Okay, here's something to be aware of because I'm seeing more and more of this in research papers. It's kind of like a woke ritual meditation about their intersectional positionality and how they approach the data.
These aren't methods per se, even though they're usually within the methods section, but really they're just emotional statements that are reflecting on their privilege that they believe somehow helps them mitigate their bias when they're analyzing the data for their paper.
It's really awkward and strange. Let me show you.
In this paper, this subsection of the methods is called "Reflexivity and Rigor." They claim that one of the authors' "experience as a Black, gender-fluid, queer clinician and academic with expertise in crisis safety planning, informed the research questions and interview guide," whereas the second and third authors are, quote, "white heterosexual cisgender women."
Now listen to this whole section, okay? I'm going to quote it in full.
"To ensure reflexive analysis, the first and second authors met throughout the analysis and write-up of the study's findings to discuss their assumptions and perspectives of the participant responses, codes, and emerging themes. These ongoing dialogues created intentional spaces to question ideas and examine how each author's social location informed their meaning-making. The authors also shared excerpts from analytic memos created during coding, which captured the first and second authors' emotional reactions to the transcripts and their analytic insights. This collaborative and reflexive process deepened the authors' understanding of the data and helped to manage bias, thus ensuring a thoughtfully interrogated analysis."
This is totally bizarre stuff, and just unthinkable for me, as it really just defeats the entire purpose of a double-blind peer-review process.
Rather than making the authors totally anonymous and unknown to the reviewers so they aren't biasing their reviews on the immutable characteristics of the authors, intimate details about the authors' skin color and sexuality and other things are foregrounded.
Honestly, while the authors claim this is done to mitigate their bias in analysis, I think it's actually done as a signal to reviewers that the authors are these good, progressive, and deeply empathetic people who are doing the so-called work and want to be treated softly in the review process.
