Teaching Reflexivity in Qualitative Interviewing

Reflexivity has gained paramount status in qualitative inquiry. It is central to debates on subjectivity, objectivity, and, ultimately, the scientific foundation of social science knowledge and research. Although much work on doing reflexivity by researchers and practitioners has been published, scholars have only recently begun to explore how one goes about teaching reflexivity in qualitative research. This paper contributes to the endeavour by first identifying challenges of teaching reflexivity. It then describes how I use an existing data set and hands-on learning as complementary strategies to teach reflexiv-ity in a course on qualitative interviewing. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of teaching reflexivity in sociology in general and in qualitative research methods in particular.