Challenging Power and Repairing Harm: Reframing Member Checking Through Restorative Justice Principles

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Disrupting Power in Qualitative Research: Three Alternative Approaches to Data Collection and Analysis

Abstract

Member checking occurs when researchers return data or interpretations to a study’s participants so that they may affirm or refute the analysis (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Vella, 2024). Seen as a tool to enhance validity (Cho & Trent, 2006; Doyle, 2007) and reliability (Caretta & Perez, 2019; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000), member checking’s role in research is entrenched. The established nature of member checking has led to its expected inclusion within research design, as it is hailed as the gold standard qualitative research (Madill and Sullivan, 2018; Motulsky, 2021).

Member checking’s unquestioned and uncritical use checking, however, does not hold space for an interrogation of its shortcomings and potential deleterious impact on participants. When participants engage in member checking they read back interview transcripts, or examine researchers’ analytic interpretation, both of which can lead to re-traumatization, or feelings of distress, exploitation, and embarrassment, (Barbour, 2001; Birt et al., 2016; Mero-Jaffe, 2011; Motulsky, 2021). Researchers’ analysis can also result in the stigmatization and undesired comparison of specific groups (de Loyola González-Salgado et al., 2024).

The structure of member checking can also engender the inexorable nature of power dynamics (Chase, 2017; Simpson & Quigley, 2016). As researchers are often viewed as an expert by participants, the reification of power structures and hierarchies commonly play out during member checking (Goldblatt et al., 2011). Even when good faith efforts are made to include participants, participants may feel prohibited from challenging a study’s analysis and believing they must agree with the analytic interpretation (Buchbinder, 2011; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Urry et al., 2024).

Although unintended by researchers during member checking, the altering, silencing, or erasure of participants' voices is a representation of epistemic violence (Santos, 2018; Spivak, 1988). Scholars engaging in member checking are not intentionally silencing or erasing; however, researchers often interpret and analyze data through the colonial and Western frameworks they have been trained in. The results are that the produced and disseminated findings can create a spurious validity, as participants’ ways of knowing are overwritten by a researcher’s analysis and construction.
To address these concerns, the use of a restorative justice (RJ) lens to member check was developed (Author & Author, 2025) and operationalized in a study on the emotional labor experiences of Teachers of Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teachers of color (Author & Author, 2025). The full paper and presentation will detail how the lens was implemented in the study, step-by-step, and the manner in which it looked to broach the challenges brought forth by member checking. The steps taken in the RJ-centric process aimed to equalize power dynamics and dismantle the hierarchical chasm between researchers and participants (Kolsch, 2013; Thambinathan & Kinsella, 2021). Can an RJ lens to member checking account for the seemingly intransigent power dynamics and potential for harm? As the tensions brought forth in this abstract cannot solely be resolved in a singular paper, nor does this method serve as a novel panacea, further discourse is warranted.

Author

• Alexander Parker, Johns Hopkins University