Being an outsider on the inside, or an insider on the outside: Betwixt and between.

Conference: 4th Annual Qualitative Research Symposium

Dates: 31 January 2018

Abstract:

How do we belong? 31 January 2018, University of Bath LACEY, ANDREA (Session 4B) Bournemouth University Being an outsider on the inside, or an insider on the outside: Betwixt and between.

I am a Doctor of Professional Practice student at a university in the south of England. This paper provides a narrative account of my personal journey trying to understand and identify my positionality within qualitative research. This on-going and reflexive process pre-dates the start of my doctoral journey and will continue long after it finishes as I engage with further qualitative research.

When I started my doctoral studies I was already working as a lecturer at the same university and was a member of the mental health nursing team where I was a personal tutor for two groups of mental health student nurses. I am a psychologist and not a nurse and I was concerned that I did not have the knowledge to help prepare these students for their first mental health practice placement. This was the key motivator for my research study. My research is an exploration of the accounts of mental health student nurses’ first mental health practice placement to identify whether they can be more fully prepared in readiness for their first placement.

My research took the form of an interpretivist, relativist and constructivist narrative inquiry that made use of focus groups prior to the students going to their first placement and diaries the students compiled whilst they were at their placement. These diaries acted as cues for face to face interviews following placement.

At the outset of my doctorate I adopted a reflexive approach of my positionality in the study, Naively, I thought this would be straight forward, but this was not so. I soon became entrenched in the extent I considered myself to be an insider, or an outsider in my study. This challenging process took some unexpected twists and turns when my role at the university changed and I was no longer a member of the mental health team.

Whilst I was no longer an insider in the mental health team, some of the students who took part in the study knew me and whilst I tried to make clear to them my role in the study was as a student, I don’t know how they positioned me. I was floating ‘betwixt and between’!

Source: Manual