GM505 Unit 7 Insider Consultant Reflexivity Analysis Example

What My Presence Changed and What It Hid: A Unit 7 Reflexivity Analysis of an Insider Consultant

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM505: Action Research and Consulting Skills

Unit 7 Reflexivity Analysis

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The college, its staff, its students and every journal entry are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

Stance Statement

I am a financial aid advisor with five years in this office, and I am also the person studying it. I have a stake in the outcome: I work these phones, and a better process would make my job easier. Last spring I proposed scheduled callbacks and the office rejected the idea, so I came to this inquiry with something to prove. I also began hoping the fault would lie in the workflow rather than in my colleagues, because a people problem would mean my colleagues, and perhaps I, were the cause. Each of those facts could bend what I saw.

David Coghlan and Teresa Brannick describe three challenges for insiders researching their own organization: preunderstanding, the knowledge and assumptions an insider brings; role duality, the tension between being a member and being a researcher; and organizational politics, the interests that shape what can be studied and said (Coghlan & Brannick, 2014). I use them as headings below.

Preunderstanding

Journal, September 22. "Started coding calls today. Already sure most of them will be status calls. Need to watch that."

My five years told me where to look. I knew that status calls were common, that the request letter confused students and that advisors could not see the processor's notes. That knowledge let me design the diagnosis quickly. It also meant I expected a particular answer.

How it shaped evidence. The five call categories were mine, and I built them around what I already believed. A category for "complaint about advisor" was not in my first draft; the director added it. Without that addition, the courtesy explanation would have had no data at all.

What I did about it. I asked the director and one advisor to review the categories before coding began, and I wrote down my prediction, that status calls would exceed 30 percent, before seeing results. They came in at about 40 percent, which confirmed my expectation but also showed it was not so strong that I had invented it.

Role Duality

Journal, September 29. "Sat at the processing desk this morning. She worked through files faster than I have ever seen. Did she do that because I was there?"

Being a colleague gave me access to the processing desk, which an outside consultant might have struggled to get. But my presence changed what I observed. On the first of three mornings, the senior processor reviewed about 30 percent more files than her daily average from the tracking system. On the third morning, her pace was close to her average.

Researchers have long debated whether being observed changes behavior; a systematic review concluded that participation effects are real but vary widely and need careful study rather than assumption (McCambridge et al., 2014). The pattern here, faster at first and normal later, fits a short-lived effect.

How it shaped evidence. Advisors also coded calls more carefully once they knew calls were being counted. In the two weeks of coding, they logged more calls per shift than the phone system's own records show for the same weeks of the previous year, suggesting that calls once left unrecorded were now being logged.

What I did about it. I relied on the tracking system's figures for the processor's pace rather than my observation, and I compared advisors' coded counts with the phone system's raw call counts, which matched within 4 percent.

Being one of them got me to the processing desk, and being one of them changed what happened there while I watched.

Organizational Politics

Journal, October 6. "The diagnosis points at the dean's rule. I keep rewriting that paragraph so it sounds smaller."

The dean sponsors this work and has authority over my position. The diagnosis suggests her live-answer rule contributes to the problem. I felt pressure to soften that finding.

How it shaped evidence. In my first draft of the diagnostic report, the live-answer rule appeared in one sentence near the end. After rereading my journal, I recognized I had buried it.

What I did about it. I moved the finding into its own section in the feedback report and raised it with the dean privately before writing it, as the clause I proposed after the Unit 6 seminar requires.

Absent Voices

Some people never appear in my evidence. Students who gave up on aid without calling are invisible in the call data and in the file tracing, since their files were never completed. They may be the students most affected by the unclear letter. The evening counter on the south campus, staffed by two advisors I rarely work with, is also missing; I coded no calls from it. Teresa Brannick and David Coghlan argue that insiders' closeness is a resource, not only a bias (Brannick & Coghlan, 2007), but closeness to some colleagues is also distance from others.

What Reflexivity Changed in the Design

The journal did more than record doubts; it changed decisions. Three changes to the engagement came directly from entries like those above. First, the data gathering plan for the pilot pulls records before any interviews, so that what colleagues tell me cannot shape which numbers I look for. Second, a colleague from institutional research, not I, will interview the senior processor about the pilot, since she knows the new letter and the notes are partly my idea and may tell me what she thinks I hope to hear. Third, the plan writes down the failing result before any data arrive, so I cannot redefine success after seeing the data. Each of these is a small procedural step, but together they make the evaluation less dependent on my judgment than the diagnosis was. If I had not written down my expectations in September, I would not have noticed how closely the diagnosis followed them, and the evaluation would have inherited the same risk.

What Cannot Be Corrected

Some effects of my position cannot be removed. My history in the office, including the rejected callback idea, will shape how colleagues and the dean read the final report. Some will see it as a vindication of my earlier proposal. I can state that history, as I have here, but I cannot erase it. What I can do is make the evidence checkable, so that the findings stand on records anyone can examine rather than on my word.

References

Brannick, T., & Coghlan, D. (2007). In defense of being "native": The case for insider academic research. Organizational Research Methods, 10(1), 59-74. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428106289253

Coghlan, D., & Brannick, T. (2014). Doing action research in your own organization (4th ed.). Sage.

McCambridge, J., Witton, J., & Elbourne, D. R. (2014). Systematic review of the Hawthorne effect: New concepts are needed to study research participation effects. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 67(3), 267-277. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2013.08.015