Diversity Issues

Insider/Outsider Perspective

The insider/outsider relationship is one of the primary discourses or perspectives in qualitative research where power and matters of diversity are considered. The term insider/outsider refers to the relationship or position of the researcher to the researched and takes into account whether the researcher stands as an outsider or as an insider relative to the group being studied. The location of the researcher to the researched [Page 227]has been characterized in the anthropological literature in several ways—endogenous and exogenous, the native and the colonizer, the observer and the observed, the participant observer and the participant. But the stance of the researcher is not easily defined despite obvious oppositional pairings of terminology. The experience of the researcher as an insider or outsider cannot be a fixed one given that one's position and identity are not static and are context specific. In addition, the perspectives of the researcher can be multifaceted and susceptible to shifts influenced by interactions with others, the changing research context, time, and other variables.

Feminist researchers made a significant contribution to the insider/outsider discussion by adding an analysis of power relations between the researcher and the participants. Although researchers ultimately hold the power in terms of analyzing and interpreting the data, feminist research posits that researchers should make it a point to attempt to equalize equal power relations. James Banks, in his 1988 article “The Lives and Values of Researchers: Implications for Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society,” contributed a fixed four-part typology that recognizes the complexity of the researchers' position: the Indigenous insider, the Indigenous outsider, the external insider, and the external outsider. The first part of his binary pairings refers to the circumstance of researchers as being Indigenous or external members in relationship to those being studied. The second component references the political and cultural position of the researchers. Do they share the values, beliefs, and views of the people they are studying? Banks's sociologically based definitions are extensions of Robert Merton's insider/outsider concept, which was first introduced in his 1972 essay, “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge.” Patricia Hill Collins's outsider within concepts were contained in her 1990 article, “Learning From the Outsider Within: The Sociological Signi-ficance of Black Feminist Thought,” and were introduced in her text, Black Feminist Thought. Using the earlier research on the insider/outsider perspective as a base, more recent qualitative literature acknowledges that research conditions are dynamic, standpoints can shift, and power can intervene to complicate data collection and postfield analysis.

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