03 · What You Need to Know
A Positionality Statement Should Explain Relationships, Not Compile a Personal Profile
Start With Your Relationship to the Research
The most useful starting question is not “Who am I?” but “Who am I in relation to this study?”
Researcher positionality concerns the researcher’s position in relation to the topic, participants, setting, institutions, and knowledge being produced. A positionality statement should therefore focus on aspects of that relationship that affect how the research should be understood.
You might have prior experience of the phenomenon. You might belong to the community being studied. You might work at the institution where the research takes place. You might supervise, teach, manage, or otherwise hold authority over potential participants. Alternatively, you may enter the setting as an outsider with limited familiarity.
These relationships often tell readers more than a generic inventory of demographic characteristics.
Include Identity Characteristics When They Are Methodologically Relevant
Social identities can be important to positionality. Depending on the research context, characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, social class, nationality, language, disability, religion, sexuality, or other identities may affect rapport, power, access, disclosure, interpretation, or how participants position the researcher.
But relevance should not simply be assumed.
If a particular characteristic has no plausible relationship to the research process, including it may add personal information without improving methodological transparency. Conversely, omitting a characteristic that clearly structures researcher-participant relationships can leave readers without information they need to understand the study.
The relevant question is: What does this characteristic change about the inquiry?
Professional and Institutional Roles Can Be Crucial
Researchers sometimes focus so heavily on demographic identity that they overlook professional position.
A teacher researching students, manager interviewing employees, clinician studying patients, administrator researching faculty, or program developer evaluating their own intervention occupies a role that may substantially affect the research.
Professional position can influence access, authority, voluntary participation, disclosure, conflicts of interest, assumptions, and interpretation.
These relationships may deserve explicit reporting even when other personal characteristics are comparatively unimportant to the study.
Explain Relevant Prior Experience With the Topic
Personal or professional experience can provide important context for why a researcher approaches a topic in a particular way.
Suppose you have previously taught using the educational technology you are investigating. That experience may give you familiarity with its implementation and terminology. It may also create expectations about what works, what problems matter, or how participants should use the technology.
A useful positionality statement can acknowledge both possibilities.
The aim is not to present experience as either a credential guaranteeing insight or a flaw guaranteeing bias. Explain how experience positions you in relation to the phenomenon and what methodological implications follow.
Consider Insider and Outsider Relationships
Researchers are frequently described as insiders when they share meaningful membership with the community or setting being studied and outsiders when they do not.
These categories can be useful, but they should not become simplistic labels. A researcher may be an insider professionally but an outsider generationally, linguistically, socially, or institutionally. Participants may also position the researcher differently from how the researcher describes themselves.
If insider-outsider relationships matter, explain the specific dimensions of similarity and difference rather than simply declaring “I am an insider researcher.”
Power Relationships Deserve Explicit Attention When Relevant
A positionality statement should identify power differences that could affect participation or evidence.
For example, if a professor recruits their own students, readers need to know how voluntariness was protected and whether participation could affect academic relationships. If an organizational leader interviews employees, readers may reasonably ask whether participants could criticize institutional practices without fearing consequences.
Power does not always flow from researcher to participant. Researchers studying senior officials, corporate executives, or powerful institutions may have limited access and control. Community participants may possess cultural knowledge and authority that researchers lack.
The statement should describe the actual relationship rather than assuming a universal power hierarchy.
Relevant Values and Commitments May Belong in the Statement
Researchers sometimes enter studies with commitments connected to the research problem. These might involve educational equity, disability inclusion, community participation, social justice, open science, environmental sustainability, or another value relevant to the inquiry.
Axiology concerns how values relate to research. Where a value commitment materially shapes the purpose, methodology, relationships, or interpretation of the study, acknowledging it may help readers understand the inquiry.
But a positionality statement is not a manifesto. Researchers should still distinguish value commitments from empirical conclusions. Caring strongly about an issue does not entitle the study to reach a preferred result.
Theoretical and Disciplinary Position Can Also Matter
Positionality is not exclusively social or demographic. Researchers are also positioned intellectually.
A scholar trained in educational psychology may approach student motivation differently from an anthropologist, sociologist, or learning scientist. A researcher working from a feminist, critical, postcolonial, or other theoretical tradition may deliberately foreground particular relations or forms of knowledge.
When these intellectual positions materially shape what the researcher notices, asks, or interprets, they may deserve acknowledgement. In many studies, however, theoretical positioning is better developed in the theoretical or methodological framework rather than repeated extensively in a positionality statement.
Move From “Who I Am” to “What This Means for the Study”
This is the step that often separates a useful positionality statement from a biographical paragraph.
| Possible disclosure |
Methodological question to add |
| I work at the institution being studied. |
How does that affect access, relationships, institutional knowledge, confidentiality, or interpretation? |
| I share a professional background with participants. |
Does shared professional language improve understanding or encourage assumptions of shared meaning? |
| I have personal experience of the phenomenon. |
How might that experience support insight or create expectations about participants’ experiences? |
| I differ socially or culturally from participants. |
Could that difference affect trust, communication, access, or interpretation? |
| I hold authority over potential participants. |
How could power affect recruitment, voluntariness, or disclosure, and what safeguards are needed? |
| I hold a strong commitment related to the research problem. |
How will I ensure that the evidence, rather than the desired conclusion, determines the empirical claims? |
A statement becomes methodologically informative when it makes these connections explicit.
Explain What You Did About Consequential Positionality Issues
Identifying a potential influence is only part of the work.
If you hold authority over participants, perhaps recruitment was handled by someone independent of that authority. If you share substantial experience with participants, perhaps interview questions deliberately probe meanings instead of assuming common understanding. If you have strong prior expectations, perhaps reflexive notes, peer discussion, alternative interpretations, or other methodology-appropriate procedures are used during analysis.
The particular response depends on the methodology and the issue.
This is where positionality connects with reflexivity. Positionality identifies relevant relationships; reflexive practice examines how those relationships operate and whether the research process needs to change in response.
Do Not Claim That Reflexivity Eliminated Your Bias
A common ending to positionality statements is some version of “I remained aware of my biases to ensure objectivity.” That claim is usually too strong and too vague.
Awareness does not guarantee that every influence has been identified or removed. Nor is complete detachment the methodological goal of every research tradition.
It is stronger to describe what you actually did. Perhaps you documented assumptions before data collection, maintained reflexive notes, separated recruitment from supervisory roles, examined negative cases, discussed interpretations with collaborators, preregistered analytical decisions, or used another relevant safeguard.
Specific methodological actions are more informative than assurances of neutrality.
Do Not Overdisclose
A positionality statement should not create the assumption that researchers owe readers unlimited access to their personal lives.
Some characteristics may be sensitive, private, professionally consequential, or potentially unsafe to disclose. Researchers should consider whether disclosure is necessary to understand the inquiry and whether the methodological value outweighs possible harms.
Relevant reporting can sometimes be framed at an appropriate level without providing unnecessary personal detail.
Watch Out
More disclosure is not automatically better positionality. Include personal information because it has a defensible relationship to the research, not because an exhaustive identity inventory appears more reflexive.
The Statement Should Match the Methodology and Reporting Context
There is no universally correct positionality template. Different methodologies make different assumptions about the researcher’s role, and publication standards differ.
Qualitative reporting guidelines such as COREQ request information about interviewer characteristics, relationships with participants, and what participants knew about the researcher. Other methodologies and journals may require different disclosures.
This is why the prior question of whether a study needs a positionality statement at all should be answered before deciding what format to use.
Follow the methodological literature and reporting requirements applicable to the actual study rather than treating a generic positionality template as universally appropriate.
