Reflexivity: Tips for Cultivating the Mind of an Anthropologist

In this study, my co-authors and I sought to explore resident and faculty perspectives on how institutional culture influences the impact of feedback, feedback seeking, and receptivity (About politeness…). Often, I learn more from the research process than the results. Setting the scene: Based on previous research, we believed that our participants would perceive institutional culture as a major influence on all aspects of feedback. The first step was to acknowledge these beliefs and revisit them as we collected, analyzed, and interpreted data. We jotted down our opinions about feedback culture in a journal and ensured that we formulated open-ended study questions to obtain multiple perspectives on the topic. One study question was: “How do residents and faculty define feedback culture, and what are their views regarding the impact of institutional feedback culture on meaningful feedback?” Sampling: When recruiting and sampling, reflexivity requires that we seek participants who hold a variety of beliefs. To demonstrate an open stance, our recruitment emails stated that we were interested in soliciting a variety of opinions about the institutional feedback culture and planned to use those opinions to improve the quality of feedback conversations. Data collection: During interviews, focus group discussions or participant narratives, trigger questions or prompts should be open-ended. Two of our focus group trigger questions were: (1) When the term “feedback cu...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Tags: Featured Guest Perspective qualitative research scholarly publishing Source Type: blogs