodology. This chapter discusses the implications of reflexivity for social research and assessment. It examines the idea of the assessor as a participant in the social world, the ways in which there is mutual interaction - direct and indirect - between the person assessing a social situation and the persons being assessed, and what the implications of this are for social assessment. The chapter considers the ethics and politics of their structured situations, especially the ways in which service users are, or should be, involved in assessment, and the interaction between this and the responsibility for assessment outcomes, in view of the specific differences, biographies, social systems and powers which constrain and enable them. The aim of a critical auto/biography social research methodology is to provide a basis for social assessment which takes reflexive factors explicitly into account, but within a theoretical framework.
