‘I take them with me’ – reflexivity in sensitive research

Abstract

What do we as researchers bring to the research we conduct? What do the participants and the topics under study evoke within us? These questions are well known within the qualitative research methodology. This paper aims at using reflexivity to describe researchers’ involvement at significant stages of the research and to help them deal with sensitive, ‘hard-to-swallow’ situations. In order to achieve that, we describe the reflexivity process we went through while conducting a research on elder self-neglect in Israel. We describe how reflexivity helped us at every stage of the research, from pre-research, through data collection and to data analysis.

Keywords:

• reflexivity
• sensitive topics
• self-harm
• geriatrics