Essai: Real-time reflexivity: Prods to reflection

Growing attention to self-as-theorist threatens to shift reflexivity from a means to improve theory to an end in itself. Such a shift both muddles observations and conceals the possibility that reflexive liabilities are present-at-hand reconstructions of dissimilar ready-to-hand moments of data collection. Reflexivity lived forward differs, from reflexive threats to validity understood backward. This difference is illustrated through an analysis of Wicklund's theory of multiple perspectives. It is concluded that current renderings of reflexivity may have focused on the wrong categories.