RESEARCHER POSITIONALITY IN QUALITATIVE AND MIXED-METHODS RESEARCH: THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS, PRACTICAL CHALLENGES, AND REFLEXIVE STRATEGIES

Researcher positionality — the constellation of a researcher's social identities, prior experiences, values, and epistemological commitments that shape every stage of the research process — has received increasing attention in qualitative and mixed-methods educational research over the past three decades. Yet many researchers, particularly those conducting their first large-scale study, encounter positionality as an abstract methodological requirement rather than a genuinely lived challenge with concrete consequences for data quality, interpretive validity, and ethical rigour. This article reviews the theoretical foundations of positionality as a methodological concept, examines the specific challenges it poses across the research cycle — from question formulation through data collection, analysis, and representation — and synthesises the reflexive strategies that the literature recommends for managing its influence productively. Particular attention is given to the distinctive positionality challenges faced by researchers who study their own communities, those who hold ideological commitments to the populations they research, and those conducting educational research in non-Western institutional contexts where Western methodological frameworks do not translate straightforwardly. The article argues that positionality is not a problem to be solved but a resource to be managed — and that researchers who engage with it honestly produce more trustworthy, more contextually grounded, and ultimately more useful knowledge than those who treat it as a methodological inconvenience to be minimised or concealed.