03 · What You Need to Know
Positionality Is About Relationship and Consequence, Not Biography Alone
Researchers Occupy Positions in Relation to Their Research
Positionality is commonly used to describe the position a researcher occupies in relation to the research context, participants, topic, and processes through which knowledge is produced. That position may involve social identities, professional roles, disciplinary perspectives, institutional affiliations, personal experiences, theoretical commitments, or relationships with the people and settings being studied.
Not every characteristic matters equally in every project.
A researcher’s professional role may be highly consequential when studying colleagues in the same organization but largely irrelevant in another study. Language background may affect an interview-based project conducted across linguistic communities. Previous experience with the phenomenon may shape interpretation in a study centered on lived experience.
Positionality therefore becomes useful when it is relational: What about my position matters for this particular inquiry, and why?
Positionality Is Not a List of Demographic Characteristics
A positionality discussion can become superficial when researchers simply catalogue personal characteristics without explaining their methodological relevance.
Age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic background, profession, academic discipline, institutional role, language, disability, religion, and other characteristics can matter in research. But their relevance depends on the context and should not be presumed automatically.
For example, stating “I am a university professor” tells readers something about the researcher. It becomes a positionality issue when the study involves university students, faculty members, institutional policy, academic authority, or another context in which that professional position may shape access, interaction, interpretation, or power.
Biographical information
Describes something about who the researcher is.
Positionality
Examines how relevant aspects of who the researcher is and where the researcher is positioned may affect the inquiry or knowledge produced.
Positionality Can Affect What Researchers Are Able to Access
A researcher’s position can open some doors and close others.
An employee researching their own organization may have access to documents, informal knowledge, institutional language, and potential participants that would be difficult for an outsider to obtain. At the same time, colleagues may hesitate to speak openly if they perceive the researcher as connected to management.
An outsider may lack contextual knowledge but may sometimes be perceived as safer for discussing sensitive organizational problems. A researcher who belongs to a community may establish rapport through shared experience, while another participant may worry that confidentiality is more difficult when researcher and participant share social networks.
Access is therefore not simply an administrative matter. Who the researcher is in relation to the setting can affect what becomes available as evidence.
Positionality Can Shape Researcher-Participant Relationships
Research encounters involve relationships, and those relationships can involve differences in authority, status, expertise, age, class, race, gender, institutional role, language, or other contextually relevant positions.
Consider a professor interviewing students from the professor’s own institution. Even when participation is formally voluntary, students may perceive the researcher as an authority figure. That perception could affect recruitment, willingness to refuse participation, or what students feel comfortable saying.
The same researcher might be positioned differently when interviewing senior administrators or other professors. Positionality is therefore not simply a permanent characteristic located inside the researcher. It can shift according to the relationship and setting.
The Insider-Outsider Distinction Is Useful but Too Simple on Its Own
Researchers are sometimes classified as insiders or outsiders. An insider may belong to the community, institution, profession, or social group being studied, while an outsider does not share that membership.
The distinction can illuminate important methodological issues, but researchers rarely occupy a purely insider or outsider position in every respect.
A researcher may share a profession with participants but differ in institutional status. They may share nationality but not language, socioeconomic background, or generation. They may begin a project as an outsider and develop relationships that alter how participants position them.
Researchers can therefore occupy multiple, intersecting, and changing positions rather than one fixed insider or outsider category.
Positionality Can Influence What Researchers Notice and Interpret
Disciplinary training and previous experience can make some patterns immediately visible while rendering others less obvious. A psychologist, sociologist, computer scientist, educator, and economist may encounter the same educational technology but approach it with different concepts, theories, questions, and expectations.
This does not mean one interpretation is automatically correct and the others are merely biased. It means interpretation occurs through conceptual resources and perspectives.
In methodologies where researcher interpretation plays a substantial role, positionality can therefore be relevant to how findings are interpreted. Researchers may need to examine how their assumptions and experiences influenced what they attended to and how they developed their interpretations.
Positionality Is Connected to Epistemology
The importance assigned to positionality depends partly on assumptions about knowledge. Epistemology concerns what can be known and how knowledge claims can be justified.
If a methodology treats the researcher as substantially involved in producing and interpreting knowledge, the researcher’s position may need explicit examination. If a design emphasizes standardized procedures intended to reduce researcher-dependent variation, positionality may operate differently and may be less central to the methodological account.
This does not mean one tradition has positionality and another has none. Researchers in all traditions have backgrounds and institutional locations. What differs is whether and how those characteristics are understood as relevant to the knowledge claims being made.
Positionality Is Also Connected to Axiology
Axiology concerns values and their relationship to inquiry. Positionality can intersect with axiology because researchers’ social and professional positions may shape commitments, priorities, assumptions, and judgments about what matters.
A researcher who has personally experienced a phenomenon may have strong reasons for studying it. A practitioner-researcher may value particular professional outcomes. A researcher working with a marginalized community may have ethical or political commitments concerning representation and participation.
Such commitments do not automatically invalidate research. Nor does acknowledging them permit researchers to make conclusions unsupported by evidence. The relevant task is to consider whether these commitments affect the inquiry and how they should be handled within the methodology.
Power Is Often Central to Positionality
Positionality becomes particularly consequential when researchers and participants occupy unequal positions.
A physician interviewing patients, teacher researching students, manager studying employees, or university administrator investigating staff experiences may hold authority relevant to participation and disclosure. Conversely, researchers can occupy less powerful positions when studying elites, institutions, or groups controlling access to information.
Power is not always obvious or one-directional. Participants may possess expertise, community standing, cultural knowledge, or control over access that the researcher lacks.
A useful positionality analysis therefore asks how power operates in the actual research relationship rather than assuming the researcher is always either dominant or powerless.
Positionality Can Change During a Study
Researchers’ relationships to a field can develop over time. An ethnographer who initially knows little about a community may become increasingly familiar with its practices. Participants may begin to treat the researcher differently as trust develops. A researcher may discover personal assumptions that were not apparent at the beginning of the study.
Positionality is therefore better understood as potentially dynamic rather than as a statement completed once before data collection.
This is one reason it is closely related to reflexivity. Researchers may need to revisit their position as relationships, interpretations, and circumstances change.
Positionality and Reflexivity Are Related but Not Identical
These terms are frequently used together, but they perform different conceptual work.
Positionality concerns where the researcher is positioned in relation to the research. Reflexivity concerns the ongoing process of critically examining how the researcher, research relationships, assumptions, decisions, and context may influence the inquiry.
In shorthand, positionality helps identify relevant positions; reflexivity examines their implications and the broader process through which knowledge is produced.
The distinction is developed more fully when comparing positionality and reflexivity directly.
Positionality Is Not a Confession of Bias
Researchers sometimes approach positionality statements as though they must identify personal flaws that threaten the study. This misunderstands the purpose.
Some aspects of a researcher’s position can create risks that need management. Others can provide methodological resources. Shared language may support nuanced communication. Professional experience may help a researcher recognize context-specific practices. Community membership may facilitate trust and access.
The same characteristic can create both opportunities and limitations.
Watch Out
Do not turn positionality into either self-accusation or self-credentialing. Being an insider does not guarantee authentic understanding, and being an outsider does not guarantee objectivity. Explain how the researcher’s actual position affects the specific inquiry and what was done about consequential implications.
Not Every Study Requires the Same Degree of Positionality Reporting
Positionality is particularly important where the researcher’s identity, relationships, interpretive role, or institutional position materially affects data generation or interpretation. In such studies, failing to discuss positionality can hide information readers need to evaluate the research.
Other studies may rely heavily on standardized instruments, existing datasets, automated measurements, or designs in which particular researcher characteristics have limited relevance to the central inference. Even there, researcher decisions remain consequential, but a lengthy personal positionality account may add little.
This is why the question of whether every study needs a positionality statement should be separated from the broader recognition that researchers always occupy positions.
