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

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.