In the field of research on parental involvement and family and community partnerships with schools and early childhood education and care (ECE) institutions, the learner and the learner’s performance at school become the object of intersecting interests of adults, including the family and their community, the school, researchers, and politicians. Researchers often embody these diverse interests, being parents, teachers, or teacher educators with varied experiences.  

Researcher interests and background will influence research, and this influence is expected to be examined throughout the research process (e.g., Finlay, 2012, Hammersley, 2005). Reflections on positioning, on one in many intersecting positions contained in one researcher, especially the insider-outsider dilemmas, appear to be most common in relation to ethnographic research (Bhatti, 2011; Finlay, 2012). Also, researchers with other methodological approaches (e.g., Crozier, 2003; Pushor, 2012) have contributed to this discussion, although on what appears to be a more limited scale. The influences of one’s own position that researchers need to be aware of can vary. Insider and outsider positions, as well as the research community’s interests and the interests of the agency that finances research, can affect the choice of topics, data sources, and interpretations. For example, in a discussion on parental roles appropriate in school, parents, teachers, and students tend to disagree on where and how much the parents should be involved (Jónsdóttir, 2019). Moreover, parents with different backgrounds, including researchers with different backgrounds, may envisage the best possible relationship with their child’s school differently (Eriksen, 2021; Kindt, 2022). Policymakers also influence the learners' schooling experiences. Policies that increasingly endorse home-school interaction and more research on “effective” parental involvement may result in more inequality in the parents’ influence on their children’s schooling (Bæck, 2017).  

To contribute to the discussion of researcher positionality in the field, this paper addresses the ethical question of how issues of positioning can be addressed when a researcher cannot step out of their role as an insider in the field. The reflection is based on the three authors’ experiences with research on migration and rural communities.  

The paper draws on our experiences and field notes and considers three examples. The first example focuses on categorisation in a three-case study of the involvement of migrant parents in Norwegian high schools while falling into the category of a “migrant mother.” We examine the categories that emerge in the study and investigate how categorisation (El-Tayeb, 2011; Jenkins, 2014) works differently on those who are researched and on the researcher. In practice, the study had a qualitative embedded design (Stake, 2006) and featured interviews with 15 teachers and school leaders and 12 students conducted over three years and an analysis of documents,websites and observations, including 19 teacher-student conferences where the parents were invited to attend. An urban school with a large proportion of students with migrant backgrounds served as the main research site. The second example is an ethnographic study on parental involvement among refugee parents in a rural Norwegian ECE institution. This study has a qualitative design incorporates semi-structured interviews with 12 refugee parents and fieldwork. The discussion focuses on how researcher positionality influences data collection and interpretation, particularly concerning the power dynamic between majority and minority groups. These dynamics shape the research process and prevailing potential blind spots, especially as the refugee parents may hesitate to express critical views due to power asymmetry (Serrant-Green, 2011). Bourdieu's (1977) perspective is applied to critically examine the researcher's positionality, power relations, and implicit biases throughout the study. The third example discusses the ethical considerations of rural research, in particular, the dangers of generalising in writing about “minorities” in our research. We reflect on our role, our interaction with members of the community and policymakers, and the required ethical permissions to be acquired to conduct our research. Indeed, when researchers assume roles as school experts, learners, their parents, the community members may find themselves surrounded by people and policies trying to define them through a single static category (Downes et al., 2021). As researchers who share some of the intersecting experiences in the field, we engage with Goffman’s (1969) work and reflect on the different repertoire of categories to draw on when we present to school leaders, other parents, learners, policymakers, or colleagues. This discussion also exploits Bourdieu’s (1977) conception of reflexivity and his concerns, both with the academic preoccupation of presenting with what he calls native theories and the nonreflexive imposition of universal rationalising structures on the realities studied.

Preliminary conclusions of the paper highlight three relevant aspects of researcher positioning. First, the authors find categorisation one of the most challenging aspects in producing nuanced research that involves diverse perspectives of parents, learners, or teachers and does not underplay differences. While, as academics and researchers, the authors have the freedom to define their own positions that align with their identities, research participants are at risk of internalizing categorisations within the school field as exclusively a migrant mother, a rural student, or someone who never attends parent meetings. Secondly, when researchers are largely aligned with a particular interest group (theoretically, ethnically, or politically), the field may experience fragmentation of knowledge. The field is left with different perspectives, and researchers struggle to reach a consensus. Lastly, “belonging to a category” does give a researcher access to experiences and knowledge, motivation for doing research, hope, conviction, and empathy. However, those experiences are not limited to one chosen type of minority or category, and they cannot automatically be presented as representative and would need careful interpretation. The authors thus place special weight and responsibility for reflexivity and ethical sensitivity on the researcher’s position that trumps other social positions in the perspectives representing different interests in the student’s education.

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