ABSTRACT
Military research in the social sciences is often carried out by individuals with past or ongoing military service as well as by those who have no prior experiences of military life. Regardless of the kind of researcher you are, there are well-known challenges associated with researching the military. In this chapter, I shall draw upon my recent research on career soldiers who were leaving the British Army to explore some of the important methodological dynamics that I encountered (Walker, 2010, 2013). This qualitative research project began only months after I had ended my own lengthy Army career. As the work progressed, my professional relationship to the data and the topic of Army exit shifted from one of proximity to one of critical distance – or at least as critically distant as an ex-soldier-turned-researcher can possibly be. My aim in the chapter is to show that military insider-ness may be put to good research use if a professional and reflexive approach is adopted. During the course of this particular project, I found that the passage of time was a significant resource that I could use to the advantage of the work at key stages of the research process. For example, I wrote the research questions from a position of significant early proximity; then as I became increasingly distant from my Army career, and more critical of the process of Army exit, I found that I had new perspectives from which I could analyse the data and my own prior views – a process that reverses that of the traditional anthropologist who seeks to immerse herself in a foreign culture in order to report back to the academic community. Matters of positionality and reflexivity for researchers are certainly not new considerations, but as I go on to discuss they are less likely to attract the attention they deserve among researchers of the military, although this is beginning to change (cf. Castro and Carreiras, 2013; Soeters et al., 2014). In this chapter, my own contribution to this important body of work is made in the spirit of Amanda Coffey’s notion of the researcher as an ‘ethnographic self’. For Coffey, the researcher is ‘thoroughly implicated in the way we collect, understand, and analyse [. . .] data such that the researching self is often presented as a kind of “medium through which fieldwork is conducted” ’ (1999: 122).
