Outsider From Within,Insider From Without: Negotiating Researcher Positionality in Comparative Social Research

Literature Review. Researcher Positionality: Drawing the Line Between ‘Insider’ and ‘Outsider’

Consciously or unconsciously, qualitative researchers position themselves at every stage of the research process, from formulating interview questions to visiting the field. It is a subtle process, and it can be argued that the position that they take is not really that of an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’. Nevertheless, without having such a position, we may not be able to express ourselves: as Hall (1990, p. 18) puts it: “you have to position yourself somewhere in order to say anything at all”. There is a growing body of literature on researcher positionality in qualitative research (e.g. Bayeck, 2022; Berkovic et al., 2020; Flores, 2018; Komalasari et al., 2022; Purwaningrum & Shtaltovna, 2017; Savvides et al., 2014) which includes discussions on the subtlety of positionality — an important element of reflexivity. Central to this discussion is the discourse around the ‘insider’/‘outsider’ dichotomy (Dwyer & Buckle, 2018), the line drawn between ‘insiderness’ and ‘outsiderness’. The line can be blurred due to potential positionality shifts within the specific moment, space and time in which the research is set (Bayeck, 2022). A researcher may experience multiple positionalities during the course of the research, influenced by factors such as researcher’s previous experiences, background and relationship to the topic itself (Christensen & Dahl, 1997; Surra & Ridley, 1991). Dowling (2000, p. 33) asserts that researchers are not simply insiders or outsiders, but rather that both insiderness and outsiderness can coexist simultaneously; they are not mutually exclusive (O’Connor, 2004). Thus, researchers may reflect on their multiple positions and adjust them accordingly as they navigate through the research process.

While the complexity of defining and attempting to draw a line between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ has been acknowledged in the literature, some authors have nevertheless documented advantages and disadvantages of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ status in research across different disciplines (Bailey, 1994; Bennett, 2002; Dowling, 2000; Edwards, 2002; Minichiello et al., 1995). The merit of being an ‘insider’ is that these researchers tend to be more readily accepted within the social group since they share common characteristics (Gair, 2012). ’Insiders’ also have the privilege of conducting research with more complete knowledge about the social world or the context of their study, compared to ‘outsider’ researchers (Heath et al., 2009). They are usually able to establish a faster and stronger rapport with their participants (Aburn et al., 2021; Berkovic et al., 2020; Komil-Burley, 2021; Mahmud, 2021; O’Connor, 2004) due to their shared cultural backgrounds (Bayeck, 2022), knowledge (O’Connor, 2004) and/or their experience of the issue being studied (Berkovic et al., 2020). This gives them the further advantage of being considered more trustworthy when conducting sensitive research (Falzon, 2016; Suwankhong & Liamputtong, 2015). However, being inside a context also has disadvantages. ‘Insiders’ might form biases more easily whereas ‘outsiders’ are more likely to be free from biases and thus to be more objective (Brannick & Coghlan, 2007). This is because ‘outsider’ researchers have the advantage of being able to distance themselves emotionally from the context (Gasman & Payton-Stewert, 2006). On the other hand, their relationship with and knowledge of the context of their study is considered superficial and weak (Al-Makhamreh & Lewando-Hundt, 2008), and a barrier to a full understanding of the social context.

However, the categorization of researchers into either ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ (Christensen & Dahl, 1997; Merton, 1972; Surra & Ridley, 1991) is problematic. Considering researchers to be either “objective and credible or subjective and biased” (Savvides et al., 2014, p. 414), is a largely outdated standpoint, since researcher positionality is now perceived to be fluid, with the potential to change.

This is certainly true of research on social activism and social movements. A researcher might acknowledge and shift between multiple positions, such as “an academic, a researcher, an activist, and all of that” (Fenge et al., 2019, p. 5) when conducting social research. In my own case, for example, I embody multiple positions and may present myself differently during my interactions with Thai and Myanmar interviewees in the fieldwork — as a researcher to both groups of participants, as a Myanmar national to Myanmar participants, and as a foreign national to Thai participants. When it comes to researcher positionality, however, I am aware of the nuances of being neither an insider nor an outsider. Instead, I may be best categorized as an in-out-sider or an in-betweener, a position in which both insider and outsider intersect and share space, in terms of dynamics and identity, with both Thai and Myanmar participants.

The study of issues related to social justice can be especially challenging for researchers. The challenge includes the need for reflexivity towards researcher positionality. Reflexivity is a method of generating knowledge in relation to researchers’ positions and their life stories (Lumsden & Winter, 2014). It entails being critically self-reflective over the topic, the participants and the communities involved (Fenge et al., 2019). Another potential challenge is the need for sensitivity on the part of both researchers and participants. For example, in my study, the interviewing of Myanmar participants is somewhat more sensitive compared to interviewing Thai participants as it involves the discussion of political situations and their impacts on the individual participants. This need for sensitivity is based on the context within which the researcher and the participants interact (Bahn & Weatherill, 2013; Brayda & Boyce, 2014; Tillman, 2002). Thus, by sensitivity in my research, I am referring to the political contexts of both Thailand and Myanmar at the time of the interviews, and how political situations unfold and affect those who participate in the social movements being studied.

Background of the Study

This article is based on a comparative study of two youth-led protest movements in Thailand and Myanmar in 2020 and 2021. The protest in Thailand started after a pro-democracy political party, Future Forward, was dissolved by the order of the constitutional court; it soon expanded into a large-scale mass demonstration on the streets from February 2020 onwards. It began with students staging protests in the schools and universities; it grew as people across Thailand demanded that the government step down and hold a new democratic election. It was predominantly a protest of young adults, a movement for democracy led by the youth. In the neighboring country of Myanmar, the general election of November 2020 was won by the National League for Democracy party, led by Aung San Sue Kyi. However, the party was accused of electoral fraud, leading to a military coup on the first of February 2021, and the rounding up of several political leaders including Aung San Sue Kyi and the President. The coup sparked nationwide protests that soon grew into a movement known locally as Spring Revolution. This Spring Revolution, similar to Thailand’s democracy movement, was predominantly led and joined by young people across the country.

Methods and Demographics

This is a qualitative research study that employs in-depth interviews and field observation as the method of inquiry. Prior to the fieldwork, following the research standard protocol, I applied for and obtained ethnics approval from the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) (Ref. no. 2021-2022-0392) of my university. The study aims to investigate the individual and collective experiences of the youth protesters who participated in the two youth-led democracy movements. The phenomenological research approach (Creswell & Poth, 2018) was adopted to explore and understand the lived experiences of each individual protester and the common meaning behind these experiences. This approach involves inquiring into the essence of ‘what’ and ‘how’ those involved experienced the phenomenon under study (the democracy movements) (Moustakas, 1994). To do this, I interviewed 40 youth protesters from Thailand and Myanmar. The criteria required of the participants were that they were aged between 18 and 30 and had participated in the movements. Recruitment of participants was initially done via personal networks such as my former school and previous workplaces. I then applied snowball and purposive samplings to recruit more targeted participants. These sampling methods are particularly suited for locating appropriate participants to fulfil the research purpose.

For about three months, semi-structured interviews were conducted online with the Myanmar participants and in person with the Thai participants. The interviews were not audio-recorded. I relied on handwritten notes to record the data. The fieldwork concluded with a brief period of field observation in Thailand in which I was able to accompany some of the Thai participants to their regular work meetings and social gatherings. The in-person interviews in Thailand took place both in solo and group formats. The group format is designed for the convenience of participants from the same community or institution, but also has benefits for the research as a whole, since the group setting can stimulate interactive discussion among the participants and myself. The aim of the interviews and the field visit was to improve my understanding of the social phenomena being studied, through the social interactions among different youth groups and myself as an active observer. The field visit was limited to Thailand due to the unstable political situation in Myanmar at that time, which made travel to Myanmar difficult. All the interviews were conducted in local languages, Thai and Burmese. I am a Myanmar native currently pursuing a PhD in Hong Kong and am fluent in Thai. This language accessibility and fluency was a significant advantage throughout the research; it assisted me not only in conducting the interviews but also in navigating the entire fieldwork process in Thailand.

The anonymity of some of the participants, both Thai and Myanmar, was compromised as I knew them from my former school and previous employment. We were former classmates and colleagues. The reason to initially recruit this known group of participants was in part due to the sensitive nature of the topic and in part due to the purpose of the study which required a specific group of participants. This, nonetheless, facilitated the recruitment process as I was able to locate more participants through their recommendations. Because the latter participants whom I did not know and had not met were recruited through their friends’ recommendations, they naturally felt more comfortable to be interviewed. In the case of Myanmar where the interview was conducted online, majority of them even showed their faces on camera. In addition, similarity in age range allowed us to engage and communicate better in this context. Most of the participants were university students like myself and this was particularly helpful in connecting and conducting the interview with them without significant power distance.

Political Context of the Research

At the time of conducting my fieldwork, both of the movements were still ongoing and some of the youth protesters were still active on the ground in both places. Thailand, dubbed a “sometimes-democratic” (Ford, 2013) or “hybrid” regime (Barrow & Fuller, 2023), has experienced episodes of military-mounted coups throughout its history. Surviving one coup after another, Thailand’s democracy remains fragile, as evidenced by another recent process of democratic backsliding (Lorch, 2021). The March 2019 election formally ended the rule of the military junta, but with conditions that ensured the re-election of the military leader General Prayut Chan-o-cha as the Prime Minister (Ganjanakhundee, 2021). This was a consequence of the 2014 coup which had enabled the military to re-draft the constitution in order to guarantee its continued political power dominance, by ensuring that 250 senators, hand-picked by the military, would take their places in parliament (Phoborisut, 2020). Under the resulting “quasi-civilian regime” (Lorch, 2021), the space for social activism has been severely restricted and there has been widespread prosecution of young activists by the state, under lèse-majesté and other political crime laws (Huang & Svetanant, 2023). By 2020, as it became clear that there was to be no return to real democracy, increasing opposition to the government eventually led to the youth mobilization for democracy.

In Myanmar, the military, officially known as the Tatmadaw, has long been a significant part of Myanmar’s governance structure (Lukito et al., 2022). The military gained power through a coup in 1962; it did not grant a free election in the country until 1990. The National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi won that election, but the military refused to transfer power to civilian rule. Eventually, Aung San Suu Kyi was put under house arrest (Erlanger, 1990) and Myanmar returned to military rule. In 2015, the first free election for 25 years was held, and NLD once again won a landslide victory. The military finally agreed to loosen its control over the country but it remained a powerful political actor, with a share of a quarter of parliamentary seats guaranteed by the current military-drafted constitution (Beech, 2021).

In the November 2020 election, NLD again claimed victory with more than 80% of the total votes (Tun, 2020). However, this result was challenged by the military; the NLD was accused of electoral fraud, leading to another military coup (Goldman, 2021; Jordt et al., 2021) and ending nearly ten years of quasi-democratic rule (King, 2022).

Findings and Discussion

In the following section, based on experiences from my fieldwork, I will discuss how dual positionality has helped and guided me through the interviews and the field visit in Thailand. The discussion details how I navigated through the research process as an in-betweener or in-out-sider rather than as either an insider or an outsider. Given my background of being of Myanmar origin and currently living in Hong Kong, this discussion shows that how I position and perceive myself throughout the fieldwork is of particular significance within a comparative context.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Summary of My Perceived Positionality.

My positionality	Myanmar	Thailand
Insider	• A Myanmar native	• Speak the language with Asian look
	• Speak the language	• Similar in age range
	• Similar in age range	• Share similar political experience (military rule) with the participants
	• Share the experience of Myanmar politics and history with the participants
Outsider	• Residing outside Myanmar	• A foreign national
	• did not physically witness the coup on 1 Feb 2021 and the youth-led movement that followed	• Residing outside Thailand
	• did not have first-hand experience of the movement	• Different in culture and race
		• did not experience the youth movement myself
		• did not have first-hand experience of the movement

Table 1 summarizes how I perceived and was perceived regarding my positionality during the fieldwork both online and in person with Myanmar and Thai participants. It indicates how and what made me both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ to both groups of the participants.

Outsider from within: the Case of Myanmar

The interviews began with the Myanmar participants. An online mode of interview was adopted and preferred due to the nature of the topic, taking account of the need for participants to maintain a low profile and to preserve their anonymity as far as possible. Not every participant was anonymous to me due to the purposive selection process during the initial recruitment. This facilitated the recruitment process rather than hindering it, as it ensured that I was able to locate and recruit suitable people to participate in the interviews. Komil-Burley (2021) suggests that online and telephone interviews are better options for researchers conducting research in an authoritarian state, helping to avoid the possibility of participants being influenced by third parties or the “gatekeepers” who may be needed when conducting research in a sensitive place. In the case of my study, there was no need to appoint any gatekeepers as I chose to conduct the interviews via online platforms, preferably Zoom due to its accessibility and convenience. Although I met some of the Myanmar participants in Hong Kong and Thailand for in-person interviews, the majority were interviewed virtually via Zoom.

Before each interview began, I would introduce myself to the participant. This was done to build up trust with both Myanmar and Thai participants prior to proceeding any further. This was especially helpful with the Myanmar participants, who needed to feel that they could trust me before sharing their experiences of joining the movement. Part of the trust may have come from knowing that I was from Myanmar but was not in Myanmar. Participants were confident that I understood the political situation, as a Burmese, but at the same time they felt reassured that I was not involved with the authorities. In other words, I was an outsider from within, which was the nuanced positionality that I experienced as I was navigating through the research process.

In addition to being a Myanmar native and speaking Burmese, I grew up under the military government and I belonged to the same generation as many of these young activists. We grew up experiencing the same system and governance before the most recent coup. For this reason, I was considered by the participants as an insider — not only because of where I was from but also because of this shared background and experience of the political pasts. This was apparent when some participants often expressed using phrases like “သိတဲ့အတိုင်းပဲလေ” [as you already know] and “အစ်ကိုလည်းသိမှာေပါ့ ြမန်မာပဲဆိုတော” [you probably know it as a Myanmar native yourself]. As such, I was able to build a good rapport with the participants throughout the interviews. 15 out of 18 participants interviewed on Zoom voluntarily turned on the camera and let themselves be seen during the interview. This willingness might be in part due to the recommendation by their friends who knew me and that to a certain degree conveyed trustworthiness. Nonetheless, I still had not seen many of them prior to the interview and given the sensitive nature of the topic, this could imply that a certain level of trust had been reached and a rapport established. Another scenario that would imply such establishment of trust would be when some participants themselves made a disclosure to me and I quote: “ဒါတွေကလူတိုင်းနဲ့ပြောလို့မရဘူး ဒါပေမယ့် အစ်ကိုနဲ့ပြောတာတော့ အဆင်ပြေပါတယ်” [I cannot just talk about this to everybody but it’s okay to talk to you.] and “ဒီအကြောင်းတွေပြောချင်တယ် ဒါမယ့် တွေ့တဲ့လူတိုင်းနဲ့ပြောလို့အဆင်မပြေဘူး ခုလိုပြောပြရတော့ ရင်ဖွင့်ရသလိုခံစားရတာေပါ့” [I want to talk about all this but it’s not okay to talk to everybody. Now that I get to share it with you, it feels like a relief]. This exhibits that the topic was somehow sensitive to talk about and yet, they still felt comfortable to share it with me.

However, I was not there in Myanmar to experience different stages of the coup or the youth movement that followed. Instead, I learned about the coup and its aftermath mostly from the news and social media. This put me in the position of being an insider (being Burmese) looking in from the outside, to learn about events and their development over time. Thus, rather than being strictly either an insider or an outsider, I found myself falling between the two, or an “in-out-sider” (Bayeck, 2022) when interacting with the Myanmar participants on Zoom and in person. This perhaps put me in a better position in terms of the research: having no direct experience of the coup and its repercussions made me less susceptible to the potential influence of any pre-formed biases and assumptions that I might otherwise have had. It allowed me some distance from events. However, I could still be influenced by my political knowledge and experience of Myanmar prior to the coup: certain assumptions could still be formed from this knowledge and familiarity of the political context.

As this trust built throughout the process of the fieldwork, the participants expressed that they were not just willing but even excited to share their experiences with me. They explained that they could not share their thoughts with anybody outside their trusted circle due to the potential risks of being targeted by the authorities. To some participants, this was an opportunity to express themselves and get their message across. Therefore, despite some concerns, they proceeded to share their experiences, including personal aspects such as the security of their family and their loved ones. They would often express their anger and frustration, as they assumed that I would understand them, since I was an insider with personal knowledge of Myanmar and its decades-long socio-political problems. And, indeed, I could understand their anger and frustration: after all, I am still Burmese, and this could affect me emotionally.

However, this understanding did not guarantee a homogeneous set of views towards the problems. Even among the participants themselves, there was a spectrum of political standpoints. The fact that I shared some of their experiences could shape how I positioned myself in the research process (Berger, 2015), but that shared experience did not necessarily mean that I was fully in accord with the participants (Adu-Ampong & Adams, 2020). It is important to acknowledge that a shared familiarity of cultures and experiences does not imply that we fully understand the lived experiences of the participants (Berkovic et al., 2020). Some of the participants appeared to be aware of this as I noticed that they were sometimes careful about expressing their political views during the interviews. As a response, I refrained from expressing any political views myself, but encouraged them to elaborate as much as possible. In doing so, I took the position of an outsider with a curious mind, keen to learn about their individual experiences of the coup and the movement. They would also attempt to confirm my knowledge of the events from time to time by asking: “သိလိုက်လားမသိဘူး” [You know that, don’t you?] and “ြကားြဖစ်ေသးလား” [You’ve heard of that, haven’t you?]. And when I was in surprise or in shock of certain experience shared by a participant, she made a remark saying: “ဟိုမှာနေတော့ ြဖစ်ပျက်တာေတွအကုန်မြကားဘူးပေါ့ေနာ်” [Living there (Hong Kong), I suppose you haven’t heard of everything (that’s happened)?].

Being too close emotionally or too attached to the context may taint the objective sense of data interpretation (Hellawell, 2006). This is a challenge, given the researcher’s intersubjective relationship with the participants, especially in participatory research (Zampini et al., 2021). To some degree, I was spared from this relationship of intersubjectivity because of the online setting and my positionality. As an in-out-sider researcher, I was neither too close nor too far from the context and the participants. Consequently, I was able to explore their individual experiences in depth rather than to confirm my own presumptions of their experiences. If I were strictly an insider, who was a part of the movement myself, the way I positioned myself towards the participants would have been different. That position would have posed more challenges to my self-reflexivity when approaching the participants, thereby affecting the intersubjectivity between us.

There were times when I had to ask certain questions regarding the aftermath of the coup, which the participants assumed I already knew about. This was when I had to utilize my positionality as an outsider, to remind the participants of my need to listen to and learn from their first-hand experiences. This is what Flores (2018) suggested when he embraced both his insider and his outsider positionality while navigating through interviews with different political activist groups. In a similar way, it was embracing my in-out-sider positionality that enabled me to detach from the context as well as the participants to minimize the likelihood of being biased in terms of both the data collection process and the data interpretation. Nevertheless, I had to constantly and actively negotiate my positionality throughout the interview process, which is common for researchers in the field (Bourke, 2014).

Insider from without: the Case of Thailand

Speaking Thai like a near-native, I was often mistaken for a Thai during the research process. Even after I had introduced myself, some people thought that I was a Thai studying in Hong Kong. For example, a participant expressed in surprise after learning that I was in fact a non-Thai: “นึกว่าเป็นคนไทยเรียนอยู่ฮ่องกง” [I thought you were a Thai studying in Hong Kong!]. In addition to an Asian-looking appearance, language was an important asset (Purwaningrum & Shtaltovna, 2017), equipping me with the ability to connect and blend in among the participants during the interviews and the field visit in Thailand. Especially during the field visit, when I asked to visit some of their workplaces and attend their regular gatherings, speaking the language like a local facilitated the process. I could get myself invited and be present in their work meetings which were supposed to be exclusive to the members. I was even invited to share my thoughts on the topic they discussed during one of the meetings. As far as I could tell, some people did not even notice that I was a non-Thai after I had spoken. This gave me the freedom to enter into deeper discussions with the local people and without the concern of nuances being lost in translation. Thus, it was not only about the appearance but speaking the language in the way that sounded like a native made me blend in like an insider. For example, a participant at the meeting commented on having mistaken me for a Thai with reference to my Thai fluency: “ถ้าไม่บอก ไม่รู้เลยว่าไม่ใช่คนไทย พูดได้เหมือนคนไทยมาก” [If you didn’t tell, I wouldn’t have known that you were not Thai. You sounded just like one!]. Another participant wondered if I had lived in Thailand for some time: “ทำไมพูดได้เหมือนคนไทยเลยคะ เคยอยู่ไทยหรือคะ” [How can you speak like a Thai? Have you lived in Thailand?].

Yet in spite of all this, I was an outsider: a foreign national with a different life story and racial background. More importantly, as in the case of Myanmar, I had no direct experience of the protest movement in Thailand. Because of this identity, which did not align with that of the participants in this context (Chavez, 2008), I had to first acknowledge that I might have limited understanding of the participants with regards to their cultural background and experiences (Bourke, 2014; Greene, 2014). I regarded this as an opportunity for me to enter the field with fewer pre-formed assumptions of the context and the participants. Even more importantly, as an outsider, I was likely to be more sensitive to the context and the social phenomenon I was studying (Bourke, 2014; Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). This provided me with a degree of flexibility in navigating through the process and also helped to generate more independent interpretation of the results. On the other hand, I had to recognize the risk that this detachment could hinder me from understanding the cultural context more thoroughly (Savvides et al., 2014).

Fortunately, my Asian appearance, similarity in age and fluency in Thai ensured that I would not be perceived as strictly an outsider by the participants. It was the combination of all these features that shaped my positionality as perceived by the participants. As a result, I generally received positive responses from the people I approached, and a willingness to participate. Some responded extensively to questions and were engaged throughout the interview; some offered to invite their friends to participate without being asked. This suggested that I was able to build a rapport with the participants despite being a non-Thai. Our seamless, interactive conversations implied that they treated me like one of their Thai friends.

Language is a powerful tool of communication that lets us explore the ‘other’ by becoming a ‘literary insider’. I did my homework before going to the field. I had been regularly watching Thai news and reading political commentaries and other publications to familiarize myself with the context. My Thai language literacy not only helped in preparing myself for the fieldwork but, more specifically, it helped to connect me with the participants at the local level. Indeed, language accessibility had an impact on how I perceived and was perceived during the fieldwork in Thailand. Adu-Ampong and Adams (2020) note in their study that being an ‘in-out-sider’ can be expressed and negotiated through language fluency. Being able to conduct an interview in a local language has been proven to have several advantages, especially with regard to the depth of knowledge of the topic being studied (Purwaningrum & Shtaltovna, 2017; Shtaltvona, 2013).

In addition to the language capability that allowed me to position myself effectively among the local participants, there was also a similar political history and shared cultural identity that facilitated communications and the discussion of the research topic. For example, I spent time in Phrae, a northern Thai province known for its rich history related to the Shan ¹ (Tai) people to which I belong; whilst there, I was introduced to the local history and shown how cultural identity was historically formed and shared in the past. This shared cultural history in this part of Thailand helped connect me with the local community. After learning that I was a Shan, some of the people were excited and wanted to ask me more about my origins. One of the participants even attempted to communicate with me in Shan (Tai) language (my native dialect which sounds similar to the dialect spoken in the northern part of Thailand like Chiang Mai). This is another example of how I was perceived not solely as either an outsider or an insider while conducting my fieldwork in Thailand. My positionality was constantly negotiated not only through language fluency but also through personal background in relation to the study topic while similarity in age helped to eliminate the power distance to a certain extent.

This shared historical knowledge and similar culture were not limited to the social sphere but also applied to the political sphere. Like Thailand, Myanmar has experienced frequent military coups since its independence (although less frequent than in Thailand). This shared experience of the political past and present played an important role in shaping my positionality when approaching the Thai participants. It was clear that we were not only communicating in the same language (i.e. in Thai) but we were also engaged in the same type of political crisis. I observed during the interviews that several Thai participants were curious about what was happening in Myanmar and were keen to hear what I thought about it. For example, a participant expressed her personal interest in Myanmar issues during the interview: “อยากรู้เรื่องราวเกี่ยวกับพม่าเหมือนกัน ถ้ามีอะไรก็แชร์ได้นะคะ” [I’d like to know about Myanmar too. You may share it with me.]. That curiosity led to several unexpected conversations in which we exchanged impromptu, off-script thoughts about the topic in more detail. Some participants eagerly went well beyond the interview questions and shared some of their earlier political experiences that led them to where they are today, even when such sharing included personal information and carried potential risk. This suggests that they regarded me as an insider from outside who not only spoke the language but also had a deeper knowledge about the topic and the context. While this might be true from a political point of view, however, I was aware that in a cultural sense, I might not fully understand the context despite the local connection and the support of the language skill. Nevertheless, coming from Myanmar, where a similar political crisis had been taking place at the time of the study, created an opportunity for Thai participants to express sympathy and solidarity for Myanmar people. In a comparative study context, this is a significant observation of how a similar political context could influence my positionality as I was engaged in reciprocal discussions with the Thai participants. This aspect of positionality assisted the research process in terms of participants' engagement, as well as generating deep and interactive discussions that would benefit the data collection process.

Conclusion

The negotiation of researcher positionality throughout the research process has been a central discussion within the literature on qualitative research methods. Multiple positionalities such as ‘insider’, ‘outsider’ and/or ‘in-out-sider’ may not always be static. Rather, they may shift in form due to their liquid nature. Despite the complexity of separating them, these positionalities play an important role in shaping the research design and process and thus the findings and their interpretation. Critical reflexivity, which affects intersubjectivity, is thus crucial in order to navigate through the nuances of the researcher’s multiple positionalities. These subtle nuances are present and manifest during the fieldwork, in encounters with the participants and in the context of the study.

In the comparative study context in which I was engaged, where I could be and was perceived to be both an insider and an outsider, negotiation of these multiple positionalities was a vital part of the process as I maneuvered through the fieldwork. These multiple researcher positionalities facilitated access to potential participants, the understanding of the social contexts and the execution of the interview process. When researchers are neither strictly inside nor completely outside of the study context, they have an opportunity to use such complexity to their advantage, which could result in deeper understanding of the phenomenon and subsequently, of the independently interpreted conclusions.