Complicating Lived Experience: Critical Reflection and Reciprocity in Interviewing and Analysis

Guided by the interpretive tradition of critical theory, this paper draws on junctures within two qualitative research projects. The first explored high school students’ lived experience of racial equality and their conceptualizations of equality in a context of an inner ring suburban school district’s desegregation. The second project involved youth researchers in looking at educational opportunities and constraints within a racially and economically isolated urban high school. While the former was a case study and the latter a participatory action research project, both offered the researcher and participants and youth researchers an opportunity to critically shift back and forth in analyzing individual experience in relation to historical and structural conditions. The paper considers notions of reciprocity within qualitative research and the ways in which critical reflection might yield more depth, complexity, and potential for action at different iterations of research activities.