This tutorial is about you, the researcher, and how your decisions and actions connect to what happens in your final project. Every HCI project is a sequence of research decisions: what to prototype, who to recruit, what methods to use, and what results might be called a finding. These decisions don’t happen automatically, they are made by someone with a particular training, history, body, and set of relationships, and that someone is the instrument through which the project’s knowledge is produced. Positionality is the practice of owning those decisions and communicating how your position shaped them. Olmos-Vega and colleagues wrote that reflexivity “should go beyond disclosing each investigator’s background and training; it should include descriptions of how the researcher’s prior experiences and motivations might influence the decisions made throughout the project” (Olmos-Vega et al., 2023).
For COMP6390 students this tutorial prepares you to develop the positionality statement in the final project, which is marked on how you connect your background and presence to decisions in your research. For COMP3900 students these skills will help you to evaluate your findings critically and would prepare you for any further study or projects in HCI.
Your final project will be at a different stage to your classmates’ which is totally fine. This class works on the decisions you have made so far, and the ones you have not made yet are a good place to look for alternatives.
You must complete these tasks before the start of your tutorial.
Re-read the reflexivity section of the week 6 lecture, then read the four types of reflexivity (personal, interpersonal, methodological, contextual) in Olmos-Vega et al. (2023) and the positionality statement in Liang et al. (2021). You will need this knowledge to evaluate other researcher’s statements and craft your own.
Find one published HCI paper that contains an explicit positionality or reflexivity statement. These have become common at SIGCHI venues since around 2021: a scoping review of CHI found 272 papers with full positionality statements over eleven years, only 14 of them before 2021 and 111 in 2024 alone (Singh et al., 2025). So a full-text search in the ACM Digital Library for “positionality” or “our positionality”, filtered to SIGCHI sponsored conferences or journals, will find heaps. Look through the whole paper, not just the statement, because you need to judge whether the statement matches what the authors actually did.
The paper must not be one that appears in the lecture slides, workshops, or reading list for this course. Part of the task is going into the literature on your own.
Post on the forum (100–200 words, with at least one proper reference to your paper):
Bring your current final project plan to class: your research question, prototype idea, method, participant plan, and any work on analysis you have done so far. If parts are undecided, bring the options you are considering.
The last bullet of task 3 is tricky, but it’s also the specific skill being assessed in the positionality rubric for COMP6390 students. Linking a position to a decision, rather than just describing your position, makes positionality a useful part of a research work, not just a biography.
In groups of 4–5, each person gives a one-sentence summary of the statement they found. As a group, place each statement on a line from biography at one end (e.g., “we are three computer scientists at a US university”) to decision-linked at the other (e.g., “because two of us are former nurses, we designed the interview protocol around the existing tensions of shift handover”).
Identify how the decision-linked statements contribute to evaluating the authors’ research. The same scoping review found that statements are “often a box-ticking exercise and their influence on the research is rarely discussed” (Singh et al., 2025), so expect most of what you found to sit near the biography end. Share these with the class, and compare them with the final project rubric row, which rewards reflection that “clearly articulates how background and presence shaped specific decisions at each stage”.
A note on disclosure. Positionality is “not necessarily about disclosing your identity” (week 6 lecture). Some researchers choose to own aspects of their identity, e.g., cultural background, (dis)abilities, lived experience of the research context, because it changed what they did and why. That can be powerful, but it is not required for an effective statement. The researchers interviewed by Liang, Munson and Kientz (2021) describe the discomfort of positionality being read as a demand to “out ourselves at the beginning of every paper”, and that is not what is being asked here. Positionality is about understanding how your position, your decisions, and your actions are linked, and showing that the links were not automatic.
Work individually in the shared document provided by your tutor. There is one table per student, with one row for each stage of the final project. Fill in as many rows as you can. Rows for stages you haven’t reached yet are still useful: write what you are leaning towards and why.
| Stage | What I chose (or am choosing) | What I did not choose | Why the choice felt natural to me | Who would have chosen differently, and what would they have done? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Design concept and user needs | ||||
| Prototype form and fidelity | ||||
| Research question | ||||
| Evaluation method and data type | ||||
| Participants and recruitment | ||||
| Analysis approach | ||||
| What counts as a finding |
“Felt natural” can be a signal: choices that seem obvious to you might be explained by your position. Some prompts:
In pairs. Each of you declares an epistemological stance for your project from the list in the week 6 lecture (post-positivist, interpretivist, constructionist, critical, pragmatist, new materialist). Then test it for coherence (Braun & Clarke, 2022):
If you are collecting quantitative data, this task is not a formality. A post-positivist stance makes claims about an objective reality, so your positionality statement is about what your instrument measures, what it does not, who counts as a user in your sample, and why you chose that measure over another. That is still a decision shaped by your position.
Write your declared stance and one sentence on its coherence into your row of the shared document.
Still in pairs. Take turns, ten minutes each: one of you is the researcher, the other is the interviewer. The interviewer’s job is to find decisions the researcher hasn’t noticed making, using the audit from task 1 as the starting point. The researcher takes notes on their own answers, because the notes are the raw material for task 4.
Some example interviewer questions:
The interviewer should push past the first answer. “I chose a survey because it’s efficient” is a biography answer. “I chose a survey because I’m uncomfortable running interviews in my second language. I understand that a survey will give me less about participants’ feelings, which is what my research question is about” is a positionality answer, and specifies a tension between data and findings.
This is interpersonal reflexivity in action. Pay attention to how it feels to be asked these questions by a peer.
Individually (10 mins): write a draft positionality statement of about 150 words for your final project, using your audit and interview notes. Use this sentence pattern as scaffolding and then make it your own:
Position → decision → consequence. Because I [position], I [decided X rather than Y], which means [consequence for what the project can and cannot find].
Two examples, one owning an aspect of identity and one not. Both work because of the links, not the disclosure:
As an example of a statement to avoid: “I am a CS student so I prefer quantitative methods, and I like games so I used gamification.” This type is a biography with the decisions missing. Where is the alternative not chosen, and what what was lost or gained by these choices?
Swap with your partner (10 mins): mark each other’s draft against the final project rubric row for the positionality statement. Which band is it in? Point to the specific sentence that would move it up a band. COMP3900 students’ drafts are not part of the assessment, but the marking exercise is the same and the draft is a good basis for the limitations in your findings.
Paste your draft into the shared document.
For COMP6390 students: positionality statements are required in your video (and your document). If it’s missing in the video you get zero for positionality!
A spoken paragraph over a slide listing your position and the connected decisions is enough.
For everybody: tell your tutor and the class (out loud) something you have discovered about your research today that you hadn’t noticed before.
Extension: first-person methods. Positionality treats the researcher’s position as something to account for. A growing strand of HCI goes further and treats the researcher’s own experience as the primary data: autoethnography, autobiographical design, and soma design, which the TOCHI special issue on first-person methods maps out (Desjardins et al., 2021) and which Höök and colleagues argue for in soma-based design (Höök et al., 2018). If your final project is about something you do yourself (make music, draw, exercise, game), read the special issue introduction and ask whether a first-person component would strengthen your evaluation, and what you would need to declare to make it rigorous rather than merely personal.