REFLEXIVITY, BRACKETING AND PERSONAL BIAS

The phenomenological grounds this project rest on considering the engagement with and bracketing of personal assumptions and biases significant as one immerses oneself into the data. Therefore a reflexive stance was highly significant in terms of assisting the process of engaging with personal biases. Personal reflexivity involves “(…) reflecting upon the ways in which our own values, experiences, interests, beliefs, political commitments, wider aims in life and social identities have shaped the research. It also involves thinking about how the research may have affected and possibly changed us, as people and as researchers” (Willig, 2001, p.10). I was therefore more interested in recognising and capturing personal biases by articulating and making sense of them rather than over-concerned about their minimisation. The relativistic nature of my own ontological stance towards intersubjectivity and the psychotherapy for psychosis required reflexive bracketing,

which was focused on making personal values and cultural suppositions transparent prior to conducting interviews. What also assisted this process was the writing of the ‘Preface’ in which I have reflectively introduced and explored myself as the researcher and author of this piece of work, and how personal experiences have given shape to it. Overall, the reflexive process involved reflexive bracketing which demanded the development of a “thoughtful, conscious self-awareness” (Finlay, 2002, p. 532). Although complete bracketing of personal assumptions was impossible, such bracketing facilitated greater transparency in the research process (Walters, 1995). As Gyulay, Mound and Flanagan (1994, p.33) have stressed, “The investigators disciplined themselves to keep original assumptions and judgments separate in order to remain open to the emerging data. Although it is impossible to be totally free of bias, this technique helps reduce bias”.

The initial method which was employed in order to track and engage with personal bias comprised of the practice of reflecting and recording these processes in my reflexive diary, which started in the early stages of the research design, proceeded through the data collection and analysis phases and ended with the project’s final interpretative position. One of the major purposes of the diary was to facilitate ‘epoche’ by being in touch with my reflections and thoughts that I intentionally had to set aside including value judgments of the data. Early notes kept in my reflexive diary included examples of personal experiences of working therapeutically with people diagnosed with psychosis and supervision notes from my clinical work. Moreover, it included reflections of several definitions of intersubjectivity which I came across throughout the exploration of the literature, and how I finally decided to apply the concept for the purposes of the project.

Moving further into the consideration of reflexivity on the process of conducting the interviews, one important issue which needs to be addressed concerns my strong sense that pre-understandings and personal experiences had a positive effect on my interviewing style as they provided the space for more insight throughout the process of assisting participants into a detailed exploration of their own accounts. Having had the experience to work relationally with psychosis in the past, I could partly relate to participants’ experiences, which I assume was implicitly

communicated through my responses. Moreover, the process of attending as thoughtfully as possible to participants’ narratives was interrupted occasionally. Sometimes a part of me felt detached from participants in my effort to set aside my pre-understandings, while at the same time another part felt fully involved within the intersubjective space of the interview through a dynamic process of participatory sense-making, mutual incorporation, and dialogic connectedness. This dynamic process prompted the necessity to orchestrate the appropriate amount of distance and closeness to participants, which despite its challenges, proved to strengthen my reflective capacities during the interviews and assisted the interaction and cooperativeness between participants and myself. As discussed by Reid, Flowers and Larkin (2005), participant-researcher interaction is a particular strength of IPA as this method explicitly acknowledges its influence in the analytic process. The notion of intersubjectivity, which was employed as a discursive tool, helped to elucidate the complex ways my thinking and feeling were intertwined into the interview process, and thus became an integral part of them. The process of separating personal past knowledge and experiences from participant’s accounts has been a significantly challenging task. During the interviews, I often had a strong sense that I was taking up contradictory stances that generated an internal conflict on both a cognitive and an emotional level, which was experienced as an inseparable part of the bracketing process. Below, I present an excerpt taken from my reflexive diary that demonstrates the process of critical self-reflection with regards to the ethics of staying as close as possible to the participant’s narrative during the interpretative process:

“I am reading again and again the passage in the transcript where Paula is describing her experience of dissociation with a client during a moment of feeling disconnected and struggling to make sense of the client’s narrative. I remember vividly where I had a ‘eureka’ moment and what vibrantly came to mind was Merleau-Ponty’s concept of self-alterity. I caught myself in a process of detaching from the participant and indulging myself with reflections on phenomenological approaches to self- alterity. I remember catching myself thinking: Is her expressed difficulty to make sense of her own experience not exclusively caused by something

external, outside of herself i.e. the client’s otherness? Can we say that it’s an experience of self-alterity? In other words is she experiencing self as Other in that moment of dissociation? She understands dissociation as an outcome of not being able to make sense and right there in a parallel process I was detaching from her in my effort of what felt like actually making sense of her experience, however in this process I have ‘lost’ the participant and myself within that space and I did not stay to explore further what was that experience of dissociation like for her and not for me! I lost a big opportunity to help her elaborate on her own experience and I must be careful not to construct meaning out of her own experience devoid of her own contribution in that, when I develop her themes. I must be careful not to represent within her themes an imposition of my own interpretation by using the concept of self-alterity’s in a manner which is far away from the core of her experience. But even If I do so, will she appreciate me exploring her experience from that angle, my own otherness, or will she experience it as me being positioned in a way she cannot relate to? More importantly, will she feel that I was not paying enough attention to her story? Have I ‘betrayed’ her openness? Feeling guilty and confused” (Personal Reflexive Diary, 15th March 2014)

Moreover, being fully involved meant that I was allowing the voices of subjectivity to emerge authentically in coming to an understanding of what the participants meant in their personal accounts. These conflicting polarities often brought strong feelings of vulnerability and helplessness to the fore, connecting me with personal memories of working therapeutically with people experiencing psychosis. A parallel process was taking place that was powerful enough to affect my embodiment at certain moments. Some of the participants’ responses and reflections on specific clients that came up during the interviews provoked varying emotional impacts on my own personal recollections of past clients. It was, therefore, helpful to keep detailed notes in my reflexive diary about the emotional impacts “...in order to prevent the worse excesses of the projection of the researcher’s own subjectivity in to the research itself and also to maximize the possibility of discovering that which was

otherwise hidden in the data” (Langdridge, 2007, p. 80). Below I present an excerpt taken from my reflexive diary that was recorded right after Carla’s interview. It demonstrates a moment of strong dialogic connectedness and my emergent need to disclose a similar experience with the one she was narrating. Even though I had finally decided not to disclose what I was going through while attending to the description of her vivid experience, my own response was recorded and taken into consideration when developing her themes in order to protect the process of theme development from the impact my own past experiences:

“Touching and being touched…containing and being contained…I remembered my client _______ as Carla is speaking here. I remember her eyes as she was expressing how she was emotionally impacted when she kindly touched the client on the shoulder to contain him. I remembered our last meeting with _______ on the ward before he committed suicide. I felt completely connected to Carla. An experience of merging…I felt that I was containing her but I also felt contained. Tears came to my eyes and I struggled not to share this. I didn’t…I should have…I shouldn’t…I tried to swallow what I felt and thought. Why did I do that? I had to give Carla the space she needed to explore this. This was not my time. But it was OUR time together. There was so much ambivalence then and now. I crossed my legs and I started coughing. I felt so confused, sad and nostalgic” (Personal Reflexive Diary, 2nd February 2015)

Despite challenges similar to the one described above, a phenomenological attitude during the interviews helped the bracketing of experiences and pre- understandings of several areas that were explored with participants such as intersubjectivity, delusions, hallucinations, the psychotherapy of psychosis etc. Even though bracketing was never fully achieved, by being cautious and recording my biases supported the analysis of data and my efforts to take an ethical stance towards participants’ otherness. My familiarity with the phenomenological method – having being trained in E-P psychotherapy – assisted my interviewing style by focusing on the essences and structure of the phenomena and their underlying universals.