مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مرور مدیریت ورزش – Sport Management Review

Reflexivity is an important part of participatory research approaches. Key thinkers who influenced the development of participatory action research, such as Lewin (1946) and Freire (1972) emphasized the importance of action-reflection cycles and a critical consciousness, respectively (Wallerstein & Duran, 2003). While reflections can take many forms, Torbert (2001) discusses the processes of first, second, and third-person research and practice. First-person inquiry involves ‘‘self-study-inthe-midst-of-action’’ (Torbert, 2001, p. 252) and reflection on the gaps or incongruence within and without of ourselves, our identities, and our social systems. Second and third-person research/practice involve the study of our own interactions with others, and the workings of groups or organizations, respectively (Torbert, 2001). Marshall (2001) described first-person inquiry as a process of iterative cycles that examine personal meaning making, assumptions, questioning, and understandings. She also contended that reflection is not a personal activity but rather a ‘‘life process’’ as it involves examining and understanding your multiple selves in and out of the research process (Marshall, 2001, p. 438). This process can be useful for navigating and documenting personal transformation and power struggles that are often part of conducting research. The first-person inquiry described by Burgess (2006), and the reflections of Humphrey (2007), are illustrative of the processes of transformation undertaken as graduate students conducting participatory research and reconciling roles of researcher-practitioner and insider-outsider, respectively. As outlined below, these accounts were highly influential in this work and directed reflections and navigation of multiple selves and roles as insiders, outsiders, and agents of change in the community. Further, interactive discussions between the doctoral student as (sometimes) insider and supervisor as outsider provided additional insights into the reflexive process, allowing particular attention to be paid to assumptions and so-called biases from each perspective. We reflect further on these processes below in describing the evolution of our participatory approach.

As much of the sport and recreation management literature focuses on group or organizational analysis (more coherently aligned with third-person research), there is a dearth of inquiry employing first and second person approaches. Some examples of self-study in sport management include work by Hoeber and Kerwin (2013) and Kerwin and Hoeber (2015) who used collaborative self-ethnography to examine their experiences as female sport fans, as well as Kodama, Doherty, and Popovic (2013) and Fleming and Fullagar (2007) who used autoethnography to explore the experience of volunteering at a major sport event and a gendered experience in cricket management, respectively. While (participatory) action research approaches have been employed in various ways in the sport management literature (see Ferkins & Shilbury, 2010, 2015; Ferkins, Shilbury, & McDonald, 2009; Frisby, Crawford, & Dorer, 1997; Frisby et al., 2005; Green, 1997; Shilbury & Ferkins, 2015; Vail, 2007), few publications have directly addressed the process of reflection within this methodological approach. For the research described in this paper, the first author employed a first-person research/practice approach in an attempt to better understand the role of the researcher(s) as the research instrument (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), as an insider (and sometimes outsider, Humphrey, 2007), and as an agent of change (Bradbury-Huang, 2010) in the context of rural community sport and recreation management. The intention herein is to provide a discussion about the process of reflexivity in community-based field work demonstrating how participatory approaches can be strengthened through methodological and theoretical involvement of the community, specifically in sport management research.