Polyphony in Practice: Applying Bakhtinian Dialogism as an Epistemological Framework for Embedded Reflexivity

Despite reflexivity remaining a central concern in qualitative inquiry, dominant approaches, such as relational, positional, and ethical reflexivity, often compartmentalise the researcher’s role or frame reflexive practice as an external addendum or an obligatory ‘confession.’ This methodological paper advances an alternative epistemological stance by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism and emphasising polyphony as a methodological and epistemic positioning within qualitative research.

The paper develops a dialogical epistemological framework that demonstrates how Bakhtin’s discursive-devices (for example, single-voiced and double-voiced words, loopholes, and sideward glances) can be operationalised as analytical tools for recognising multivocality within qualitative inquiry. Methodologically, this is grounded in a qualitative interview study exploring former-vegan identities as lived socio-cultural and ideological experience. In-depth interviews were undertaken and transcribed, and a Bakhtinian-informed analytic procedure was applied in three stages: (1) identifying and coding instances of key discursive devices in the transcripts; (2) mapping how these devices organise co-constructed meaning-making between participant and researcher; and (3) tracing the shifting ideological positions and dialogical ‘tensions’ that emerge across the interview encounter.

Empirically, the worked examples show how attention to single- and double-voiced words illuminates participants’ negotiations of moral accountability and identity change, how sideward glances reveal orienting to absent audiences (for instance, imagined vegans or sceptical others), and how loopholes signal attempts to manage conflict between ethical commitments and everyday practices. These illustrations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in making visible the polyphonic character of qualitative data and the researcher’s own participation in it. The paper concludes by outlining the methodological implications of adopting a dialogical epistemology for qualitative research design, including the reciprocal nature of voice between researcher and participant, heightened sensitivity to participant agency, and a theoretically grounded, transferable set of analytic procedures for embedding dialogical reflexivity throughout the research process.