Positionality refers to how a researcher’s identity, shaped by factors like race, gender, class and lived experience, influences the research process. Acknowledging your positionality is vital, particularly when researching within marginalised communities or sensitive areas like Social, Personal, and Health Education (SPHE). Articulating your positionality enables the receiver of research to understand your perspective and to interpret what you are saying in that context.

Traditionally, positionality has been understood in binary terms: insiders and outsiders. An insider is a researcher who shares a common identity, lived experience, or background with the community or group being studied, providing them with a pre-existing cultural or contextual understanding. An outsider is a researcher who does not share the key identity characteristics, lived experiences or background of the community or group being studied, often bringing a more distanced or so-called objective perspective.

However, there are limitations in interpreting positionality in these binary terms because, by its nature, positionality is ‘messy’ (Vicars, 2008, p.97) and can shift over time and contexts (Bukamal, 2022). Since our identities are intersectional, we are always insiders on some dimensions and outsiders on others. Therefore, it is more productive to view positionality as a spectrum of insiderness (Chavez, 2008).  For social justice research, insiderness is crucial for understanding and challenging systemic injustices. To grasp the complexity of marginalisation, researchers must be able to understand it from the perspective of those experiencing it. Some of the key benefits of harnessing insiderness include:

• Deeper Contextual Understanding: insiderness enables greater appreciation of a group’s norms and history and the nuances associated with different ideas;
• Increased Trust and Access: shared identity fosters immediate rapport and trust. This is essential for overcoming the inherent power dynamics;
• Enhanced Credibility: insiderness lends credibility among research participants. This helps ensure their stories are understood and represented accurately

There are challenges associated with insiderness that also need to be understood, however. Rigour can be threatened if a researcher is unable to navigate and adequately articulate their closeness to the research. Being too close can also lead to assumed familiarity, where the researcher overlooks common practices or where personal biases influence interpretation. The researcher may also struggle with the dual roles of being a group member and a researcher, leading to conflicts of interest. The key to managing these challenges lies in reflexivity, which, essentially, is the continuous process of self-interrogation. Researchers must consciously reflect on how their positionality is shaping the research at every stage, documenting assumptions and deliberately bracketing personal preconceptions (Patnaik, 2013).

By embracing the fluidity of an insider/outsider spectrum and making critical reflexivity central to our practice, we can harness the power of insider knowledge. This allows us to produce ethically sound, rigorous, and truly socially just research that reflects the lived realities of marginalized communities.