Reflection 3: Researcher Stance

Linda Finlay writes of how “as qualitative researchers, we understand that the researcher is a central figure who influences the collection, selection, and interpretation of data.”¹ Throughout Constructing Grounded Theory, the “classic text” (Judith Preissle’s blurb on the back) for student practitioners of qualitative research, Kathy Charmez stresses how both “the methods we choose” and “what we bring to the study” influence not only “what we see,” but also “what we can see.”² Her index lists eight references for “preconceptions” and ten for “background assumptions,”³ and much of her book focuses on reminding us as researchers of the importance of our identities and our positions in relation to our subjects, both human and topical, and the necessity for self-reflexivity at every stage of the research process.

Researcher positions and identities – researcher stance – are, of course, multidimensional and shift over the course of a project for all kinds of reasons. They are created/impacted by

• academic discipline(s) – both those within which the researchers usually work and those with which they interact during the study
• methodologies – those that the researchers are experienced in applying, those that they try out perhaps for the first time, and those that they observe colleagues from other disciplines using
• upbringing
• personality
• religious/other belief systems
• individual sociocultural factors, for example social class, gender, ethnicity, age, and sexuality
• broader sociocultural factors – what else is in the air within the social and cultural context(s) a researcher inhabits
• professional background(s)
• academic training – as Max Saunders pointed out to me, while this may be implicit in “academic discipline(s)” or “professional background(s),” it’s “not necessarily congruent” with either.⁴
• experience of conducting the present study, both in terms of what we learn in the process and how the study is configured, led, and managed
• the passage of time
• the nature of our research and research questions

amongst other factors.

In other words, researcher stance comprises a messy and shifting combination of intrinsic, relational, and developmental dimensions. It both affects and is affected by our work as we engage with it.

But stance is more than the position in which we find ourselves as researchers. The above (far from exhaustive) list of factors suggests it is something close to predetermined: something that, if not programmable is, at very least, predictable. It is stance as the position into which a researcher is woven within a web of factors that affect their research. A spidery trap, almost. But that ignores the active decisions involved in taking a “stance”: a position adopted deliberately. Taking a stance both indicates and demands a level of reflexivity (which “can be defined as thoughtful, conscious self-awareness. Reflexive analysis in research encompasses continual evaluation of subjective responses, intersubjective dynamics, and the research process itself”⁵) and choice: however conditioned or impacted these acts of reflection and choice are by all aspects of our evolution into/as researchers.

The following clip illustrates this. Initially, as Max Saunders explains, the Ego Media team decided against researching the dark web. However, the revelations about data and social media (mis)use during the 2016 EU referendum in the UK, and the presidential election in the US, meant that “the dark side of the web began to affect everyday usage,” and made the team “think very differently about what we were doing and why we were doing it.”

While drafting the essay on Interdisciplinarity, I emailed my colleagues to ask which disciplines they “inhabit.” Of those who responded, three – all literary scholars – listed seven disciplines, while the others listed three or fewer. Additionally, Clare Brant pointed out that “literary criticism is such a broad discipline it borrows/inhabits whatever’s useful anyway.”⁶

All three team members who listed seven disciplines included literary criticism. No other discipline was named more than twice.

I’m flagging that this was the most cited discipline – and one espoused by two of the four Investigators, including the Principal – because, literary criticism is, by name and nature, critical. As Max Saunders pointed out to me,⁷ this suggests that those scholars working within the discipline would be more likely to take a critical stance towards their material than those working in disciplines/with methodologies that either espouse a more neutral, traditionally scientific approach, or which, as in the social scientific methodology of creating grounded theory, require researchers to identify and monitor their own preconceptions and presumptions.

There is, of course, debate within the discipline as to what literary criticism comprises. Joseph North, for instance, writing in the introduction to Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History claims that

one of the defining features of our period has been the relative absence of “criticism” in anything like the sense used by earlier thinkers. There has been what I will call a “scholarly turn,” by which “scholarly” approaches, which have tended to treat literary texts chiefly as opportunities for cultural and historical analysis, have replaced “critical” approaches, which in their day, had tended to treat literary texts as means of cultivating readers’ aesthetic sensibilities, “aesthetic” here of course being understood in a range of rather different senses.⁸

For North, then, criticism involves more than “scholarly” analysis. It involves a commitment to “cultivating” – less active than “educating,” in that it implies providing conditions for readers within which their “aesthetic sensibilities” can grow, rather than teaching them directly – but is still somewhat directive in function. The scholarly approach, however, still involves “cultural and historical analysis.” This is not death-of-the-author-the-text-is-all-there-is (post)structuralism, and so , if we follow North, does not conform to the dichotomy Tobin Siebers identifies in The Ethics of Criticism , in which

Either literary criticism is seen as a branch of ethics, one of the many disciplines used by ethics to exert control over different areas of thought, or criticism exists at odds with ethical requirements in its quest to chart poetic form not within the ethical domain of truth, but within the strange and elusive domain of fiction. In the first case, criticism obeys the imperatives of ethics to keep literature within the bounds of moral integrity. … In the second case, criticism strives to diverge from ethical requirements to establish its own identity and objectives and to invent a unique standard of literary content and form.⁹

However, whilst literary scholars/critics investigate and analyze text and/or context, exploring outwards into the society, culture, and politics of the relevant time(s), and, perhaps, inwards into the lives of the text’s author(s), their positions, backgrounds, and motivations as researchers have rarely formed part of their investigations. This, they have in common, perhaps, with certain types of scientific research: if, for instance, your research involves observing bacteria mutating under a microscope, you may not need to interrogate your relationship with those bacteria. If you are conducting an interview with another human being, your relationship with them is an integral part of your research, and the nature of it is likely to have a profound impact on your findings. Absent a self-aware and reflexive researcher stance, your findings lack value.

Until the advent of digital texts/reading, literary criticism arguably fell somewhere in between these two situations. Texts in printed form are (comparatively) stable: books in codex form may vary from edition to edition, but – B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates aside – the contents and orders of text in individual editions don’t tend to morph into something else as you study them. Their digital descendents are very different. Digital texts, images, and videos and the platforms on which people post them are almost infinitely changeable. As Clare Brant said in her interview: “the social media landscape is actually very different in 2019 from how it was in 2012 when we first started to talk about putting a grant application together.” There is no way any researcher can be “the one who stands rock-solid in the shifting sands”¹⁰ characteristic of the social media landscape. The more liable to change and less predictable a research subject is, the greater the likelihood that its researchers’ stances will shift: both in relation to the subject being researched and in relation to their previous stances. Which, arguably, also means that the more unstable a research subject the greater the need for researcher self-reflexivity.

Clare Brant and Max Saunders – both of whom identified one of their seven disciplines as literary criticism – described a stance change in terms of how they thought about others’ social media use. Clare Brant said her research had made her “less judgemental,” while Max said that he had become “much more interested and curious about what’s going on in the online world,” whereas previously he “might have been more critical or more hostile to that.” Meanwhile, here’s Alexandra Georgakopoulou on how team members’ positions changed over the time the Ego-Media project ran:

In essence then, the team, in general, shifted to an increasingly critical stance towards social media overall; towards the companies that own it and what they do with our data (in Shoshana Zuboff’s terms, those who know, those who decide, and those who decide who decides),¹¹ while correspondingly, to a less critical stance towards the individuals who post on it, who use – and are used by – it.

Even though, as Rob Gallagher points out in the following clip, it’s often not easy for researchers to pinpoint exactly what has precipitated a shift, it would be interesting to revisit this question and ask team members about the extent to which coronavirus-induced changes in working practices have changed their stance towards social, and other online digital, media.

Neither is it necessarily easy to identify a stance from which to start.

Rob Gallagher is, perhaps, the team member who – because his research has incorporated both theoretical and practice-based work – articulated the issues most clearly during his interview.

For Rebecca Roach, a combination of personality traits (“I do very well,” she explained, “sometimes in pretending that I am not a massive introvert, but I am”) and political and ethical concerns about a disruption of the boundaries between work and personal lives, rendered locating a position from which to conduct her research challenging:

And, while Stijn Peeters chose to focus on IRC and Twitter during his research “which are – not entirely coincidentally – also platforms I use myself. I would say, probably, the ones I’m most active on,” Alex Georgakopoulou takes the opposite stance:

Although she posts on some platforms for work, Alisa Miller characterizes herself as an “more of an observer than a player,” on social media:

Given that Alisa’s topic is Life and War Writing, Off- and Online, it’s intriguing that it’s her restricted use of social media that she identifies as something that might lead people to “say … disqualifies me from being able to write or research about them,” rather than, say, her lack of direct involvement in the military. But, as Rebecca Roach points out: “as scholars we often write down oh they said this in an interview and you’re like, yeah but, what was the question they were being asked?” In this instance, I was, of course, asking Alisa to reflect on her social media use, rather than on her focus on war writing.

While neither Alisa nor Alex felt that their observer status impacted negatively on their research, Mikka Lene Pers felt differently:

I started thinking about researcher stance because, during the process of conducting interviews with my Ego Media colleagues, I realized that, in most cases, their relationships with their research subject(s) influenced their social media practice far more than did the process or outcomes of their research. That’s because – inevitably and perhaps obviously to anyone with a greater level of academic research experience than I bring to the topic – “what we bring to the study … influences [if not determines] what we can see.” Arguably, the literary scholars on the team tended to approach their topics from a critical perspective consistent with their disciplines. The social scientists approached theirs from a more neutral (as opposed to objective) perspective. It is perhaps no surprise that the only Ego Media team members who

1. increased their social media posting as a result of their research on the project, and
2. identified and articulated the cause and effect

were both social scientists (Mikka Lene Pers and Alison McKinlay).

Several of my colleagues adopted one particular position vis à vis social media. Rebecca Roach described herself as “such a lurker.” “Through, my participants,” says Alexandra Georgakopoulou, “I’m a kind of a digital, if you want, lurker on Instagram and Snapchat.” Alisa Miller says she is “more of an observer than a player.” Although Clare Brant explores social media extensively in her research, she says she didn’t use social media before starting work on the Ego-Media project, and that although the King’s Centre for Life Writing Research project Strandlines “has a presence on Facebook and Twitter” to which she contributes, she doesn’t use social media platforms “personally.” Meanwhile, Rob Gallagher uses Twitter and, to a certain degree, Tumblr, yet describes himself only semi-ironically as a “horrified onlooker” on Instagram.

In other words, reading or watching social media as a reader, viewer or, indeed, as a researcher might read a book or watch a film puts you in a different position to the reader of a book or the watcher of a film. Those are legitimate audience positions. Reading or viewing social media (being a lurker) feels – and is often judged to be – voyeuristic. Or, perhaps, worse than voyeuristic: after all, before the word was used to describe those who read posts on fora but don’t contribute, a lurker was an unflushable turd. As Rebecca Roach says of the way she uses Facebook to keep in touch with friends and colleagues abroad and “see what they're doing occasionally,” she knows this “is very unfair because they’re posting and I’m not.”

Alisa Miller says that she knows her refusal to “use” social media means “a lot of people would say sort of disqualifies me from being able to write or research about them,” while Mikka Lene Pers says her research has made her “more explorative and has made me more open to trying out new social media platforms, because I feel like I have to understand what it is that is happening in social media.” “I post,” she says, “mostly because I feel like only when you actually contribute as well you will be able to understand all those different kind of experience that you have when using social media.”

A lurker, according to the Techopedia definition:

is an Internet user who, rather than participating in interactive websites such as social media platforms, only passively observes information and does not reveal information about himself or herself. These passive users may view text and images, download information, visit other people’s profiles or request information through the Internet, but do not post, update their profiles, share links, use social media indicators or otherwise create an online or social media footprint.¹²

The issue with this as a definition is that it can be read as pejorative.¹³ After all, as the OED points out, the term was “frequently employed as a term of abuse in early quots. literal and figurative.”¹⁴ Social media are designed to be participatory. They promote themselves as an economy of “sharing.” Those who are viewed as successful in their use of social media attract followers, friends, and also engagement, in terms of likes, comments, and monetization. Lurkers, in this sharing economy are takers, unidentified and unidentifiable, who are failing to fulfill the contract of giving as well as taking – or, at least, signaling their appreciation of that which they have taken. As Michael L. Kent wrote in 2010:

In the early days of the Internet, these people were called “lurkers.” Twenty years ago, active participants to lists would complain about people who just read the posts by others and never participated in the dialogue.¹⁵

The term has stuck. Searching Google Scholar for “lurkers on social media” produces about 10,400 results. Limiting the search to articles published since 2015 reduces the number to 3,700. That’s still a lot of interest in those who don’t post. And, while the author of the paper that tops the list – Kate Crawford, writing in 2009 – suggests using “listeners” instead. In “Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media,” she aims “to engage with a set of emerging modes of paying attention online, and to propose that they be considered practices of listening.”¹⁶ – a suggestion that might have been undermined by the more recent dominance of visual culture across social media. Most scholars – and, indeed people writing in practitioner-facing outlets about – appear to have adopted the term, either arguing for it to be stripped of its pejorative connotations, or simply using it as a synonym for those who fulfill what is, effectively, a traditional, receptive (rather than passive) audience function, as opposed to “active users.”

So, should we, therefore, define those like Clare Brant and participants in migraine and epilepsy studies who frequent condition-specific Facebook groups in order to gather information and/or, perhaps, to find out about others experiencing similar diagnoses, symptoms, and treatments as “lurkers”? Or, if they are simply using social media in the way that they might use other resources on the web, should we find another term? If so, is there one that offers sufficient precision to be useful?

See also Max Saunders’s 'Observation': Privacy, Identity, Identities.

On reading this section, Max Saunders wondered what my focus on researcher stance might tell us about “about posters’ stances,” and how these might, in turn, impact on the people researching posts and posters:

More specifically, Twitter and the more millennial-oriented platforms seem to favour a stance that highlights/foregrounds both irony and ideas of authenticity on the part of their posters. So the question is whether the medium fosters a new kind of self-consciousness and whether that in turn rubs off on researchers?¹⁷

Irony – amongst other forms of wit, high and low – and unironic passion both flourish on Twitter: sometimes in the same tweet. Meanwhile Instagram may be fostering a new and interestingly nuanced redefining of the relationship(s) between privacy, public statement or display, and the ways in which people negotiate what it means to demonstrate “authenticity.” The recent spate of essays exposing falsity by popular influencers … going viral¹⁸, the Finsta/Rinsta dichotomy (see Software and the Self), and Alex Georgakopoulou’s work in Showing the Moment all seem to point in this direction. So, my answer to the first part of Max’s question – one that is central to the Ego Media project would be yes. The second part? I’m not sure. Max’s take is that “most of us … have become more self conscious… about our social media use; it’s just that that has made some post more, and some less.” This made me wonder also about the relationship between self-consciousness and consciousness per se – or, perhaps, what’s commonly called mindfulness. If we are thinking about our selves in relation to platforms, situations, utterances, representations, performances, and how these are perceived/received by other people, to what extent is this self-consciousness, to what extent context awareness, and to what extent a kind of expanded proprioception?

We’d need more research to answer these questions…