Teaching in Higher Education

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Inside–out: analysis of the insider–outsider

concept as a heuristic device to develop reflexivity
in students doing qualitative research

David Hellawell

To cite this article: David Hellawell (2006) Inside–out: analysis of the insider–outsider concept as
a heuristic device to develop reflexivity in students doing qualitative research, Teaching in Higher
Education, 11:4, 483-494, DOI: 10.1080/13562510600874292

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Teaching in Higher Education
Vol. 11, No. 4, October 2006, pp. 483
494

Inside out: analysis of the
insider outsider concept as a heuristic
device to develop reflexivity in students
doing qualitative research
David Hellawell*
University of Central England in Birmingham, UK

This paper focuses on one approach to making research students more reflexive in their writing. It
is argued that the development of the ability to be reflexive in regard to their own qualitative
research does not come easily to a significant number of students. A range of possibilities which
supervisors might present to their research students as questions to be considered in these respects
is outlined. Four relevant case study vignettes are presented of the work of doctoral students (with
the full cooperation and written permission of all involved) who have been supervised by the author
of this paper. It is argued that these demonstrate that the students concerned have found
consideration of their own, sometimes shifting, positions on the insider
outsider continuum of
considerable value in developing their reflexivity in relation to their own research.

Introduction
Supervising an increasing number of doctoral students has made me more aware of
difficulties which seem to be common to quite a wide range of those undertaking
qualitative research. One very clear example of this has been the problem of trying to
make such students more reflexive in their writing. Shacklock and Smyth (1998) see
reflexivity as the conscious revelation of the role of the beliefs and values held by
researchers in the selection of research methodology for the generation of knowledge
and its production as a research account. The key word here is ‘conscious’ for we are
discussing the researcher’s deliberate self-scrutiny in relation to the research process.
Most experienced commentators recognize that this ability objectively to stand
outside one’s own writing, and to be reflexive about it, and about one’s own relation
to it, are some of the hallmarks of a good thesis. (Indeed, I have increasingly come to
the view that a great deal of academic writing at all levels would benefit from a
heightened degree of reflexivity.) Over recent years I have come to appreciate that an
entry into reflexivity can be provided by doctoral students’ consideration of where, if

*8 Kidderminster Road, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, B61 7JW, UK. Email: davidh@bromsgrover.

u-net.com
ISSN 1356-2517 (print)/ISSN 1470-1294 (online)/06/040483-12
# 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13562510600874292
484 D. Hellawell

at all, their qualitative research figures on what I am ultimately going to argue is a

series of insider
outsider researcher continua.
The first students I encouraged to analyse this issue were those who were
researching into aspects of their own work organizations. These were often primary
or secondary schools, but I have also supervised students researching into the
workings of their own further education (FE) colleges, higher education institutions
(HEIs), and indeed non-educational organizations. In more recent years, particularly
with the initiatives of what is now the Training and Development Agency for Schools
(TDA) and the very rapid expansion of ‘professional’ doctorates, usually styled
‘doctorates in education’ (Ed.D.), there has been a large increase in the number of
teachers conducting research within their own organizations. This has often taken
the form of ‘practitioner enquiry’ within the more generic category of ‘action
research’.
One of my earlier examples was a head teacher intending to research into the
management of staff development in his own secondary school at a time of
contraction during the later 1980s (Hawkins, 1990). I can still recall the severe
reservations I had about the feasibility of this research when the proposal was first
submitted. It immediately raised problematic issues such as, for example, power
differentials. To put it bluntly, how could this head teacher interview his own staff,
and not simply receive a version of what the staff in question might surmise that he
would want them to say, whether they genuinely believed it or not? Whether it was as
a direct response to these expressed reservations, or simply because of a high degree
of intelligence and research sensitivity on his part, the head in question developed a
thesis which all those involved in its supervision and examination had to agree was in
the end a model of reflexivity. He even wrote a substantial appendix, which
substantially amplified his methodology chapter, about the potential strengths and
weaknesses of insider research of this kind. He detailed the steps he had taken to
counter the potential pitfalls, and I still recommend this appendix, in particular, to
students wishing to go down similar pathways.

Definitions and discussions of insider and outsider research

This latter case is a very clear example of what I am here labeling as insider research.
If, however, we look back to one of the early classic definitions of insider research by
Robert Merton (1972) the notion that such research always involves looking into
your own work organization appears far too narrow on a number of counts. Merton
defines the insider as an individual who possesses a priori intimate knowledge of the
community and its members. The word ‘community’ is a much wider concept than
just an organization, and possessing intimate knowledge of it doesn’t necessarily
mean being a member of it yourself. So being an insider researcher is not necessarily
the same as being currently a member of the organization being researched. As is so
often the case, moreover, it is possible to see more clearly the full scope of what
insider research can be by considering its opposite. So one definition of outsider
 Inside
out 485

research is where the researcher is not a priori familiar with the setting and people
s/he is researching. Traditionally, it is this kind of research which has long had its
virtues extolled in the literature. So Burgess (1984, p. 23) has written that: ‘being a
stranger, an outsider in the social setting, gives the researcher scope to stand back
and abstract material from the research experience’. Even where, as for example in
anthropological studies, researchers had to do extensive field work in cultures with
which they gradually over time became familiar, the gravest academic sin they could
commit was ‘to go native’. This meant that they were being instructed not to become
sucked into the perspectives of those they were observing or interviewing et cetera.
To do so, the critics alleged, would be ‘to pollute their objectivity’.
A very full discussion of the issues surrounding this view within anthropology was
given by Lewis as long ago as 1973. To quote one significant sentence:
Given the significance of anthropology as a tool in Western man’s search for self-
understanding, it was an important methodological assumption that the study of
‘primitive’ or non-Western world could take place only from the vantage point of
the Westerner or outsider. (Lewis, 1973, p. 582)
Lewis’s article is something of a demolition job on the traditional anthropological
view that only the sensitized outsider can produce the research that provides a
suitably objective view of reality. She criticizes the assumption that there is indeed
only one ‘reality’ to be observed: ‘The assumptions fostered by the objective
approach coincide with those engendered by the colonial relationship. Further, they
blind the anthropologist, like the colonizer, to the validity of other than a single view
of reality’ (ibid., p. 585).
She goes on to point to one of the key dangers for the anthropologist who sees the
traditional expert outsider role as in some way ‘purifying’ the research:
When the anthropologist assumed the role of ‘objective’ observer, his1 behaviour
significantly affected the relationship between himself and his informants: it assured
both his estrangement from, and his superordinate position in relation to those he
studied. (Lewis, 1973, p. 585)
Lewis is not, however, arguing that outsiders cannot produce a valuable research
perspective. She approvingly reports Robert Merton as arguing that there is an
inexorable logic which follows that anyone who argues ‘only Blacks can understand
Blacks’ is also arguing in effect that the perceptive observations made by those
researchers (who were then typically referred to as Afro-American) on the workings
of White society in the US were somehow invalid. ‘Obviously, the perspectives of
both outsider and insider reveal ‘‘certain truths’’. . . . Each perspective has its
advantages and disadvantages, both intellectual and practical’ (ibid., p. 585).
This view is taken to further lengths by Martin Hammersley (1993, p. 219) when
he summarizes his arguments against only insider research being valid:
In short, I do not believe that being an established participant in a situation
provides access to valid knowledge that is not available to an outside researcher. In
general, the chances of findings being valid can be enhanced by a judicious
combination of involvement and estrangement. However, no position, not even a
486 D. Hellawell

marginal one guarantees valid knowledge; and no position prevents it either. There
are no overwhelming advantages to being an insider or an outsider. Each position
has advantages and disadvantages, though these will take on slightly different
weights depending on the particular circumstances and purposes of the research.
Two of the seminal European theorists of sociology and social psychology had,
nevertheless, argued that there were overwhelming advantages in the outsider’s
perspective on societies. Georg Simmel (1950, p. 402) analysed the subtleties of this
particular kind of sociological stranger as follows:
The stranger is thus being discussed here, not in the sense often touched upon in
the past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the
person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is, so to speak, the potential
wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of
coming and going. He is fixed within a particular spatial group, or within a group
whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries. But his position in this group is
determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the
beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the
group itself. (Simmel, 1950, p. 402)
He goes on to argue that this can give the stranger a freedom from entanglement in
family and party interests which occasioned, for example, the historical practice in
some Italian cities of calling in their judges from outside. This freedom, Simmel
argues, can give the stranger’s perceptions and judgements a particular kind of
objectivity not usually granted to the insider.
Nevertheless, some of the nuances of the relationships known to the insiders, and
often going back generations, may forever be withheld from the outside observer. As
Schütz (1964, p. 34) has expressed it:
At best he may be willing and able to share the present and the future with the
approached group in vivid and immediate experience; under all circumstances,
however, he remains excluded from such experiences of its past. Seen from the
point of view of the approached group, he is a man without a history.
On the other hand Schütz, like Simmel, underlines the ways in which the stranger
is more easily able critically to observe events and situations which the insiders may
take for granted as unquestionable ‘truths’:
Yet the stranger, by reason of his personal crisis does not share the above-mentioned
basic assumptions. He becomes essentially the man who has to place in question
nearly everything that seems to be unquestionable to the members of the
approached group. (Schütz, 1964, p. 34)
This is precisely why ethnomethodologists such as Garfinkel, taking up some of
Schütz’s ideas, would set research tasks for their students with the express intention
of making the latter realize the possibilities of making familiar activities ‘anthro-
pologically strange’. Asking students to make observations of the effects of their
acting as polite lodgers in their own homes was one of the most dramatically
disruptive of these research projects (Garfinkel, 1967). Norms, which had previously
been so taken for granted by insiders as to be practically invisible, suddenly became
 Inside
out 487

all too painfully visible when they were being disrupted, and the students were
positioned as outsiders.
When one reads in full the perceptive comments of both Schütz and Simmel on the
situation of the sociological stranger, one is compelled to conclude that both writers
were overwhelmingly predisposed to see what they termed the ‘marginal man’ as
observing from a considerably more favourable analytical vantage point than the
insider. It is plausible, however, to suggest that in both cases their own complicated
life histories, in Austria and Germany respectively, made them to some extent
perpetual outsiders in those societies. In addition, in the case of Schütz his status in
France, and then the US, as an Austrian Jewish refugee from the Nazi Anschluss
must have heightened his awareness of the analytical possibilities of the stranger
position. Yet ultimately his geographical realities seem far less important in this
respect than his mental ones. Zygmunt Bauman (1991) has written at length about
the ‘marginal perspectives’ of European Jewish intellectuals in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. This was true even in those countries such as Germany where
the Jewish ethnic population (whether or not converted to Christianity as was the
case with Simmel’s family) was for long thought to be the most assimilated in
Europe. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, this now of course seems
deeply ironic and indeed tragic. In some senses one could argue that marginal figures
such as Simmel and Schütz were ‘condemned’ to try to understand, and yet never
fully share, the Weltanschauung of the dominant cultures in which they existed from
birth onwards. (I would contend that the somewhat pathetic attempts by Simmel in
his last few years of life to turn himself into a German super-patriot during the ‘Great
War’ only strengthen my case.)
This is important for one of my central arguments, because I would contend that
ideally the researcher should be both inside and outside the perceptions of the
‘researched’. That is to say that, as Hammersley (1993) implied above, both empathy
and alienation are useful qualities for a researcher. I use the word ‘alienation’ here in
its strictly Brechtian sense of distancing or making strange. The word used in the
original German by Brecht is Verfremdung , and hence his famous ‘alienation effect’ in
the theatre is Verfremdungseffekt or V-Effekt. A simplistic explanation of this is that
various theatrical devices can be employed to prevent the audience being sucked into
the world created by the actors on stage. As Willett expressed it:
It is a matter of detachment, of reorientation; exactly what Shelley meant when he
wrote that poetry ‘makes familiar objects to be as if they were not familiar’, or
Schopenhauer when he claimed that art must show ‘common objects of experience
in a light that is at once clear and unfamiliar’. (Willett, 1967, p. 177)
All this obviously has considerable relevance to some of the points made in this
article. (This meaning of alienation must not, however, be confused with the very
different set of meanings given to the concept by Karl Marx, following Hegel, and
made famous through the writings of the former. The noun commonly used by Marx
in the original German is Entfremdung which is subtly different in meaning to
Verfremdung.)
488 D. Hellawell

The pros and cons of researching peers and familiar settings

A much more balanced judgement on the strengths and weaknesses of the positions
of insider and outsider researchers is provided by Hockey (1993) in what is essentially
a review of some of the literature relevant to this debate. The title of the article,
‘Research methods*researching peers and familiar settings’, is significant because in
/

itself it provides a specific definition of what I, nevertheless, consider to be only one

way of placing the researcher on an insider
outsider spectrum. Hockey concentrates
on ethnographic research which, within the sociological field, has some of the most
obvious links to anthropology. In statements such as the following, Hockey’s debt to
the debates within anthropology is self-evident: ‘Traditionally, the accepted approach
to ethnography has been for complete outsiders to learn to be like ‘‘natives’’, all the
while retaining a distance and the perspective it provides’ (Hockey, 1993, p. 201).
Hockey is very quick, however, to point out the strengths of the insider viewpoint:
The advantages of researching in familiar settings, for example the relative lack of
culture shock or disorientation, the possibility of enhanced rapport and commu-
nication, the ability to gauge the honesty and accuracy of responses, and the
likelihood that respondents will reveal more intimate details of their lives to
someone considered empathetic are juxtaposed with the problems that proponents
of insider research nevertheless acknowledge. (Hockey, 1993, p. 199)
Even more advantages of the insider position, along with further disadvantages,
emerge over the course of a very detailed and finely balanced consideration of the
issues. The very way that Hockey’s article is structured means, however, that despite
his awareness of the continuum notion, a dichotomy between insider and outsider
research is almost inevitably established. But a continuum in ethnographic field work
from ‘complete observer’ at one extreme to ‘complete participant’ at the other end,
goes back at least to the very perceptive analysis of the subtle differences of some of
the various points on this continuum by Gold (1958), and the latter refers to even
earlier published methodological variations on this theme.

The use of the insider
outsider continuum as a heuristic device with

doctoral students
It is this notion of a continuum from insider to outsider in the position of the
researcher upon which I now wish to concentrate. This is because of its heuristic
possibilities in discussions with students. I have found that it can be a very
enlightening exercise to ask students which of five possibilities applies most
accurately to their research. These are as follows:
a. How many of you consider you’re doing insider research?
b. How many of you think you’re doing outsider research?
c. How many think you’re doing both?
d. How many think you’re doing neither insider nor outsider research?
e. How many of you simply don’t know where your research fits into this debate?
 Inside
out 489

Obviously these questions can be posed in research seminars and tutorials only after
the terms insider and outsider research have been clarified. But the very fact that all
these possibilities may exist can come as something of a revelation to some students.
It is those students who tick the (b) option who are often the easiest to pick up on.
Frequently, education students who are not researching within the confines of their
own schools or colleges, etc, will immediately respond to the effect that they are
doing outsider research. If, however, you then ask a supplementary question along
the following lines, a more subtle ‘truth’ begins to emerge:
OK so you are not researching within your own organization, and I grant you that
someone who was would be more of an insider. But you are researching into the
workings of other educational organizations. Would you not be much more of an
outsider were you to be researching into the perceptions of, for example, workers on
a car assembly track in the motor manufacturing industry?
(This can have an added impact when addressed to female students who would be
hypothetically faced with a predominantly, if not entirely, adult male work force in
this particular example. This is a gender issue to which I will return later.)

Case study vignettes

The realization then often begins to emerge that there are subtly varying shades of
‘insiderism’ and ‘outsiderism’. The issue may be more one of empathetic, rather than
spatial, closeness or distance. Moreover, it can sometimes become quickly apparent
that the same researcher can slide along more than one insider
outsider continuum,
and in both directions, during the research process. As an example, I am currently
supervising a student who had initially undertaken research at the masters level in her
own school during her days as a secondary schoolteacher. In retrospect, both the
student and I would now see this as a clear example of research tending towards
the insider end of the continuum. She then began to work on a Ph.D. thesis about the
perceptions of a particular section of (entirely male) vocational teachers in an FE
college. During the period of the fieldwork for this research she was first employed on
a part time basis in this same college. Then she worked jointly in this college and a
university. Finally she was employed on a full time basis in the university alone. Her
situation was further complicated by the fact that the vocational teachers in question
worked on a remote site from the main FE college campus.
This student has undertaken a perceptive analysis of her various positions on the
insider
outsider continuum during this research. This was initially triggered by her
professional and occupational moves while doing the research, but it soon moved
beyond that starting point. It is a very illuminating analysis covering spatial,
sociological and psychological considerations and these are also linked to gender
issues. In particular, her growing empathy with her informants, and her realization of
both the potential strengths and weaknesses of this development, have illumined her
analysis. Her increasing understanding of her differing perspectives at various stages
of the research has made her writing admirably reflexive. Her research journal entries
490 D. Hellawell

about the different ways in which she relates to her various informants, and they to
her, together with her retrospective analysis of these entries, show a very sensitive
awareness of the varying ‘research distances’ involved as her own employment
position changed and her understanding of, and empathy with, her interviewees and
their situation deepened (Le Gallais, 2003). What Willard Waller (1965) as long ago
as 1932 referred to as the lengthening and shortening of the rubber band of social
distance is very well exemplified in her analysis of how she attempted to ‘manage’ the
key inter-relationships, and the effects this had on her informants. Indeed, her
analysis could also be read as an exemplification of the researcher stepping inside and
outside the perceptions of the researched.
In fact many contemporary researchers (see Labaree, 2002) would argue that you
can simultaneously be to some extent an insider, and to some extent an outsider, if
you’re involved in qualitative research of this kind. We are, in effect, not talking about
one continuum but about a multiple series of parallel ones. There may be some
elements of insiderness on some dimensions of your research and some elements of
outsiderness on other dimensions. For example, if you’re a female interviewing other
females there may be an element of insiderness on a gender dimension. On the other
hand, if you’re a relatively young female interviewing relatively older females, there
may be an element of outsiderness on an age dimension. In the case of this re-
searcher, she was an insider to the extent that she was initially interviewing
employees of her own organization with whose grievances she had a lot of
sympathy/empathy. But she was an outsider to the extent that she was interviewing
male employees who had formerly been in the construction industry with which she
was not familiar. They made it clear to her, for example, that the language they used
in the interviews would have been very different if they had been interviewed by
another male from the construction industry.
In another case, a male student in his 50s, who had spent a lengthy career in the
civil service and then in higher education (HE), researched into the predominantly
female role of practice managers in the National Health Service (NHS). At first sight
this looked as though this research should be close to the far outsider end of the
continuum, because the student had never had any direct experience of this NHS
role in action, apart from the casual observations made on the visits to his own
general practitioner (GP) which most of us make from time to time. When some of
the complexities of the insider
outsider concept were drawn to his attention,
however, he began to see that there were indeed insider elements in his research. For
one thing he had delivered HE management courses to practice managers and some
of the females he interviewed for his research had attended these courses. Secondly,
and more importantly, he felt, as the research progressed, that his own experiences in
a lengthy public sector career mirrored those of some of the practice managers he
interviewed and he felt considerable empathy with them during some of these
interviews. Certainly he was able to draw on his work experiences with his own
managers when analysing the relationships between practice managers and GPs.
Although this research could not be described as ‘researching peers and familiar
settings’, he did nevertheless have some a priori familiarity with at least some of the
 Inside
out 491

people he was interviewing, and he had, through the management courses he had
delivered, acquired some a priori understanding of the settings in which they worked.
More fundamentally, he realized that he had considerable experience as a public
sector manager fairly low down the managerial hierarchy, and that he was now
interviewing other public sector managers who were very conscious of their own
subordinate positions vis-à-vis GPs. This insight alerted him, for example, to the
potential dangers of becoming sucked into the perspectives of those he interviewed.
Another student I was supervising on her Ed.D. thesis was conducting research
into the appraisal process in the HEI in one of the Arab States in which she worked.
She was unfortunately informed only part way through her fieldwork interviews that
her contract was not going to be renewed at the end of the academic year in question.
She was, however, eventually able to make a virtue out of this potential disaster. She
obtained employment in another HEI in the same country, and was then able to
continue her fieldwork. Now, moreover, she was able to make some fascinating
methodological comparisons between her experiences as an interviewer of staff in an
HEI where she had worked for some considerable time with her experiences in
conducting interviews in an HEI where she was very much a newcomer. Both sets of
experiences could be categorized as ‘insider’ research but there was no doubt that she
felt herself to be much more of an insider in the HEI where she had some 18 months
prior academic experience before the research began. The resulting methodology
chapter in her thesis was one of the most perceptive I have encountered. It is
interesting in this context to quote two lengthy passages from her own later analysis
of these experiences:
At both Rihab University and Al Fanar College [these are pseudonyms], I
undertook insider research, but there were very significant differences between
the two processes. At Rihab I engaged in particularly ‘intimate’ insider research in
that I was well known to most of my informants for eighteen months before my
research began, and had freely expressed my opinions on my research topic. By
contrast, at Al Fanar, my research was of a much less ‘intimate’ nature because my
informants had known me less than a year, and I had deliberately chosen not to
discuss in any context anything related to my research topic. This difference had
particular implications for my interviewing style, a point to which I will return later.
(Mercer, 2004, p. 58)
. . . in order not to appear hopelessly naı̈ve, it may be necessary for the insider
interviewer to acknowledge certain realities that are considered to be common
knowledge by the informants, and to phrase their questions accordingly. (Hellawell
& Hancock, 2001, p. 4) Berreman (1987), for example, found he got a better
response from people when his questions assumed polygamy existed, than when he
tried to find out whether or not it existed. On the other hand, this strategy can
obviously rebound if the meanings the interviewer assumes are shared, in fact, are
not. In all honesty, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think there were definitely
times at Rihab when I allowed a long shared history and an intimate involvement
with my informants to inflate the amount of common knowledge I inadvertently
thought could be assumed. I took care to avoid the same mistake at Al Fanar. (Ibid.,
p. 64)
492 D. Hellawell

Another student I am currently supervising is researching into aspects of a working

partnership between an HEI in the UK and another HEI in China as the focus of a
doctorate of business administration (DBA). She is the major link person from the
UK side, and makes frequent working visits to China. She was already experiencing
the familiar tensions and confusions of the go-between role before the research as
such began. The full extent and nature of these complexities had not, however, been
consciously grasped by her until she began some extensive reading into reflexivity
and auto-ethnography. I would contend that this reading, and the discussions
surrounding it, have not only greatly enhanced her reflexivity but have also helped
her to face the dilemmas which are an inevitable concomitant of facing both ways
between two very different cultures. The following quotations from a paper she has
written as one of her DBA assessment requirements (Ringwald, 2004, unnumbered)
illustrate some of the insights that her understanding of the insider
outsider
continuum has provided.
As I continued to reflect, two issues for my research emerged. When looking at
relationships in China and UK I consider myself to be an insider in UK and an
outsider in China. However, when undertaking the research for my first paper I was
surprised to find that some of my (UK) colleagues suspect that I have ‘gone native’
through my involvement in China and therefore regard me as something of an
outsider. In China I have become part of the local team, I am seen to have made a
real effort to understand Chinese culture, I observe the social conventions, I clearly
love the country and therefore people I have worked closely with for years consider
me to be in part an insider. What or where is the reality?

If I am researching both Chinese and UK partners in these relationships, then I

have assumed I will be taking an ethnographic/auto-ethnographic approach. If this
is so, then I must first understand myself before I can understand others . . .
I now accept that I can use the insider/outsider situation to my advantage, if
through a process of self-reflection, I understand who and what I am. ‘Knowing the
self and knowing the subject are intertwined, partial, historical, local knowledges’
(Richardson 2000, p.929).

Conclusion
To summarize, I am arguing that a consideration by students of where their doctoral
research falls on a series of insider
outsider continua is one way of guiding students
into what is often the secret garden of reflexivity. There are obviously many other
ways of approaching this important territory, but it is my contention that this is
potentially a highly promising entry point. The quality of the research diaries and
journals of some of my students has improved quite dramatically once they have
begun to reflect critically on their own perceptions of where they stand in relation to
their informants, and just as, if not more, significantly, what they consider to be the
informants’ perceptions of this relationship. In some cases this breakthrough into
reflexivity has been something akin to a religious conversion in the suddenness of the
revelation and its long-lasting consequences.
 Inside
out 493

One of the four students referred to above talked in a tutorial about her experience
of gaining an understanding of the nature of reflexivity. She argued that it had
resembled her attempts to see those hidden pictures in ambiguous drawings used in
books on perception. Once the picture has been revealed, often only after
considerable effort, it’s hard, she argued, to understand why you couldn’t see it
before. What’s more, it’s then virtually impossible to see the drawing without seeing
the hidden picture. I would contend, moreover, that such consideration of reflexivity
does not need to be triggered by the fact that the researcher is clearly in an insider
position. Even for those students who consider their research to be at the extreme
outsider end of a continuum, some analysis by them of why they have this perspec-
tive may be just as fruitful in its enhancement of reflexivity. In reality, some of these
students may well decide after some due reflection that there are, in fact, a variety of
continua to consider, and that there are disguised insider elements in their research
after all.

Acknowledgements
My thanks go to the four researchers who not only gave me permission to quote their
work but also approved my summaries of their ‘case studies’. They are in alphabetical
order by surname: Bob Bates, Tricia Le Gallais, Justine Mercer and Kath Ringwald.
In researching into their research, I certainly felt myself to be both insider and
outsider, although not necessarily simultaneously. I am also grateful to two
anonymous referees and to Peter Earley and Richard Hatcher for their helpful
comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Note
1. Because so many of the writers I refer to in this article use the male forms of pronouns,
possessive adjectives et cetera, to cover both male and female observers, I have not wanted to
litter the article with (sic) to indicate my awareness of the fact that this is now anachronistic.

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