Situatedness

Situatedness refers to involvement within a context. There are two types of situatedness. The first type refers to the involvement of the researcher within a research site. Qualitative researchers should be aware of the situated nature of the contexts in which they collect data. The word situated refers, therefore, to the researcher's physically being on site and consequently to research shaped by personal relationships and by linguistic, biographical, historical, political, economic, cultural, ideological, material, and spatial dimensions. A researcher who is keenly aware of the situated nature of researchers can be said to be reflexive.

The second instance of situatedness refers to exactly the same phenomenon, but to a different subject: not only are researchers situated in the contexts they study, but so are the social agents whose lives are being investigated. Thus, situatedness means involvement of social beings with symbolic and material dimensions of sites and with the various social processes occurring in those domains. In sum, situatedness refers to the quality of contingency of all social interaction. As such, it stands in sharp opposition to the universal, determinist, atomistic, and absolute pretensions of classical positivism.

Situatedness is a tricky affair because of the diverse, contradicting, dynamic, uncertain, and constantly shifting ways of being involved in social domains. Different individuals are situated within contexts in different ways—depending on their definition of the situation. For example, teachers and students may share a common understanding of their context (the classroom), but their different perspectives, values, goals, identities, or biographies may make their conduct, experiences, or feelings different. Furthermore, regardless of their role as students, different pupils are oriented toward different classroom situations in different ways: for some, learning may be fun; for others, it may be but a family imposition; and for others, a physical struggle. As their situatedness in the classroom context and in the various situations typical of this context varies, so do students' and teachers' interactions in relation to grading, attendance, effort, and so on. Because multiple ways of being situated in a context always exist, researchers need to be aware of the multiplicity of voices, possibilities, and interpretations existent within a research site. Since researchers are also situated, they need to reflect on how their observations and interpretations are outcomes of their interaction with that environment.

Over recent years, researchers have engaged in numerous debates over the nature of knowledge. According to some scholars, reflexivity of one's situatedness is unnecessary, difficult, or even impossible, and as long as the researcher's conduct in the research site is made predictable by following precise procedures for gathering and interpreting data, no problems occur. Others believe that reflexivity of one's situatedness as researchers is necessary to avoid bias. For them, the situatedness of knowledge works as a limitation of research based on its contingency. Finally, for a third group, research-derived knowledge is so inevitably embodied, so clearly positioned by such markers as race, gender, class, identity, time, and space that writing about knowledge can be nothing but a modest, relative, partial, relational, standpoint-based narrative—a story with no claim of authority higher than the stories that research participants may tell about themselves.

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