A view from the bridge: Insider/Outsider perspective in a study of the Welfare Rights Movement

The study

This study examined the question of how mobilization occurred, and how the roles of insider or outsider were constructed for women directly affected by the social problem of poverty, and for women not directly impacted by poverty but engaged in supportive roles in the welfare rights movement. Specific methods included oral history interviews and archival work.

In historical research, oral history methods allow the researcher to actively resist the idea of simply gathering historical facts, and instead discover participants’ first-hand constructions of historical events in their lives (Gluck and Patai, 1991). When conducting oral history interviews, careful attention must be paid to how dominant ideologies of race, class, and gender have shaped women’s meanings (Sangster, 1998). In my use of oral history I set out to understand how the dimensions of race, class, and gender shaped women’s experiences historically as well as the meaning that individual women gave to these categories.

Feminist oral historians have made significant contributions not only by making women’s lives visible but also by contributing to the development of feminist theory (Perks and Thomson, 1998). By utilizing oral history as one of the methods in this study, I was able to gain new insights into our understanding of how women came together across differences and within similarities to work for social change.

However, it should be noted that when using oral history methods, the researcher must remain cautious about interpretation, because individuals tend to filter their remembrances of the past through the lens of the present (Gluck and Patai, 1991). For the purpose of this study I was interested in how the participants made sense of their participation in the Welfare Rights Movement – as they remembered it – through their own interpretations. I was not as concerned about accurate remembrances of specific dates, times, and places, since I used a second method, archival work, to examine historical documents as background for the events. The oral histories were designed to document the women’s sense making of their past social activism, and how they perceived insiders and outsiders within the movement. The framework and use of intersectionality in this study also allowed me to be attentive to the ways that race, class, and gender intersected within our interactions as researcher/participant.

The oral histories in this study were conducted with twelve women who participated in the Welfare Rights Movement in the United States, in Southeastern Michigan. The interviews were conducted between the fall of 2003 and the fall of 2005 and took place in the interviewee’s home or office. The women’s ages ranged from 59–83 years old and most were in their seventies at the time I interviewed them. They were all active in the welfare rights movement from the mid to late 1960s through the 1970s. All of the participants had small children at the time of their involvement in welfare rights, and the average number of children each had was 3.8. African American and white women who were poor, working class, middle class, or upper middle class at the time of their participation were included (see Table 1 and Table 2).

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Table 1.

Basic Description of Sample

Pseudonym	Recipient Status	Race	Class	Gender
Anita	Friend	White	middle class	Female
Delores	Recipient	Black	poverty class	Female
Patricia	Friend	White	middle class	Female
Anna	Friend	White	middle class	Female
Martha	Friend	White	upper middle class	Female
Ruth	Friend	White	middle class	Female
June	Friend	Black	working class	Female
Victoria	Recipient	White	poverty class	Female
Evelyn	Friend	Black	middle class	Female
Gladys	Recipient	Black	poverty class	Female
Vivian	Recipient	Black	poverty class	Female
Helen	Recipient	Black	poverty class	Female

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Table 2.

Further description of sample

Pseudonym	Interview Date, and Interview Location	Age	Place of Birth	Initial Year of Involvement in Welfare Rights
Anita	10/24/03, Detroit, MI	63	Indiana	mid. to late 1960s
Delores	11/07/03, Detroit, MI	59	Louisiana	between 1966–1968
Patricia	11/14/03, Farmington, MI	76	Illinois	early 1970s
Anna	11/19/03, Berkley, MI	73	Michigan	mid. 1960s
Martha	9/06/05, Bloomfield Hills, MI	78	New Jersey	1968
Ruth	9/09/05, Detroit, MI	82	Michigan	mid. 1960s
June	9/27/05, Bloomfield Hills, MI	79	Tennessee	mid. 1960s
Victoria	10/11/05, Pontiac, MI	75	Michigan	1970
Evelyn	10/22/05, Spring Valley, CA	74	Ohio	1969
Gladys	10/25/05, Detroit, MI	83	Alabama	late 1960s
Vivian	10/26/05, Detroit, MI	66	Mississippi	1969
Helen	11/17/05, Dearborn, MI	72	New York	early 1970s

Insider/Outsider status

The use of an intersectional conceptual framework and the creation of a representational graphic model assisted me in plunging deeply into and interrogating the concept of insider/outsider statuses in the welfare rights movement. Such a graphic model, informed by intersectionality, could be modified in the classroom and used as a teaching tool to illustrate the intersectional nature of both the study participants’ and the researcher’s various social locations at different points in time. The categories of race, class, and gender in this study were understood as converging and shaping each of the study participants’ lives as well as my own. This model helped act as a prompt for broader questions and for the analysis approach used. The model did not dictate the direction of the study, rather it served as a reminder to examine the ways that race, class, and gender may be intersecting in unseen ways within both participants’ lives and the research process itself. A diagram of the conceptual model for this study can be seen in Figure 1. OPEN IN VIEWER

As this study used oral history methods to examine specific historical events in participants’ lives, a time-bound approach was necessary. The model focused on three main phases of the study participants’ lives, and on the research process itself. The socially constructed categories of race, class, and gender were examined within each time-bound phase. The roles, experiences, and motivating factors of the women, in relation to their social movement work were explored for each of these phases through the prism of race, class, and gender. Particular attention was paid to how participants spoke and made sense of their cross-race, cross-class social movement work through their race, class, and gender lenses. Attention was also paid to the ways that the structural level hierarchically ordered categories of race, class, and gender shaped their experiences and opportunities within their social movement work. Questions asked in the oral history interviews were framed on the overall conceptual framework, and the interest in how insider/outsider statuses were constructed. However, the framework and model were used as a guide within the overall research process, and did not dictate or mandate interpretations.

What makes this framework unique is the emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender within participants’ lives and the researcher’s life – as well as the research process. This acted as a ‘prompt’ to the researcher, to remain attentive to the unseen spaces where categories may be acting simultaneously – rather than using a dichotomous (either/or) superficial understanding. This attention to both the seen/spoken and the unseen/unspoken in qualitative research is also particularly important to illustrate when teaching qualitative research methods. A thorough understanding of this concept allows for simultaneous insider/outsider statuses to be revealed. In an article on her development as a feminist researcher, Deutsch (2004) discusses how the insider/outsider status of the researcher can present opportunities to ask questions from an outsider’s perspective, which may result in more detailed information provided, and how being seen as an insider may make one privy to more intimate knowledge. This insider/outsider status can be based on participation or membership in a community or group, but it can also be constructed by participants based on the researcher’s racial and class status and subsequent assumptions.

Naples (1996) uses an insider/outsider framework to understand her own research conducted with a group of migrant workers and local townspeople in two small rural Iowa communities. Naples (1996) views insider/outsider statuses as shifting categories that are constructed in part through researcher/participant interactions. Within both of the Iowa communities that she studied she felt like an outsider, due to her urban background. However, she soon discovered that many of the community members she interviewed also felt like outsiders based either on their own higher social class status or on their position as newcomers having recently moved to the community. What was most surprising to Naples in this work was that participants held views of themselves as outsiders based on one dimension (such as newcomer status), even as they were considered insiders by community members based on categories such as social class status and subsequent access to power. In many instances she shared an outsider status with her participants while she simultaneously occupied an insider status related to her position as the researcher and the inherent power that this represented. Naples (1996) admitted that she was far more likely to view herself in terms of an outsider in comparison to the poverty class Mexican immigrants that she interviewed within the community, than to the upper middle class owners of the factories. However, the relational aspect of the insider/outsider phenomenon allowed her to be viewed as a mutual outsider by the powerful individuals that she studied. This aspect of the insider/outsider phenomenon is one that was also prominent in my work studying the Welfare Rights Movement. As a white, middle class researcher, and former social worker, I was viewed as an outsider by the Recipients, while simultaneously occupying an insider status based on my past experiences as a poor single mother. The Friends viewed me as an insider based on a shared gender, race, and class status, while I simultaneously occupied an outsider stance as someone who had not grown up or lived most of my life with the same level of class privilege they had.

As someone who has experienced the stigma and isolation attached to being a poor single mother, I was able to situate myself within the research process, formulating questions that were especially designed to interrogate how the Recipients had experienced their daily lives as poor women. As someone who was also white, middle class, and occupied a professional status at the time of the interviews, I was also able to formulate the types of questions that would most likely indicate how the middle class Friends had felt about their cross-race/cross-class relationships within their social movement work. As a simultaneous insider/outsider to the problem of poor women and social movement work, I realized that I would need to explore my own shifting status as insider/outsider in order to be as fully aware as possible within the research process. Thus, from the conceptualization phase of this study I took a consciously feminist approach which understood that as the researcher I was an actor rather than simply an instrument in the research process (Oakley, 1981; Phoenix, 1995).

The insider/outsider phenomenon impacted my study beginning with the sampling process itself. A snowball sampling method was used to locate participants, using information obtained from key informants chosen for their leadership roles in the movement. A purposive theoretical sampling strategy (Silverman, 2000) was used in my attempts to identify participants of differing race and class statuses. The white middle class participants in this sample were found much more quickly and agreed to participate more readily than did the poverty class, working class, or African American women. In all cases the Friends, who had been middle to upper middle class during their work on welfare rights, were still middle to upper middle class at the time they were interviewed. All were still working in the social justice/social services arena in a volunteer capacity (most were retired and/or had husbands who had retired), and many had their own offices where they preferred to meet with me. They were highly visible within the community, and fairly easy to locate. This was in sharp contrast to the interviews I conducted with Recipients.

Considerable time was needed to contact the participants who had been Recipients at the time of their welfare rights work. All were still either poverty class or working class at the time I interviewed them, and one participant was still living in the same public housing unit she had lived in during the 1960s and 1970s, although the surrounding units were being torn down. In many cases I had to contact several individuals who were friends, relatives, or acquaintances of those I was searching for, before I finally got a correct address or phone number. In some cases the participants moved before I was able to reach them. In at least two cases the women I was searching for passed away before I was able to meet with them. Even after I was finally able to speak with participants who had been Recipients, it took persistent efforts on my behalf before they agreed to be interviewed. This difficulty in locating Recipient members for the study is partially due to their continued marginalized status in society which made them much less visible than the middle class supporters. However, once contacted – the difficulty in getting participants to agree to meet with me is partially an implication of their perception of me as an outsider.

It is important to note that the Recipients immediately viewed me as an outsider and thus saw my requests for an interview as not important to their daily lives. This illustrates the implications of insider/outsider status perceptions at the earliest and perhaps most critical stages of the research project. However, if we as researchers can prepare for this challenge ahead of time, we may acknowledge the need for extra time in the sampling stage to foster relationships with potential study participants through phone meetings or written communication, before we expect face to face meetings to occur. It may also help us build more time into the referral process and to aim for larger numbers of participants in the sampling frame, based on whether we are being perceived as an outsider or an insider. Lastly, partnering with individuals who may be considered ‘linkages’ between the researcher and the participants is also helpful to addressing the implications of insider/outsider perceptions in the data collection process. These could be individuals who have worked in the community and developed an ‘insider’ status, while simultaneously maintaining connections to those deemed ‘outsiders’ by study participants. They can serve as valuable bridges between outsiders and insiders in the research process.

The white middle class women in this study mostly saw me as an insider, identifying with me based on assumptions of a shared race and class status and responding positively to my university affiliation and professional identity. Since these women were still working in the social services field, they commented on my status as a social worker and told me that they wanted to be helpful in a professional capacity. For the welfare recipients in the study, they perceived me as an outsider based on these same social locations and statuses, and thus were suspicious of my intentions. I often needed to prove my intentions as a social worker, since there was much mistrust. I understood this by grounding my work in my social location as a white middle class professional, and trying to understand the privilege that this represented, rather than simply ignoring it. This is a critical factor in attempts to understand how insider/outsider statuses are interpreted: it requires a thorough examination of privilege and oppression in both the research participants’ and the researcher’s lives. This understanding helps the researcher take the appropriate approach to engagement with research participants. Knowing that social workers were not necessarily trusted and that outsiders were suspect with the women who had been Recipients, I tried to be cautious and patient in my initial contacts. I also tried to utilize the help of ‘insiders’ – those who had first-hand knowledge and the trust of the women – to initially develop relationships with. I also relied on my contacts within the world of macro social work and community practice to gather support and trust. I had engaged in some activist work myself with present-day women on welfare in Southeastern Michigan, both African American and white. Therefore, my social work position provided me with a simultaneous insider/outsider status.

All participants in this study were asked to primarily speak about the time during which they were involved in the Welfare Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but were first asked questions about their childhood and family background. I engaged them in telling stories about how they first became interested in working on welfare rights issues as well as what kept them involved for an extended period, focusing all the while on how insider/outsider status was defined by participants in this movement. Interviews were transcribed, initially coded, and as common themes developed more fully and similarities in descriptions emerged, subsets were then re-coded. I employed the constant comparative method of analysis (Silverman, 2000), analyzing and comparing within case data before moving on to examine between case comparisons. The final themes which emerged after re-coding were then organized into matrices (Miles and Huberman,1994), in order to see larger patterns and relationships that were emerging.

Researcher, researched, and positionalities

When I began this study I assumed that my status as a white middle class woman would impact my participants and the information that I was able to obtain in specific ways. However, I did not simply acknowledge one social location for myself. I grew up in a white, working class, blue-collar family, and later as a young adult spent many years as a poverty class single parent raising three children. Before beginning this study I was careful to acknowledge my racial and class privilege, but I was also very cognizant of the ways that my previous marginalized status as a poor woman impacted my conceptualization of the study and my interactions with study participants. Indeed the main reason that I became interested in the study of social movements focused on the poor was because I had first-hand knowledge of the everyday lives of poor women caring for children on their own. The stigma and fear as well as the pride associated with struggling alone for daily support and survival was something that had never quite left me. Therefore, while I began this work understanding that my current racial and class privilege would affect how participants responded to me and I to them, I also acknowledged that my previous marginalized status would make me a simultaneous insider/outsider. Intersectional research requires that one address both privilege and oppression as simultaneously occurring phenomena, and can provide a mechanism for teaching students that although they may occupy a particular marginalized status – as a woman for instance – they may also occupy a privileged location – such as middle class – at the same time (Hulko, 2009). This is helpful in teaching qualitative research methods because it assists us as educators in grounding students in their own privilege/oppression before they begin to study others.

When I began oral history interviews with the African American women who were Recipients, most first asked me exactly why I was interested in the topic of welfare rights. They appeared to be suspicious of my motives and apprehensive about sharing their stories with me. I often engaged in several phone conversations first, getting to know them, discussing their current lives and activities, before they would agree to meet with me for a face to face interview. With Gladys, an African American woman who had been a Recipient, I had many phone conversations about her love of fishing and discussions about which Detroit area fishing spots were the best, before she finally consented to meet with me in person. I shared with her some of my own background, including the fact that I had grown up in the Downriver Detroit area in a family that enjoyed fishing, and that I later lived in another Michigan community very near Lake Erie, where she frequently fished. With Victoria, a white woman who had been a Recipient, I also had numerous phone conversations before she consented to meet with me. Victoria and I discussed the history of the city of Pontiac (where she was currently residing) and its relationship to the city of Detroit. Victoria tested me on my knowledge of the auto-industry, labor movement activity, and history and politics of the city of Pontiac in its industrial growth. Once she felt sufficiently comfortable with me she scheduled a time for us to meet. It also took several phone conversations with the other Recipients in the study before they would agree to meet with me.

Although the Recipients initially viewed me as an ‘outsider’ due to my privileged race and class status, as well as my identity as a social worker, our relationships were also complicated. In an interview with one of the African American Recipients, she had spent a considerable amount of time telling me about her experiences migrating north to Michigan from the Southern United States and how difficult it was for her, then telling me about her experiences working in the Welfare Rights Movement. When I thought the interview was over and was preparing to shut off the tape recorder and leave, I shared with her that because I had been a poor single parent for many years I particularly appreciated all of the work that she and other women in the movement had done. This moment of sharing led to a moving revelation about her experiences of stigmatization while on welfare and the emotional pain that this caused her. She shared with me the fact that the workers in the welfare office (whom she referred to as social workers) would treat her as if she was a completely insignificant human being, and how hurtful this was to her. Here, she talked about the stigma of using food stamps:

You’d go in the store to buy groceries with food stamps and people would look around at you like you’re dirty. You know it was just every kinda way they could make you feel bad, that’s what happened. (Gladys)

Although Gladys later felt that she could share with me her vulnerable feelings as a poor woman, her perception of me as an outsider was due in part to my status as a social worker. Many of the Recipients’ perceived social workers as maintaining tight control of critical resources, and some held very negative views of what social workers actually did. Most of the stories I was told by Recipients about their experiences with social services involved negative experiences with case workers. The relationship that Gladys and I engaged in during the early stages of contact is typical of the suspicion with which I was viewed by Recipients, based in part on their perceptions of my status as a white middle class social service professional. This made me a ‘current’ outsider based on their ‘past’ experiences. I spent much time explaining that I had worked as a ‘community organizer’, or ‘macro’ social worker, before going back to graduate school. While Gladys felt comfortable at first only sharing with me her roles in the Welfare Rights Movement, and experience moving from the South to the North, it was not until much later, after my self-disclosure about poor single parenthood that she began to open up about her personal feelings of stigmatization while on welfare.

As the researcher occupying this simultaneous and shifting insider/outsider status I often felt uncomfortable, particularly when I was being granted an insider status by the white middle class women. In one example of this, Anna, a white middle class Friend spoke to me about how poor white women were different from poor African American women:

… people like the [white] women we worked with out in the suburbs, they wouldn’t ever admit they were on welfare! I actually believe the Black women had a better handle on that than the white women. If there’s one thing I recall about that period, is that those women seemed to know who they were and their sense of self worth was not as damaged by having to participate in these terrible [welfare] systems as a white woman’s was. (Anna)

Another example of my insider status with the Friends can be seen in my experiences with Martha, an upper middle class white woman who was a Friend. Martha was particularly eager to share her story with me. She readily agreed to meet with me and when I came to her house she showed me all of her scrapbooks, photographs, documents, and other mementos of her activist days. She had been very active in many civil rights groups as well as welfare rights during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Martha spent a long time showing me numerous boxes of documents and mementos from her very full life before she felt ready to start the official interview process. Although I did not mention the issue of abortion nor did I share my own position on this matter, Martha assumed that I shared her own pro-choice stance, and later elaborated on her views:

I saw so MANY poor women just dragged down by having these GIGANTIC families to take care of … I became a BIG advocate for abortion rights. I just can’t see a poor mother being forced to have another BABY just because her husband is amorous or something. You know? I just … I just think it’s wrong. And so, I’m big on that issue. (Martha)

Another Friend, Patricia was also very willing to participate in the study and excited about meeting with me. Patricia, a white, middle class Friend was also very interested in sharing her own files with me, and illustrating to me her leadership role with the Friends in the movement. At many points during our interview Patricia seemed to appeal to our shared racial and class status, granting me the position of an insider. She freely shared information on how she felt that the Black women Recipients in the movement used very different tactics than the white women Friends did. Here, she talks about the tactics that were used by the African American participants:

It was the Black people mainly that were the impetus [for the use of militant tactics], and as I say, the REAL militants were the Black people in Detroit. They were unbelievable strong women, oh, God, those Black women, you know? They (chuckles) really did have guts. (Patricia)

The Friends’ attempted to speak to me as one middle class white woman to another, and this insider status felt conflicted with my first-hand knowledge of being poor. However, I tried to interrogate my own discomfort (through process notes after each interview) in order to remain alert to hidden or obfuscated ways that race, class, and gender intersected in this social movement as well as the research process itself.

Participants also constructed the insider and outsider statuses of their fellow activists in specific ways. Although they worked together in this social movement, Recipients mainly viewed the Friends as outsiders. Vivian, an African American recipient talked of division around decision making in the movement:

They [Friends] got involved, but we would TELL them. You know, we would tell them what … we wanted, or how, you know … things like that. (Vivian)

The only white recipient in the study also spoke to the ways in which the Friends were viewed as outsiders; Victoria spoke about control over decision making in the movement:

Well I think that they [Friends] acted more as advisors, but they didn’t make decisions you know? And when we [Recipients] decided to … march … that’s what happened. (Victoria)

The Recipients indicated their view of the Friends as outsiders in their struggles and frustrations trying to make the Friends understand what it was like to be poor and on welfare, as Vivian illustrated in the following:

We would … try to explain to them [Friends] what it’s like on welfare. And like, on the end of the month, when your food stamps, or your food is you know, at the end of the month, you don’t have that much, trying to stretch it to the next month. We had what we call a ‘welfare meal’ and they would come and eat some beans and rice, and (chuckles) … beans and rice and Jell-O. (Vivian)

Recipients viewed the Friends as outsiders due in part to their privileged racial status, but class figured prominently in their perceptions of who could be classified as an insider or outsider. Recipients granted women who were receiving welfare automatic status as insiders, regardless of race. In many of the stories Recipients told they would use signifiers such as ‘us’ or ‘the women’ or ‘the mothers’ to identify those who had recipient status and thus were deemed insiders.

The Friends also saw divisions in their roles and responsibilities in the movement. A white middle class friend, Anita, noted the widening division between how policy decisions were made:

[Friends] who then went in [to work in] the office really started to analyze policy and make decisions on where we were going to come down on policy. And they did not do it in a way where they invited the welfare rights mothers in to vote on it, or … or be an integral part of that decision making. (Anita)

Friends viewed the Recipients as outsiders with regard to understanding the intricacies of policy advocacy and decision making, although it was the Recipients themselves who were experiencing the problems of poverty and would be best situated to formulate potential welfare policy solutions.

Friends saw the direct action tactics that were commonly used by Recipient members of the movement as somehow being racially grounded. They shared with me that they believed the more confrontational tactics seemed to come easier for the African American Recipient members, while they felt more comfortable with indirect tactics such as policy advocacy and fund-raising. Several of the Friends I interviewed also stated that if the Recipient members of the movement had been more willing to compromise on some policy issues, there may have been more lasting change created. It is interesting to note that Friends did not identify class as being connected to the types of strategies they themselves felt most comfortable using as opposed to those of Recipients. Their privileged race and class statuses intersected allowing them to obscure the importance of both within their own tactics.

The Friends assumed that I was someone who could understand their activist work from the perspective of a white middle class woman. They also appealed to my professional status as a researcher with a university affiliation by first sharing with me information about their own university experiences as well as those of their (now grown) children, when we met. By relating to me as ‘one of them’, based on my race, class, and gender, they allowed me to share in their conceptions of the Welfare Rights Movement as a whole, and their perspectives of the roles and tactics of the Recipient members of the movement.

Similar to how Bloom (1997: 116) has described being uncomfortable and ‘locked in an uneasy sisterhood’ when an interviewee made negative statements about Jews, later confiding that she did not consider Bloom a ‘typical Jew’, I also felt uncomfortable with my status as ‘insider’ with the Friends. Having grown up working class and later struggling as a poverty class single mother, I sometimes perceived myself as having more insider status with the African American Recipients that I interviewed than the middle class (or upper middle class) Friends. However, the Friends clearly trusted me and granted me insider status much more easily than did the Recipients I interviewed.

This again brings us back to what Naples (1996) has described as the insider/outsider phenomenon in her work with rural Iowa communities. While I considered myself an outsider in the interviews I conducted with the Friends in my study, this status was socially constructed and perceived differently by these members, as was my assumed insider status with the Recipients, who saw me distinctively as an outsider based on my race and class statuses as well as their perception of me as a social worker. This consciousness of the shifting nature of insider/outsider status allowed me to think more critically about the ways that race, class, and gender intersected in the women’s cross-race, cross-class social movement work. If I had not made myself aware of the insider/outsider phenomenon early in my study, I may have missed the opportunity to shine a light on some of the small but critical aspects of women’s interactions with other women.

Conclusion

The conceptual framework for this study, that understood the race, class, and gender of the participants as well as the researcher, through an intersectional prism, allowed for a more complex understanding of insider/outsider constructions. The insider/outsider statuses of the participants of this study changed and shifted throughout their social movement work. These statuses are also important to capture and examine in the research process since they represent power relations between all participants. My own simultaneous insider/outsider status as researcher led to differences in interview participants’ engagement with the interview process, framing of their oral histories, and the ways in which this information was understood within the study.

As Naples (2003) has also illustrated, the concept of insider/outsiderness is important to interrogate, since these statuses may not necessarily be based on typical race and class privileges. Instead, members of a community, such as a community of social movement participants, construct insiders and outsiders based on a sense of shared experience and knowledge that shifts and changes over time. This method for understanding how insider/outsider statuses are constructed is also important for teaching and learning about qualitative methods. An important starting point in this process is the understanding of one’s own social location, privilege, and oppression. Simply because a researcher (or student) may have a shared experience or specific social location with a research participant, it does not mean that they will necessarily have a shared ‘insider’ status. In order to fully grasp this process, students should be encouraged to thoroughly examine and understand how their own locations as privileged and oppressed (on multiple dimensions such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, language, etc.) affects where they are positioned within society and the lenses through which they view the world around them. This is a good starting point for teaching this methodological approach, since it requires students to understand themselves before they attempt to understand others. The use of intersectionality to examine how insiders and outsiders are constructed also allows students of qualitative research to view categories of identity through a more complicated prism versus a single lens.

An acknowledgement of the shifting and simultaneous insider/outsider statuses within the research process itself can lead to observations that represent a view from the bridge, rather than the banks, of the river. As qualitative researchers, understanding and embracing this view from the bridge can assist us in seeing both sides of the river simultaneously.