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Doing reflexivity: accounting for emotion and attachment in social research

Jon Dean, Doing Reflexivity: An Introduction, Polity Press, 2017. 180 pages.

Chapter one – Introduction

“Social research requires us to account for our humanness” begins Jon Dean, in his book, Doing Reflexivity: An Introduction. Social research is the study of humans by humans. By definition the study of humans can’t be done in a laboratory. It requires field conditions, amid the networks and relationships that make humans human. This includes the researcher, seeking to unpick the “messy bundle of behaviour and thought” of social networks (5). Unpicking is made possible through reflexivity. Reflexivity providing processes that allow the researcher to reflect on their human involvement in the study of humans. It provides way to account for the role of emotion and attachment in social research. Reflexivity is “the way we analyse our positionality, the conditions of a given situation” (8).

Ironically, this common sense approach is relatively recent. There is a long established hierarchy of knowledge that places pure maths at the top and anthropology and sociology at the bottom. It needs to be inverted. It is far harder to study people in all their inconsistencies, complexity and variability.

Jon Dean examines the increasing number of fields that are taking the attachments of social research seriously: journalism, politics, economics, health, welfare and social work. (And for me, the theological disciplines of ecclesiology, practical theology and missiology – all of which take critical examination of the lived practices of the church in the world as including the study of humans seriously.) Doing Reflexivity: An Introduction by Jon Dean promises a mix of theory, example and practical strategies.

Chapter two – Pierre Bourdieu and the development of theory