Exploring Researcher-Participant Relationship in a Multiethnic, Multicultural and Multilingual Context Through Reflexivity

• Main Author: Renganathan, Sumathi
• Format: Article
• Published: RMIT Publishing 2010
• Subjects: L Education (General)
• Online Access: http://www.informit.com.au/qrj.html; http://eprints.utp.edu.my/4060/
• Institution: Universiti Teknologi Petronas

Exploring the Researcher–Participant Relationship in a Multiethnic, Multicultural and Multilingual Context Through Reflexivity Sumathi Renganathan UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI PETRONAS ABSTRACT In this paper I explore the notion of reflexivity in two main domains. In the first, I explore my struggles as a trained objective, positivist researcher trying to embrace and appreciate subjective qualitative research practices. In the second section, I explore the dynamic relationship between myself, the researcher and my participants, focusing on issues related to ethnicity and power. Generally, research that explores ethnicity and power relationships commonly depicts the researcher as the privileged self compared with the participants as the marginalised other. However, in this paper I illustrate how this relationship in a multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual research context is much more complex and multifaceted than usually acknowledged. Moreover, this was further complicated by the researcher’s own experience in relation to the issue under investigation, which was different from that of the participants. Keywords: Reflexivity, power, ethnicity, ESL, multilingual, multicultural.