Life Experience as Part of the Qualitative Researcher’s Methodology

This paper will address the role of the researcher’s life experiences in their scholarly work. Specifically, I argue that self-examination is an essential companion to conducting qualitative research. That is, the researcher’s self is data and as such must be examined in tandem to researching other perspectives and phenomena (Attia & Edge, 2017; Blair, 2010). Both the experience of the researcher and participants must be translated into data. The first step in this process is reflexive writing (Luttrell, 2010). Taking field notes is a nudge toward reflexive writing, but to thoroughly engage in an interpretive process, the researcher must take a deep introspective look at the self. “From this perspective, the experience of a writing act is as important as—perhaps even more important than—the text” (Whitney, Hicks, Zuidema, Fredericksen, &Yagelski, 2014, p. 180). Thus, reflexive writing as a way to discover the self as researcher is essential to qualitative data analysis.