The Component of 'Self' in Research: A Self-Reflexive Approach

The feminist voice (Reinharz, 1992) invites the researcher's personal experiential data in the material as embodied knowing, and self-reflexivity uses "feedback" from the materials or writing to admit new possibilities (Schon, 1983 ; Steier, 1995). Through a combined feminist and self-reflexive framework, a chronological account of the development of my epistemological awareness is explored. This paper demonstrates the self-reflexively functioning researcher through the illustration of a self-reflexive ethnographic approach (Ellis & Bochner, 2000) to the relationship between epistemology and (my) self.