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Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL)

Queer Faces in Holy Spaces

The Self as Researcher and Researched

One of the issues facing social scientists who wish to research is that the social scientist quite often has some form of relationship to the group, society or phenomenon they wish to study which impacts on the way that they interpret the data they collect. In other words, their interpretation is likely to be biased. In order to ensure that the social scientist does not accidentally allow their biases to completely dominate the outcome of the research, they are encouraged to be reflexive and to acknowledge that such biases do exist and that they are “inherent in the fact that interviewers are human beings and not machines.” (Sellitz 1965, quoted in Oakley 1981, p.52.) It is through this process of acknowledging moments of bias and the incursion of individual experience on the interview process that one can hope to both remove the potential negative effects of bias and to acknowledge the possible positive effects that such individual experiences can have on the outcome of the research project.

In my own project, Queer Faces in Holy Spaces, I have attempted from the beginning to utilise my own position as a member of the group I researched (LGBTQ+ Christians) to my advantage- it enabled me to gain access to participants with greater ease through the snowball sampling of my own contacts in the community and it enabled me to have a greater degree of knowledge about the types of questions I should ask about the lived experiences of my participants as I had had many of the same experiences.

However, my membership of the group also turned out in many ways to be a great disadvantage. For example, the fact that I had chosen to do a snowball sample of acquaintances and connections from the somewhat insular and hidden world of LGBTQ+ Christians meant that I had to work even harder to ensure that all my interviews were conducted with a degree of secrecy as the risk of outing someone to their church community or family would have had at least some degree of impact on my own relationships with the people who had suggested their friends for participation.

The fact that I also had at least some degree of personal connection to the people I was interviewing meant that I sometimes struggled to maintain a degree of separation from the sometimes traumatic events and feelings that were expressed during the interviews; an example of this occurred when a participant told me about an event at their church where they had attended a service and someone had given a testimony about how they had been “cured” of their homosexuality by an intense period of prayer. When recalling the event, the participant told me that it had felt like they had been hit by a hammer to hear a member of their congregation refer to their own sexuality as something to be cured and it caused me to remember similar experiences in my own life where I had heard similar testimonies and reacted in much the same manner. After hearing this story, I admit that I struggled to continue the interview and it briefly caused me to consider the wisdom of deciding to research such a personal topic.

However, my closeness to the issue I studied, and my degree of knowledge also enabled me to offer advice and support to participants who felt they needed it once the interview was over. This was particularly the case with one Catholic participant who had assisted other LGBTQ+ members of their congregation to come out and was looking for resources in order to make sure that they were giving correct information and could support those individuals fully. The fact that I too am a Catholic and had been in contact with organisations that provided a safe space for LGBTQ+ Catholics meant that I was able to provide that participant with relevant contact details for such organisations and thus assist them in their journey. In some way, thus I felt that I had also achieved one of the aims of my study as an example of ethnography as I had in some way assisted members of the community I was studying and had therefore, at least in my own eyes achieved, to some degree, the ideals of the critical realist school of thought that argues that ethnography must be in some way able to emancipate members of the group studied from their burdens (see Armbruster and Laerke, 2008.)

To conclude, the experiences of this study and my own relation to it have been complicated by my existence as a social actor within the group I am studying. Despite the difficulties that this has raised (which are too many and too nuanced to be included in this blog post) I have found that my reflexive situation within this group has enabled me to realise the aims of my study as a means of critical ethnography more fully and thus, rather than arguing that my study and its outcomes have been negatively effected by this situation, I believe that during the course of the study I must simply accept my dual position as “researcher and at other times a participant” (Cupane and Taylor , 2007, p.11) and when the time comes to report my findings, I must write through the lens of critical autoethnography (see Burke 2011, p.47) and relate my findings as a member of the group reported upon and see how my own story is reflected in the interviews I held and thus use my privileged position as a social scientist with the means to report upon the experiences of a misunderstood and hidden group to in some way improve the lot of those who cannot speak in the same way and achieve the critical realist goal of using my skills as a researcher to “speak truth to power” (Scheper Hughes 1992, p.28.)

 

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