Through the Looking Glass Space to New Ways of Knowing: A Personal Research Narrative

Abstract

This article describes how writing personal research narratives during my doctoral research journey challenged my role as a health professional and my personal beliefs and values in fundamental ways. In qualitative narrative inquiry, the reflexive account of the research experience is a key element in conducting ethical, rigorous, and meaningful forms of qualitative research. However, as a novice researcher, I was unprepared for the unlearning journey I experienced during the research process. This uncomfortable experience cut to the core of my identity by dismantling unexamined belief and value systems that lay dormant and hidden from my everyday consciousness as a health professional. In the spirit of transparency, reflexivity and “good” qualitative research, this article presents an explicit account of my exquisite and sometimes excruciating reflexive research journey that profoundly changed how I relate and work with people. I believe health care professionals should adopt a narrative view of experience that creates the “looking glass space” to locate their own stories within the broader socio-cultural and historical context of their lives, especially in relation to their health professional identity. Exchanging diminishing dialogue with deeper dialogue honours both the complexities of young peoples’ lives and social worlds and encompasses socially-conscious methodologies of promise and hope.