Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 2,093

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 53 of the 53 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research

Pillow, Wanda·2003·International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education

Abstract

Reflexivity is commonly used in qualitative research and has been posited and accepted as a method qualitative researchers can and should use to legitimize, validate, and question research practices and representations. This paper closely examines the role of reflexivity as a methodological tool as it intersects with debates and questions surrounding representation and legitimization in qualitative research, within modernist and postmodernist ideologies, and pays close attention to how reflexivity is being defined and used in present-day research. Specifically, the author identifies and discusses the problematics of four common trends in present-day uses of reflexivity: reflexivity as recognition of self, reflexivity as recognition of other, reflexivity as truth, and reflexivity as transcendence. The author argues for a move away from comfortable uses of reflexivity to what she terms uncomfortable reflexive practices and provides an overview of the work of three authors who practice reflexivities of discomfort. Practicing uncomfortable reflexivity interrupts uses of reflexivity as a methodological tool to get better data while forefronting the complexities of doing engaged qualitative research.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/0951839032000060635

Cites

53 of 53 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 53 references

Cited by

See all 2,093

Metadata

Authors
Pillow, W.
Venue
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
Published
2003-03
Volume
16
Issue
2
Pages
175-196
ISSN
  • 0951-8398 (ISSN-L)
  • 1366-5898
OpenAlex
W2016780159
Cited by
2,093
References
53
FWCI
42.41
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1080/0951839032000060635
The paper
Pillow, W. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/0951839032000060635

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.