What are examples of researcher positionality?

Fields such as psychological research, sociological research, and education research employ a range of methods, including interviews, focus groups, observations, and ethnographies. When using these methods, the researcher is the most important instrument of data collection. Take a research study that employs semi-structured interviews, for example. When follow-up questions are generated in the moment as the interviewer responds to answers given by participants, it's important to know a little about the interviewer. How well does the interviewer know about the expertise and knowledge that their respondents have? Are they close colleagues or are they meeting for the first time? Does the interviewer belong to the same social groups as the interviewee? Answering such questions in a positionality statement helps the research audience understand how the data was generated. Ethnographies benefit from a more complex statement of positionality. Sociocultural and critical research relies on, among other things, the concept of emic and etic positioning. This concept says that cultures and communities treat people differently depending on whether they are considered insiders or outsiders. Such judgments may be made based on age, race, gender, or cultural background. As a result, an ethnographer's status as an insider or outsider has potentially significant implications in terms of gaining access to the context, interacting with participants, and analyzing data generated from the ethnography.