Conference Agenda

Researcher identity is a type of professional identity, a key factor not only in career success, but also a potential source of satisfaction with life for most of us. In this interactive symposium, we invite the participants for joint explorations on the professional identity of a qualitative researcher. In the era of continual transformations in academic life, reflecting on our own identity facilitates coping with challenges, conflicts, and crises in our professional career. In the first session, participants reflect on major contextual factors that determine our identity. During the second session, we focus on the personal domains of lived experiences and the development of competencies. The third session is a presentation on a potential approach and method, Identity Structure Analysis, a mixed methods tool to study a researcher’s/lecturer’s professional identity. We will demonstrate how the results of our joint qualitative explorations can be built into the instrument for further use.

Our explorations on the context include shared reflections on the impact of the neoliberal turn within academia – the consequences of globalization, digitization, and increased competition. These challenges are common to most of us. Who are the significant others that determine my career as a researcher? What is the role of gender (e.g., tensions between the academic clock and the biological clock; potential discrimination of LGBTQ+ and female academics)? What is the role of one’s nationality in their career? What are our ideas on a functional/dysfunctional organizational background? In this interactive session, participants are encouraged to share their experiences as a focus group.

A researcher’s identity includes our attitudes, motivations, values, beliefs, and experiences in the context of our profession, as well as our reflections to all these. Some of the identity elements or themes are context-independent, such as motivation, curiosity, creativity, critical-reflective thinking, preference for individual vs. teamwork, and autonomy. Other factors might be more specific, such as the researcher’s area of interest, or the approaches they use. The immediate social context is represented by our metaperspectives: How do others see me as a researcher? How do they see my area of interest, my background, my methods etc.?

In this interactive session, we facilitate autoethnographic explorations by integrating the Life Line technique, a method used in narrative approaches with Critical Incident Analysis. Through these methods, we aim to deepen our knowledge on our personally experienced conflicted issues and unique strengths and competencies.

Identity Structure Analysis (ISA) (Weinreich, 2004) integrates classical theories with narrative and discursive approaches. ISA defines identity as the totality of our constructs on our own selves, with a continuity between past and present experiences and future anticipations. ISA’s framework software, Ipseus includes a bipolar rating scale and relies on iterative multi-perspective ratings to measure one’s identifications, self-states, and conflicted areas. The discourses in the appraisals are shaped according to participants’ key domains of social interactions (entities) and to the themes (constructs), emerging in the interactions. Since its inception, ISA has been used to explore cultural and professional identities, as well as identity changes in clinical settings. Though ISA/Ipseus uses quantified identity parameters, it is customized to respondents’ discursive traditions. This ethnographic approach with a strong focus on language requires qualitative methods (e.g., observations, interviews, and a Delphi-method to reach expert consensus, etc.) to define the exact contents of the discourses. In this presentation, we focus on the qualitative steps that we used when designing our Lecturer Identity Instrument. These steps comprised discourse analysis on key strategic documents, autoethnography and a Delphi-method involving cross-cultural comparisons.