Reflective Journaling
There are many ways to practice reflective journaling. Your style is unique to how you want to utilize your autoethnographic gaze. Reflective journaling is a common practice among qualitative researchers to maintain an ongoing reflexive account of their negotiation of various subject positions, construction of knowledge, process through/with/against such knowledge is constructed, emotional reactions to the process of data collection, hunches, and any other information that the researcher feels is relevant to understanding her own processes of making sense of data, including the questioning of what is "data" in some cases.
If you are new to qualitative research, think of reflective journaling as a research journal. As much as it might seem tedious at first, if you practice writing just a bit every time you read an article, a book chapter, transcribe your data, manage your data into codes and categories, and/or analyze your data, you would be surprised at the amount of work you have already completed when it comes to writing "up" your data.
Because you are the research instrument and the data analyzer, as Kamala Visweswaran says in Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, you should do your homework before you do your fieldwork. For those of us who work to interrogate social structures, we question our own positioning in the research and how we might perhaps animating the condition that we are trying to oppose.
Reflective journaling is a direct reflection of your epistemology and how you want to document your "data." I am presenting three examples below from my work as part of my reflecting journaling. The first two examples are examples of journaling during a participant research project while I was in graduate school. The second, is a more recent reflection as I work towards an article about how disciplining of knowlegde occurs in higher education to streamline certain kinds of research as "fundable research."
Example 2: Reflective journaling during participant observation
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