 My name is Crystal Steltenpoul and I'm going to talk a little bit today about positionality statements and how they fit in with open science. So let's talk about the logic of open science real quick. Open science is a method or really a set of methods for making the research process and products more transparent. So ways that we try to make the research process more transparent is by outlining specifically the decisions that researchers make throughout a research study. So things like setting your alpha, when is it an outlier, what kinds of analyses are you going to run on, which variables, which are scored in which way, right? So we outline and try to really grapple with what we're doing and why we're doing it before we actually run the research study. We also try to make our research products transparent and we can do this through sharing our data, sharing our materials, we might share our analysis scripts, stuff like that, but you can also share preprints and other means of science communication. So these are different ways that you can make things more transparent. So you might be wondering where do positionality statements fit in. So positionality statements come from qualitative and critical quantitative paradigms and they're basically statements that help to contextualize the research process. They often go in the method section, though not always. And they basically help to fold the researcher back into the study because the researcher is an important but often ignored part of the research process. There are a lot of decisions that get made over the course of a study. From, why is this important enough for me to be spending my time on it in the first place? All the way through that study to the end where you have your results and you're deciding, okay, what do I tell people about this, right? There are a lot of decisions that get made during the process of a study. And it's not always made explicit, but those decisions are always made by people who are going to be influenced by a number of factors. Usually though, when we think about researchers and being influenced, we think about money, we think about conflicts of interest. But researcher bias isn't limited to who's paying you and where that money is coming from. Who we are and what we've experienced or learned throughout our life can influence what we see in the first place. You're not qualitatively trained. You might be asking, wait a minute, what kinds of things do you think can influence my research? And I don't have a specific answer for you because it's gonna depend on you and your research. But we can do this right now. Take a few minutes to consider how your training background, your personal history, your culture, your personal and professional interests, all might have influenced your work. I know as somebody who used to study the way that people interact with and through technology, growing up my personal history, my culture is that I grew up in a military family who moved around a lot between the US and Western Europe. I used video games to make connections with people. I joined online forums around video games. I played online games when I could. I made a lot of community even though I was moving around a lot. That was my sense of stable community. But I actually didn't initially study this topic because my training background was primarily in social psychology, which was focused almost entirely on video games and aggression while I was coming up in school. And I wasn't really interested in studying that because that didn't match my personal history. I was interested in communities and community development and membership and stuff like that. And it actually wasn't until late in graduate school when I realized I could study that. I could study how people make community online, how they make community and gaming communities and where those have strengths and weaknesses. That's how my history has influenced my work. So it's important for us to take a moment to question how and why a research question is considered interesting and meaningful. And that's what positionality statements try to do. So I get this question sometimes. Are positionality statements only for qualitative researchers? The answer to that is no. That's not the case. Quantitative researchers can and in my opinion should consider using positionality statements in their work. So if you want to learn more about positionality statements than I could feasibly provide in five minutes, I highly recommend reading Jameson, Govart and Pallinals, Reflexivity and Quantitative Research Paper. It's open access meaning it's free to read. It's got some great questions for you about your research, regardless of whether you're a qualitative or qualitative researcher. Go read it today. I also made a series of YouTube videos on how to craft a positionality statement with Cambridge University Press. So that might be a good starting point. And of course, you're also welcome to email me. I'd be happy to answer any questions. Or send you examples of really good positionality statements. Thanks for listening, and I hope you have a great day.