If you’re a DBA candidate, there’s a good chance your research site is the organisation you already work for. You know the politics. You know the history. You know why certain decisions got made, even when the official record doesn’t say so.
Is that an advantage or a problem? Honestly, both – and how you handle that tension is one of the most consequential methodological decisions you’ll make.
Why Insider Knowledge Quietly Becomes a Risk
The risk isn’t that you know things. It’s that what you already know can start doing the work your data analysis is supposed to do, without you noticing it happening.
Say you’re coding interview transcripts from colleagues, and one participant mentions “communication issues between departments.” If you’ve worked there for eight years, you already have a theory about what that means – you know the history, the personalities, the old conflict from three reorganisations ago. The danger is coding that response according to what you already believe it means, rather than what the transcript, read on its own terms, actually supports. You end up confirming what you knew before you started, dressed up as a finding.
This is sometimes called insider bias, though I’d argue “bias” undersells how it actually operates – it’s less a distortion and more a shortcut. Your professional judgement is fast and usually right, which is exactly why it’s dangerous in a research context that requires you to justify every interpretive step, slowly, on the record.
The Discipline: Reflexivity as a Method, Not a Disclaimer
Many students treat reflexivity as a single paragraph in the methodology chapter – “as an insider, I acknowledge my position may have influenced the research” – and then move on. That paragraph, on its own, doesn’t do anything. It’s a disclaimer, not a method.
Genuine reflexivity means being able to trace, for any given finding, three separate things:
- What you already believed about this, based on your professional experience, before you looked at the data.
- What the data itself showed, read as neutrally as you could manage.
- Where those two things agreed, disagreed, or where the data surprised you.
The third point is the most valuable, and the one insiders most often skip. A finding that simply confirms what you already believed is the least interesting kind of finding you can report, because a sceptical examiner will reasonably ask whether you found it or assumed it. A finding where your prior belief and your data actually diverged – where the evidence made you revise something you thought you knew – is far stronger evidence that your analysis, not just your experience, produced the result.
A Practical Habit
One habit I recommend to DBA clients: before coding a transcript, write a single sentence predicting what you expect to find, based on what you already know. Then code the transcript. Then compare. When your prediction and your coding match, ask yourself honestly whether the match happened because the data genuinely supports it, or because you coded toward what you expected. This doesn’t slow the process down much, and it creates a paper trail of reflexive practice that’s far more convincing to an examiner than a one-paragraph disclaimer.
FAQ
Does being an insider disqualify my research? No. Insider research is a well-established and valuable approach, particularly in DBA and practitioner-doctorate contexts. The requirement is transparency about your position, not elimination of it.
Should I try to “switch off” what I know while coding? You can’t, and trying to pretend you have isn’t credible either. The goal is to make your prior knowledge visible and checkable, not to erase it.
Where does this go in my thesis? Typically in your methodology chapter, under positionality or reflexivity – but the practice itself should run through your analysis chapter too, not just be declared once at the start.
Next Step
If you’re not sure where your professional judgement ends and your data analysis begins, that’s worth talking through before it becomes a viva question rather than after. I offer a free 15-minute introductory call.