Decolonizing Methodology in a Study on Decolonial Practices: Member Checking as Co-constructed Knowledge Creation

I received a grant in 2023 to learn about practices of decoloniality among pastoral leaders of color in mainline Protestant traditions. Such practices include anti-racist and anti-white supremacist engagements, as well as diversity and inclusion efforts. However, practices toward decoloniality involve more directly ideas, processes, and practices of resistance, subversion, and reclamation against and beyond the colonial matrix of power—“a complex structure of management and control composed of domains, levels, and flows”—as a foundational ethic of life in the United States.(1) The study itself involves 1.5 hour long, one-on-one, semi-structured interviews with 20-25 pastoral leaders across the country and from a variety of denominational traditions.

For such a project, I also wanted to praxis a decolonial methodology, particularly in the analysis phase of the work, to minimize the practice of research as an extractive endeavor on the part of “experts” to obtain wisdom and experience from others without their input into its interpretations. As a result, I incorporated into the research design the process of member checking, or respondent validation, at the point in which I write up results and analyses of interviews. While this takes place months after the interviews themselves, leaders have agreed in advance to engage in this process, with the understanding that they are the singular experts on their own experiences and thus possess the agency to confirm, deny, alter, and (co)shape initial interpretations. In this manner, I hope to praxis a kind of deep accountability in the process of knowledge co-creation. Because qualitative analyses procedures can often move the researcher further from participants’ words through coding of transcript themes, followed by the development of second and third order constructs of meaning from those codes, an intentional use of member checking keeps the research closer to participants’ lived experiences and practices, as well as their own reflections on those experiences and practices.(2)

While there is nothing wholly unique to this study or its design in the broad spectrum of qualitative approaches, I believe that expanding upon this often overlooked “validation” method toward resituating research as a collaborative endeavor of knowledge co-creation (without extending into the realms of participatory research entirely, as this involves different kinds of expectations and relationships with individuals and communities) creates greater potential for how research with lived religious persons and communities can become less transactional and more relational in centering participants’ experiences and practices beyond the extraction of their words (i.e., engaging in a more ethical and relational re-presentation of practices). 

This research is still ongoing, with interviews taking place the first part of 2024 and analysis beginning later in 2024 and extending into 2025; however, I hope to have initial examples of places where knowledge co-creation took place in preliminary analyses, as well as a deeper description of the details and a few best practices for the in-depth member checking process (e.g., sharing first drafts, leaving space for notes, asking questions in comments, and inviting a follow-up Zoom conversation if helpful). 

(1) Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2018), 142.

(2) Linda Birt, Suzanne Scott, and Fiona Walter, “Member Checking: A Tool to Enhance Trustworthiness or Merely a Nod to Validation?,” Qualitative Health Research 23 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069241227852.