Why Positionality Questions Come Up in Malaysian Vivas
Questions about positionality — who you are as a researcher and how your identity, background, and relationship to the research topic may have shaped your study — are increasingly standard in Malaysian postgraduate vivas, particularly for qualitative and mixed-methods research. These questions test whether you have genuinely reflected on your own position in the research rather than claiming a false neutrality that qualitative research methodology explicitly rejects. Being prepared to discuss your positionality in the viva requires specific, concrete reflections — not a theoretical discussion of why positionality matters, but an honest account of how your particular position shaped your particular study.
The Specific Positionality Questions to Prepare For
Examiners typically approach positionality through two types of questions. The first is the insider/outsider question: “Were you an insider or outsider researcher in relation to your participants, and how did this affect the data collection and analysis?” An insider researcher shares important characteristics with participants — professional role, ethnic background, institutional affiliation, life experience — which creates access and rapport but also potential blind spots. An outsider researcher brings distance and fresh perspective but may miss cultural nuance or generate lower trust from participants. Your answer should acknowledge which position you occupied and describe specific ways it shaped the research process.
The second type is the reflexivity question: “How did you manage your own assumptions and biases during data collection and analysis?” This requires describing specific practices — a reflexivity journal, peer debriefing, member checking — with concrete examples of how these practices influenced your analytical decisions. A response that names these practices without describing how they operated in your specific study is insufficient.
Giving Specific Examples of Positionality in Action
The most credible positionality discussions in Malaysian vivas are those grounded in specific examples. “As a former doctoral candidate myself, I entered the study with assumptions that financial support would be the primary concern of participants — an assumption that my reflexivity journal helped me identify and bracket during analysis when early interview data suggested that social belonging was a more significant factor.” This response names a specific assumption, identifies how it was detected through a specific reflexivity practice, and describes the analytical consequence of detecting and managing it.
If your positionality was entirely positive — if your insider position provided only advantages without any complicating assumptions or potential blind spots — examiners are likely to probe for the limitations you have not acknowledged. No positionality is entirely unproblematic. Preparing to discuss one or two specific ways your position may have limited or shaped the research, alongside the strategies you used to manage those effects, is more credible and more complete than presenting your positionality as an unalloyed advantage. Discussing positionality in your Malaysian viva with this level of honest, specific reflection demonstrates the intellectual maturity that qualitative research methodology requires of its practitioners.
