Reflexivity

In embarking on a doctoral project investigating the history of tobacco control in Poland, from the outset I was aware that the issue of researcher positionality would be of considerable importance. Tobacco control has been a field I have been involved in for several years, and to which I have strong professional and personal links. My views on issues surrounding tobacco control are neither objective nor detached, nor could they ever become that. My work and family background, and my studies in the field of public health, have taught me to think of unrestrained access to good health as one of the virtues of a well-functioning society, and weak regulation of tobacco as a major inhibiting factor for achieving this positive outcome.

From 2008 I have volunteered my time in anti-tobacco advocacy, and from 2012 I have worked as a researcher and analyst in a health advocacy organisation, the Health Promotion Foundation (HPF). The HPF was one of the key institutional actors involved in tobacco control efforts in the 1990s. From its establishment in 1991 it has conducted some of the country’s largest mass health education campaigns, including the Great Polish Smokeout, and was heavily involved in lobbying in favour of the Anti-tobacco Law. Inevitably, a significant portion of my research on the post- 1989 period was therefore devoted to investigating an organisation with which I have been, and continue to be, professionally involved.

However, my connection with tobacco control has been much more intimate than just spending a few years working for a public health NGO. My father, Witold Zatoński, has been closely involved with tobacco control since the 1980s. In 1982 he became the General Secretary of the Polish Anti-tobacco society, and in 1991 he founded the Health Promotion Foundation. For decades he was the head of Cancer Control and Epidemiology at the Warsaw Cancer Centre. He was the first and most important person to shape my views about the importance of civil society involvement in public health, and about cigarettes being something far more sinister than just another consumer good. Using the distinction described by Evered and Louis in 1981, my

research was closer to ‘inquiry from the inside’, rather than from the ‘outside’.11 _{This background}

meant that I had to pay special attention to positionality and reflexivity at every step of this project, from the design, through data collection, to data analysis and reporting.

11 _{R. Evered and M. R. Louis, "Alternative Perspectives in the Organizational Sciences: "Inquiry from the}

112 My positionality as a public health advocate brought with it some benefits. As Ilja Maso points out, a researchers’ passions and prejudices can also fuel their willingness to pursue the ‘truth’, and indeed, my practice in tobacco control advocacy in Poland has driven me towards embarking on a PhD investigating its history.12 _{Thanks to my insider status, I had a deep prior understanding}

of the community from which many of my interviewees hailed, and shared an experience base with many of them.13 _{On a practical level, this made it easier to convince some of the key}

informants to participate in my research – although I did my best to avoid making them feel coerced into doing so due to our pre-existing relationships, I made the voluntary nature of participation explicit, and I accepted refusals without further probing.14 _{More importantly, it}

helped me establish rapport, respect, and a shared language with many of the participants.15 _My

prior knowledge of the field they operated in meant that I was in the position of someone who was ‘empirically literate’ on the subject of my research, making it easier to draw out the more detailed and implicit data.16

On the other hand, my proximity to the object of my research posed serious challenges to its reliability and validity, and also to my capacity to access some data. Every researcher brings with themselves a baggage of emotions, experiences, values, prejudices and personal agenda. Every research project is a subjective enterprise, and must thus employ rules and considerations which can help control for this subjectivity.17 _{In my case, given both my professional and personal}

connections with tobacco control in Poland, this was particularly important.

Some of the interviewees were my peers and workplace colleagues. Others, while never having met me before, were aware of my professional and personal backgrounds. In designing my

12 _{I. Maso, "Necessary subjectivity: exploiting researchers’ motives, passions and prejudices in pursuit of}

answering ‘true’ questions," in Reflexivity: A practical guide for researchers in health and social sciences, ed. L. Finlay and B Gough(Oxford: Blackwell Science Ltd, 2008).

13 _{V. K. Kanuha, ""Being" native versus "going native": conducting social work research as an insider," Social}

work 45, no. 5 (2000); M. E. Asselin, "Insider research: issues to consider when doing qualitative research in your own setting," J Nurses Staff Dev 19, no. 2 (2003).

14 _{T. McConnell-Henry et al., "Researching with people you know: issues in interviewing," Contemp Nurse}

34, no. 1 (2009).

15 _{J. Taylor, "The intimate insider: negotiating the ethics of friendship when doing insider research,"}

Qualitative Research 11, no. 1 (2011); F. McDermid et al., "Conducting qualitative research in the context of pre-existing peer and collegial relationships," Nurse Res 21, no. 5 (2014).

16 _{S. Roseneil, "Greenham Revisited: Researching Myself and My Sisters," in Interpreting the Field: Accounts}

of Ethnography, ed. D. Hobbs and T. May(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Taylor, "The intimate insider: negotiating the ethics of friendship when doing insider research."

17 _{Maso, "Necessary subjectivity: exploiting researchers’ motives, passions and prejudices in pursuit of}

113 interview schedules, and in interpreting the interviews, I therefore closely followed Corbin Dwyer and Buckle’s admonition to remain committed to represent accurately the data collected, while being open to my role in inevitably shaping interpretations.18 _{I informed my participants that I}

wanted to hear their opinions and memories of the events and that they should not assume that I had extensive prior knowledge of what happened (or that I was asking questions to which I knew the answers already), in an attempt to avoid missing useful data.19 _{Whenever during data}

analysis it became clear that some data has been shared through innuendo or vague comments, due to the interviewee’s perception that I would understand what they meant because of my familiarity with the subject area, follow-up contact was established to clarify what their intended meaning was.20 _{In interviewing participants with whom I have worked before I made it explicit}

that for the duration of the interview we were interacting in a professional context, in an attempt to minimise the possibility of blurring the boundaries between the research and our collegial relations.21 _{For that reason, I attempted always to conduct the interviews in locations that would}

facilitate this, preferably work offices or neutral spaces such as cafes, rather than the

participants’ homes. Fortunately, I have not been placed in a position in which I would consider omitting reporting certain data due to the fear of repercussions, which can be a common challenge for interviews with people with whom there is a pre-existing relationship.22

In my research and analysis I was determined to do everything I could in order to mitigate what Michael Pertschuk, a prominent American public health advocate and later chronicler of US social justice movements, called the ‘inevitable distortions of judgement flowing from that very

closeness to the issues and people involved.’23 _{I took several precautions to moderate the bias. I}

sought not to write a history based on individual agency and constructed a conceptual framework that favoured structural explanations. I did my best to triangulate each claim, especially made in interviews, with archival data.

18 _{S. Corbin Dwyer and J. L. Buckle, "The Space Between: On Being an Insider-Outsider in Qualitative}

Research," International Journal of Qualitative Methods 8, no. 1 (2009).

19 _{D. DeLyser, ""Do You Really Live Here?" Thoughts on Insider Research," Geographical Review 91, no. 1/2}

(2001); L. J. Breen, "The researcher 'in the middle': Negotiating the insider/outsider dichotomy," The Australian Community Psychologist 19, no. 1 (2007).

20 _{Kanuha, ""Being" native versus "going native": conducting social work research as an insider."} 21 _{C. Gunasekara, "Pivoting the centre: reflections on undertaking qualitative interviewing in academia,"}

Qualitative Research 7, no. 4 (2007).

22 _{J. Mercer, "The challenges of insider research in educational institutions: wielding a double-edged sword}

and resolving delicate dilemmas," Oxford Review of Education 33, no. 1 (2007).

114 Nonetheless, despite my best efforts, certain limitations resulting from my fraught positionality were impossible to eliminate. First, an important organisation investigated in this research was the Health Promotion Foundation. It is an organisation in which I have been personally involved for many years, and am emotionally invested in.24 _{This opened the possibility of having}

internalised a lack of objectivity about its achievements, or insider blindness, which made attaining analytic distance more difficult.25 _{On one hand, having worked for a long time in the}

HPF I had an in-depth understanding of the organisation, which facilitated the process of identifying and locating the sources relevant to this research.26 _{On the other hand achieving}

authenticity in my research demanded constant attention to reflexivity – I have been taught to think about the past of the Foundation in the context of its tobacco control successes of the 1990s and had to prompt myself to formulate questions and evaluate data in a way that would not presume this interpretation and open to other narratives that might emerge.

Second, nearly all of my interviewees were well aware of my father’s anti-smoking activity, and knew that I am his son. In several cases, they referred to this directly (You want to know why tobacco control in Poland was successful? The answer is your dad). Some expressed surprise that I was interviewing them at all, suggesting that my father knew more about tobacco policy development in Poland than anyone else. This attitude was especially prevalent among

respondents from the field of public health, although several of the interviewed politicians, and even tobacco industry executives voiced similar opinions. It is also not unreasonable to suspect that my personal and professional backgrounds, as well as my affiliation with a public health school, made it more difficult to access some interviewees, in particular more tobacco industry representatives, and in result eliciting dissenting views on tobacco control efforts in Poland. To make sure the participants did not think I expected them to talk primarily about my father’s contribution, I informed them, both in the participant information sheet sent ahead of the interview, and personally at the beginning of the interview, that I was particularly interested in structural factors, as well as their personal experiences. I also made it clear to each of them that they could choose for the interview to remain anonymous and fully confidential. Nonetheless,

24 _{M. Alvesson, "Methodology for close up studies - struggling with closenes and closure," Higher Education}

46, no. 2 (2003); T. Brannick and D. Coghlan, "In Defense of Being “Native”: The Case for Insider Academic Research," Organizational Research Methods 10, no. 1 (2007).

25 _{Taylor, "The intimate insider: negotiating the ethics of friendship when doing insider research."} 26 _{T. Zdrojewski, "Presentation at Conference on Smoke-free Poland,"(Ministry of Health, Warsaw 2016).}

115 there is no way of telling for sure whether any of the respondents were deterred from speaking openly, and from voicing any criticism they might have of my father’s work.

In discussions with my supervisors the concern emerged that in my attempts to avoid bias that could stem from my family background, I might end up introducing the opposite bias and marginalise individual agency in cases where it was of key importance. However, I did my best to let the data speak for themselves and I hope that the mixture of structural and individual factors that have emerged in my conclusion as having shaped the tobacco control story in Poland are a fair representation of the historical reality.

116