Member Check

The Debate over Member Checking

Member checking is a controversial practice as it embodies what is commonly referred to as “the crisis of representation,” or the problem of how faithfully to render the lives of others. Member checking raises a host of epistemological and ethical questions, most notably: What data or interpretations are research participants in a position to validate? What is the right course of action should participants decide researchers got it wrong? Does a member's refusal to validate a researcher's interpretation invalidate it? Is member checking appropriately conceived as a validation enterprise at all?

Although participants are certainly experts regarding their own lives, they may not be able to authorize summaries and interpretations of data that encompass other people's lives. If these interpretations are in the form of theories, phenomenological descriptions, or other renderings intended for audiences of qualitative researchers, they may be totally inaccessible to participants. Whether participants can certify the “truth” of a text depends on what text they are shown. Participants may not necessarily be in a position even to verify data-near texts, such as transcripts or descriptive fieldnotes, derived from their own lives. Participants may have forgotten what they once said or did, regret having said or done it, and therefore see the member checking process as a way to erase the past. Seeing transcripts of what they said in the past may engender discomfort in participants. Yet, participants may also validate researchers' interpretations out of a desire not to offend researchers or be completely uninterested in such an exercise. Moreover, narrative accounts are themselves inherently revisionist as every telling of an experience leads to a retelling of it. Accordingly, participants' accounts of an event offered at different times, and even within the same interview session, may be inconsistent as they are constantly being revised in the very act of telling. These are only some of the reasons scholars have increasingly proposed that member checking is less about optimizing validity and more about an opportunity for further reflecting on members' own experiences and for self-transformation.

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