2027 Writing a Reflexivity Statement as a Practitioner-Researcher
Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist
When you research a healthcare setting where you also work, your access and expertise can strengthen the study - but your role can also shape what people tell you and how you interpret it. A reflexivity statement makes those influences visible.
This guide is for healthcare administrators, clinicians, and students conducting practitioner-led research. It explains what to disclose, how to connect your position to concrete research decisions, and how to protect participants. You will leave with examples and a process for drafting a statement that is candid without becoming a personal essay.
Key Things You Should Know
- A strong reflexivity statement identifies your professional role, relationship to participants, assumptions, and the specific steps you took to examine their influence on the study.
- Disclosing a possible bias is not a substitute for addressing it: explain decisions such as using an independent interviewer, recording analytic memos, or checking interpretations against contrary evidence.
- For qualitative interviews, the 32-item COREQ reporting checklist includes researcher characteristics and relationships with participants; use such guidance alongside your journal's requirements, not as a substitute for ethical review.
What Is a Reflexivity Statement in Practitioner-Research?
A reflexivity statement explains how a researcher's position may have influenced a study and what they did in response. A practitioner-researcher studies a field in which they also work, sometimes within their own organization. Their professional knowledge can sharpen the research question, while their authority, relationships, and expectations can affect recruitment, interviews, and interpretation.
Reflexivity is more than declaring, "I may be biased." It connects a particular position to a particular research decision. For example, an administrator studying planning a healthcare administration bachelor's transfer might understand employees' education barriers firsthand but also favor pathways their organization already supports. The statement should describe how that perspective informed the study and how alternatives were considered.
Why Is Reflexivity Important in Healthcare Administration Research?
Healthcare administration research often concerns staffing, access, quality, costs, or organizational change. Employees may worry that criticism will reach a supervisor; patients may believe participation will affect their care. An insider researcher may also interpret a workflow problem as an individual performance issue because that is how their organization normally measures it.
Reflexivity helps readers judge how the research was produced, not whether the researcher achieved impossible neutrality. In a study of advancement and career options in healthcare administration and management, for instance, a manager should consider whether employees feel safe describing limited promotion opportunities. That concern affects who agrees to participate and which conclusions the evidence can support.
What Should a Practitioner-Researcher Include in a Reflexivity Statement?
Include information that could reasonably change how readers interpret the findings. The following elements provide a useful drafting framework; not every personal characteristic belongs in every paper.
- Relevant position: Your job, professional background, organizational affiliation, and whether you are an insider or outsider to the setting.
- Relationships and interests: Any supervisory authority, prior contact with participants, responsibility for the program studied, or stake in its perceived success.
- Starting assumptions: Expectations that influenced the question, interview prompts, or initial reading of the evidence.
- Research decisions: How your position affected recruitment, data collection, analysis, and reporting - and what you did to examine those effects.
- Remaining limits: Influences your procedures could not eliminate.
Relevance matters more than exhaustive disclosure. An administrator studying whether employees can access less expensive healthcare administration degree options should disclose a role in tuition-benefit decisions, if applicable. Unrelated details about the administrator's life would add little unless they affected the research.
Start with what you do, where your authority begins and ends, and how you gained access to the setting. Then state whether participants knew you in your professional role before the study. "I am a hospital administrator" is less informative than "I oversee scheduling on the unit studied but do not supervise the interview participants."
Distinguish access from influence. A leader who can introduce researchers to staff may not make employment decisions, but staff may still perceive that leader as influential. Likewise, a practitioner studying accelerated healthcare leadership study beyond the master's level should say whether they recruit colleagues, advise prospective students, or stand to benefit from the program being evaluated. Describe the relationship as participants might experience it, not only as an organizational chart defines it.
Name an assumption precisely enough to show how you tested it. If you expected a new staffing process to improve communication, explain whether interview questions allowed staff to describe worsening communication and whether you examined accounts that contradicted your expectation. Do not claim that a reflexive journal or second coder "removed" bias; explain what those practices helped you notice or challenge.
Power requires separate attention. A supervisor's invitation can feel obligatory even when it says participation is voluntary. An independent recruiter or interviewer may reduce that pressure, although it cannot erase participants' awareness of the supervisor's role. Similar concerns arise when an education administrator evaluates accelerated healthcare-focused MBA degrees while advising employees about enrollment: their preferences may influence both the questions asked and whose experience is heard.
A statement should identify risks arising from your role and the protections used - not merely say that the study was "ethical." Describe who invited participants, who could access identifiable information, and whether managers could see individual responses. In a small department, removing names may not prevent colleagues from recognizing someone from their job title or a quoted incident; explain how you handled that risk in reporting.
Follow your institution's process for determining whether a project requires institutional review board review or qualifies as quality improvement; do not make that determination solely from the label you prefer. Address applicable privacy and data-security requirements separately. For example, a researcher comparing online MHA programs through CAHME accreditation might interview employees about education decisions. Accreditation information may be public, but employees' accounts still require appropriate consent, access controls, and careful reporting. Reflexivity documents these decisions; it does not replace formal review or consent.
Draft the statement after mapping your influence across the study, then update it as data collection and analysis reveal new tensions. These steps turn a general disclosure into an account readers can assess.
- Identify your position: State your clinical or administrative role, connection to the site, and relevant relationships with participants.
- Trace its effects: Note where your role may have shaped the question, recruitment, interviews, coding, or interpretation.
- Describe responses: Specify measures you actually used, such as an independent recruiter, open-ended prompts, analytic memos, or discussion of competing interpretations.
- State the limits: Explain what those measures could not resolve and how that constrains the findings.
Choose details that fit the method. In interviews about employees' experiences with health administration graduate programs designed around one academic year, for example, a training director might disclose that they promoted a particular pathway. They could then explain how interview prompts invited criticism of that pathway and whether someone outside the training office conducted the interviews. Report only steps that actually occurred.
In a qualitative paper, the methods section is usually the most useful location because readers can connect your position to sampling, data collection, and analysis. A short subsection labeled "Researcher positionality" or "Reflexivity" can work if the journal permits it. Put consequential details beside the relevant method as well: an independent recruitment process belongs in the recruitment description, even if the reflexivity statement explains why it was needed.
If space is limited, prioritize influences that affect interpretation and follow the journal's reporting instructions. A study of healthcare administration degrees on an accelerated timetable, for example, should disclose an author's advising role where readers can find it, rather than burying that relationship in a generic closing acknowledgment.
These illustrative statements show how to link a professional role to research choices. Adapt the logic, not the facts: a published statement must describe what its authors actually did.
Example: Interviewing staff about a scheduling change.
"I manage operations in the department studied and supported the scheduling change before this project began. Although I did not supervise interview participants, staff knew my role. A researcher outside the department recruited and interviewed participants. During analysis, I recorded interpretations that favored the change and compared them with accounts of increased workload. My position may still have affected which staff chose to participate."
Example: Studying professional education decisions.
"As a workforce-development coordinator, I have recommended graduate programs to employees and initially expected shorter programs to be more accessible. Interview questions invited participants to discuss disadvantages as well as advantages, and I retained accounts that challenged my expectation during analysis. Employees may nevertheless have viewed me as an advocate for accelerated study."
The second example could support a study comparing completion times for healthcare management master's degrees. Both examples identify an assumption, a concrete response, and a remaining limitation. Neither treats disclosure as proof that participants were unaffected.
How Can You Evaluate and Revise a Reflexivity Statement?
Read the statement alongside your methods and findings. A reviewer should be able to see why each disclosure matters and find evidence for each action you claim. Use these questions for a final revision:
- Could a reader tell whether I had authority over participants or a stake in the outcome?
- Have I connected my assumptions to specific questions, interactions, or interpretations rather than listing traits?
- Do the safeguards I describe match the recruitment, consent, and analysis procedures reported elsewhere?
- Have I acknowledged plausible influences that remained after those safeguards?
- Could any personal detail or quotation unnecessarily identify a participant or colleague?
Revise vague claims into observable ones: replace "I remained objective" with what you examined, recorded, or changed. If studying employees' choices among online bachelor's programs in health services administration, for example, state whether your own advising recommendations affected the study design. If they did not, do not introduce the connection merely to make the statement longer. The goal is an accurate account of influence, not a performance of neutrality or self-disclosure.
Other Things You Should Know About Healthcare Administration
Not always, but dated notes can help you track changing assumptions and decisions. A journal is most useful when you refer to what it revealed and how that affected your analysis.
Yes, if it explains relevant differences among team members. For example, distinguish an insider who works at the study site from an outside interviewer rather than describing the whole team as insiders.
No. Researchers using surveys or mixed methods can also examine how their roles influenced question wording, recruitment, variable selection, or interpretation. The disclosure should fit the methods used.
No. A conflict-of-interest disclosure identifies interests that may affect the work, often financial or professional. A reflexivity statement explains how the researcher's position and assumptions interacted with the research process. A paper may need both.
- Maintaining reflexivity in qualitative nursing research - PMC https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9584480/
- Ethical considerations associated with Qualitative Research methods - UK Statistics Authority https://uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/publications/ethical-considerations-associated-with-qualitative-research-methods/pages/6/
- Confidentiality and privacy - Qualitative Research | Monash University Library https://openpub.libraries.rutgers.edu/qualgo2/chapter/__unknown__-12/
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- Reflexivity Statement: Template & Examples | CASRAI https://casrai.org/guides/reflexivity-statement
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- Reflections on Practitioner Research: A Practical Guide for Information Professionals - ACRL Insider https://acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/reflections-on-practitioner-research-a-practical-guide-for-information-professionals/
- How Do You Judge Reflexivity in Qualitative Research? | Manuel B. Garcia https://manuelgarcia.info/guides/research/guide/reflexivity-researcher-influence
