Revisiting a Boy Named Jim

Abstract

Using examples from qualitative health research and from my childhood experience of reading a poem about a boy devoured by a lion (Belloc, 1907), I expand on a framework for reflexivity developed in Bischoping and Gazso (2016). This framework is unique in first synthesizing works from multidisciplinary narrative analysis research in order to arrive at common criteria for a "good" story: reportability, liveability, coherence, and fidelity. Next, each of these criteria is used to generate questions that can prompt reflexivity among qualitative researchers, regardless of whether they use narrative data or other narrative analysis strategies. These questions pertain to a broad span of issues, including appropriation, censorship, and the power to represent, using discomfort to guide insight, addressing vicarious traumatization, accommodating diverse participant populations, decolonizing ontology, and incorporating power and the social into analyses overly focused on individual meaning-making. Finally, I reflect on the affinities between narrative-in its imaginatively constructed, expressive, and open-ended qualities-and the reflexive impulse.

Revisiting Peshkin: teaching reflexive practice through categorization

“…As noted by Alejandro (2021), there is a great deal of scholarship attempting to support researchers in creating their own "toolbox" for "reflexive research methods" (p. 2). Experts in qualitative research continue to offer insight into both what reflexivity is (Adams, 2021;Ahmed and Buheji, 2018;Henwood et al, 2019) and how to (or how not to) practice it (Alejandro, 2021;Bischoping, 2018;Borgstrom and Ellis, 2021). Within that milieu, Pousti et al (2021) aptly make clear that reflexivity is diversely practiced, taught and written about in qualitative research.…”