Adrian Holliday
Canterbury Christ, Church University College,
United Kingdom
Abstract
It is now becoming established that the naturalist dream
of unobtrusive,
‘fly-on-the-wall’, objective qualitative research is naïve
and unrealizable.
We therefore have to accept that the researcher is an
inevitable interactant
in the research setting, that her views and authorship
drive the findings of
the study, and that subjectivity is unavoidable. This
paper will look at some
of the ways in which this subjectivity can be managed
so that scientific
rigour can be maintained. I will consider how the researcher
must declare her
influence, show the workings of her research strategy,
and show explicitly how
she has interpreted the voices of the people she is researching.
Two of the
key strategies here are the use of the first person and
careful demarcation
between selected data, discussion and argument.