Kaleidoscope Analysis: A Multi-Theoretical Framework for Exploring Lived Experience, Identity and Structural Power

Abstract

Purpose
Kaleidoscope Analysis is a multi‑theoretical framework for examining how lived experience, identity, and structural power interact within qualitative research. The framework responds to limitations in existing methods, many of which engage experiential, identity‑based, and structural perspectives without an explicit framework for integrating them, by offering an approach that holds these analytic planes in dynamic relation.

Design/methodology/approach
Grounded in a critical realist ontology, intersectionality as a non‑negotiable analytic foundation and informed by Black feminist epistemology, Kaleidoscope Analysis integrates three lenses: Lived Experience, Intersectionality, and Structural–Systemic Analysis. Analytic movement is conceptualised as kaleidoscopic: shifting vantage points reveal different patterns of meaning, allowing idiographic depth to sit alongside critical, systemic interpretation and giving rise to an Integrative Kaleidoscopic View. Positionality operates as method, recognising researchers as situated knowers whose identities and structural locations shape interpretive insight. A worked example from the author’s empirical study illustrates how the lenses interact in practice.

Findings
Kaleidoscope Analysis illuminates patterned relationships between individual meaning‑making, intersecting identities, and socio‑political structures. Moving across lenses enables previously obscured mechanisms, including racism, ableism, gendered norms, and institutional conditions, to become analytically visible through their effects on lived experience.

Originality/value
The framework offers a named, rigorous, and adaptable approach for analysing phenomena where embodiment, identity, and power are tightly entangled. Its explicit intersectional grounding, multi‑lens structure, and emphasis on positionality support justice‑oriented qualitative inquiry that remains accountable to the communities whose experiences are explored.

Introduction

“Nothing about us without us” (Charlton, 1998, p.3) has become a defining principle within disability justice movements, advocating for the epistemic authority of lived experience and the need to centre marginalised voices in knowledge production. At its core, the principle asserts that knowledge must be generated in ways that honour the standpoint and interpretive authority of those most closely connected to the experience, recognising that positional distance can shape and distort how lived realities are understood. Yet this principle is in sharp contrast with dominant evidence hierarchies, which systematically elevate quantitative forms of evidence, ranking systematic reviews, meta‑analyses, and randomised controlled trials at the highest levels for their perceived rigour and ability to minimise bias (Williams et al., 2019; Long and Jiang, 2023). Within such hierarchies, qualitative and experiential knowledge is frequently devalued, positioned as anecdotal or methodologically inferior, despite extensive scholarship demonstrating its critical role in understanding human experience, identity, and social systems (Walker et al., 2025; Sartor, 2023; Gupta et al., 2023; Levitt, 2024).

A growing body of work challenges these hierarchies, emphasising that personal narratives are shaped within and through social, cultural, and structural conditions (Isik, 2025; Gilstein, 2024; Loseke, 2007). This tension calls for qualitative methodologies that can more effectively illuminate the complex relationship between individual lived experience, identity, and societal power together. While established approaches such as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA), each offer valuable analytic tools, none explicitly provide a named, structured, multi‑theoretical and intersectional framework capable of intentionally bridging micro‑level experience with macro‑level social structures (Larkin et al., 2019; Squires, 2023; Braun and Clarke, 2021, 2024). Likewise, multi‑perspectival or longitudinal designs offer breadth, but do not prescribe how multiple theoretical lenses can be used in combination, nor do they position intersectionality as an essential analytic foundation (Gale et al., 2013; Vogl et al., 2018).

The Kaleidoscope Analysis Framework responds to this gap. As the framework foregrounds positionality as method, it is worth noting from the outset that I write as a Black, neurodivergent female, a standpoint that shapes the analytic choices detailed throughout this paper and is revisited more fully in the Researcher Positionality section below. Developed through research with Black Autistic girls, and informed by Black feminist epistemology (Nelson, 2024; Nelson and Lichwa, 2025), Kaleidoscope Analysis is a flexible yet theoretically rigorous framework that integrates multiple analytic lenses to examine how lived experience is shaped by intersecting identities, social processes, and structural power. Its intersectionality lens is a non‑negotiable foundation, ensuring that identity is understood as dynamic, relational, and situated within overlapping systems of oppression and privilege (Crenshaw, 1989). The framework enables researchers to move deliberately between idiographic, experiential analysis and broader socio‑structural interpretation, making visible the layered and uniquely contextual nature of lived experience.

Kaleidoscope Analysis is grounded in a critical realist ontology, recognising that lived experience is shaped by real but often unobservable mechanisms (such as racism, ableism, classism, gendered norms) that may not appear explicitly in participants' accounts. This differs from approaches that treat all things as existing on a single, homogenous plane with no deeper structure to uncover (i.e. flat ontology; DeLanda, 2002), or that foreground fluidity and continuous becoming over stable, traceable patterns (i.e. process philosophy; Whitehead, 1929). Critical realism instead allows the analyst to surface these mechanisms through analytic shifts in perspective, even where they remain unspoken. This ontological position is discussed more fully in the Philosophical Foundations section below and aligns with the framework's intersectional grounding and its focus on how structural forces contour meaning-making and everyday experience.

In this paper, “Black” and “Autistic” are capitalised to reflect identity‑affirming, community‑preferred language and to align with the epistemological commitments of Kaleidoscope Analysis consistent with previous research (Nelson, 2024; Nelson and Lichwa, 2025). Kaleidoscope Analysis is intentionally not abbreviated. As a conceptual framework, its name is integral to the metaphor, epistemology, and analytic logic that underpin it. The term evokes the shifting, patterned, multi‑lens process at the heart of the method, and using an acronym would obscure this meaning and disconnect the framework from its interpretive and visual foundations.

This paper outlines the conceptual foundations of Kaleidoscope Analysis, details its development, and demonstrates its application using examples from the author’s empirical research. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing methodological innovation within qualitative inquiry by offering a structured, justice‑oriented framework for analysing lived experience across multiple theoretical and interpretive planes. The framework's structure is not a container that fixes what can be seen, but an architecture that makes movement, reconfiguration, and multiplicity possible. This reflects the way that a kaleidoscope's fixed encasement does not restrict what can be seen but allows its internal fragments to shift into ever-changing patterns. It is this structure that enables, rather than constrains the dynamic interplay of individuals, intersecting identities, and institutional systems. Although the worked example centres Black Autistic girls, the central argument of Kaleidoscope Analysis is that lived experience is always shaped through the dynamic interplay of identity and structural power, making the framework adaptable across diverse populations and research contexts.

Theoretical Grounding

Intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1989) is integral to Kaleidoscope Analysis. It offers a prism for understanding how different aspects of identity are privileged or marginalised within society, and how these identity dimensions overlap and intersect to shape an individual’s lived experience (Crenshaw 1989). It is crucial because it accounts for the entangled nature of socio‑political forces that shape lived experience, emphasising that individuals do not solely determine their experiences; rather, their experiences are dynamically configured through interactions between identity, power, and structural conditions (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 1990). These structures shape what becomes intelligible, recognisable, and possible within particular contexts. As Bowleg (2023) and Collins (1990) argue, identity is inseparable from experience and cannot be meaningfully examined without attention to power.

Given this, a single analytic perspective cannot illuminate the layered, relational, and context‑dependent nature of lived experience. While intersectionality makes visible how social categories and systems of oppression co‑construct experience (Crenshaw, 1989; Cho et al., 2013), different theoretical lenses are needed to explore how these dynamics operate across individual, relational, and structural planes. Phenomenological, narrative, psychosocial, and critical perspectives each highlight different mechanisms shaping meaning‑making, belonging, interpretation, and institutional response (Tavakol and Sandars, 2025; de Boer and Zeiler, 2024; Pino Gavidia and Adu, 2022). Taken collectively, these theoretical lenses emphasise that these dynamics operate simultaneously at individual, relational, and socio‑political levels (Phillips, 2023; de Boer and Zeiler 2024). Multiple lenses are therefore needed to account for the complexity and entanglement inherent in lived experience.

Building on this, the practical application of multiple lenses also requires careful attention to the theoretical assumptions embedded within each lens. Analysis will always be shaped by the epistemological commitments of the approaches employed.

IPA, for example, traditionally emphasises staying close to participants’ meaning‑making and guarding against premature theory‑loading (Smith et al., 2022). At the same time, scholars such as Larkin et al. (2019) and Morrison (2025) illustrate how IPA can operate multi‑perspectivally when its boundaries are clearly articulated. This requires careful delineation of analytic processes to avoid epistemic drift and maintain transparency (Nizza et al., 2021). In contrast, approaches such as RTA allow theoretical integration more openly, meaning that a psychosocial or structural lens can be woven directly into the analytical process (Braun and Clarke, 2021,2024). Kaleidoscope Analysis accommodates these differences by enabling flexible and creative use of multiple lenses while ensuring that the core theoretical underpinnings of each lens are respected to maintain scientific rigour.

Development of Kaleidoscope Analysis

Building on the earlier discussion of IPA’s philosophical commitments, the Kaleidoscope Analysis framework emerged in response to concerns within IPA about the limits of allowing external theoretical lenses, such as Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit; Annamma et al. 2016) or intersectionality, to shape analysis prematurely. While IPA encourages researchers to avoid introducing external theoretical frameworks prematurely (Smith et al., 2022; Abrams et al., 2020), scholars such as Larkin et al. (2018) demonstrate that IPA can also be used multi‑perspectively, where individual accounts illuminate the wider construction, dynamics, or mechanisms of a phenomenon, reflecting IPA’s grounding in Heidegger’s view of humans as ‘being-in-the-world’ (Horrigan‑Kelly et al., 2016; Peat et al., 2019). This work creates conceptual space for bridging IPA’s phenomenological core with systemic and critical psychological perspectives (Rostill et al., 2011; Glasscoe and Smith, 2011). In response to this tension, Kaleidoscope Analysis was developed as a framework that both honours IPA’s experiential and idiographic commitments and simultaneously enables a structured, theoretically plural analysis (Nelson, 2024).

Philosophical Foundations

Building from these methodological considerations, Kaleidoscope Analysis is further anchored in a distinct philosophical stance that shapes how lived experience and structural power are understood. Kaleidoscope Analysis intentionally foregrounds a decolonial orientation by grounding its epistemology in Black feminist epistemology, which recognises lived and embodied knowledge, values situated knowers, and emphasises dialogic meaning‑making, reflexivity, and resistance to dominant hierarchies of knowledge (Collins, 1990; hooks, 1989). Epistemologically, this stance asserts that marginalised groups produce forms of knowledge that are often excluded from dominant research paradigms, and that such knowledge is essential for understanding how lived experience is shaped through intersecting systems of power (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 1990; Harding, 1991; Friesen and Goldstein, 2023).

Kaleidoscope Analysis draws on critical realism as developed by Bhaskar (2008), who argued that reality is stratified into real, actual, and empirical domains, with generative mechanisms operating at the "real" level that may not be directly observable but nonetheless produce observable effects (see also Lawani, 2021; Danaeefard et al., 2025; for applied discussions on critical realist methodology). This differs from flat ontology, associated with new materialist approaches, which treats reality as a single plane without this layered, underlying structure (DeLanda, 2002), and from process philosophy, which foregrounds reality as continuous becoming and being in constant flux (Whitehead, 1929) rather than stable, stratified mechanisms that persist and can be traced across contexts. Critical realism's depth ontology is what allows Kaleidoscope Analysis to treat mechanisms such as racism, ableism, and gendered norms as real and structuring, even when they are not explicitly named or visible within participants' accounts. It is worth noting that while Kaleidoscope Analysis shares a visual, optical metaphor with Barad's (2007) diffractive methodology, the two are grounded in distinct ontological traditions. Diffractive methodology is developed within agential realism, in which phenomena are understood as produced through the intra-action of observer and observed rather than existing independently of that encounter. Kaleidoscope Analysis, by contrast, remains grounded in the critical realist commitments outlined above.

Ontologically, the framework assumes a socially constructed, relational, and power‑saturated reality in which meanings, identities, and experiences are shaped through continually shifting relations among individuals, social meanings, and structural arrangements (Horrigan‑Kelly et al., 2016; Peat et al., 2019). This is consistent with critical realism's distinction between what is real and how it comes to be known: these mechanisms exist independently of any one person's account of them, while how they are recognised, named, or experienced remains socially and relationally shaped. Kaleidoscope Analysis holds both commitments together, treating structural mechanisms as having real, tangible effects on lived experience, while recognising that how those effects are interpreted and understood is shaped by social, cultural, and relational context. This philosophical grounding enables a layered, multi‑lens analysis capable of engaging both lived experience and the socio‑political forces that shape, constrain and mediate it.

Researcher Positionality

As a Black neurodivergent woman, practitioner psychologist, and mother of neurodivergent children, my standpoint is intimately connected to the development and application of Kaleidoscope Analysis. I hold identities that position me in ways that include both marginalisation and advantage, reflecting the nuanced interplay of privilege and oppression that intersectionality seeks to illuminate. These identities cannot be meaningfully separated from one another; rather, different aspects of my identity become salient depending on context, shifting which forms of marginalisation or privilege are most active or visible at a given moment. This mirrors the framework's own logic: much as a kaleidoscope reveals different patterns depending on which lens is turned toward the light, which parts of my identity are foregrounded, and how they are read by others, shifts according to the setting I am in.

Engaging with participants whose experiences resonated with aspects of my own required sustained reflexivity, particularly given the ways researcher subjectivity can shape qualitative inquiry (Braun and Clarke, 2013). While phenomenological approaches emphasise bracketing to manage pre‑understandings (Langdridge, 2007; Tufford and Newman, 2012), I approached bracketing as an imperfect but necessary discipline. This involved ongoing reflexive work, moving between openness and critique, recognising the insight afforded by experiential familiarity while acknowledging the limits of my perspective (Finlay, 2006, 2008a). Reflexive journaling, supervision, and critical self‑examination supported the process. Drawing on ‘reflexive bodily empathy’ (Finlay, 2006, 2008b), I attended to embodied and affective responses during the research process, using them as both analytic resources and sites of scrutiny.

My positionality is therefore not a methodological aside but a constitutive element of Kaleidoscope Analysis. The framework’s emphasis on layered, intersectional, and structurally informed interpretation is inseparable from the plurality and complexity of my own standpoint. My lived experiences of race, gender, neurodivergence, education, motherhood, and professional practice shaped the framework’s development and its application, enabling a mode of analysis that is both critically reflexive and grounded in the embodied realities of those whose voices it seeks to centre.

Applying Kaleidoscope Analysis in Practice

The Kaleidoscope Metaphor
Kaleidoscope Analysis draws its name from the way a kaleidoscope produces shifting patterns through the interaction of multiple reflective surfaces within a structure (see Figure 1). The kaleidoscope's outer casing represents society itself: structured, containing, and producing the pervasive, often unremarked presence of forces such as racism, ableism, and classism within everyday life. Within this structure sits the eye, representing the analyst, who is never external to the society being analysed but embedded within it, shaped by the same structural conditions under examination. This is distinct from the Structural-Systemic lens itself, which does not represent this background condition but is the analytic tool used to trace how a specific manifestation of it operates within a given account.

Within the Kaleidoscope Analysis framework, each analytic perspective functions as a lens that brings patterns into focus. Rather than refracting or distorting the data, these lenses illuminate different aspects of lived experience and the social structures that shape it. What becomes visible depends on the context in which the experience occurs, the standpoint of the analyst, and the broader social and political forces at play. This is echoed in a simple physical detail: passing a kaleidoscope to someone else (someone taller, shorter, positioned differently) inevitably shifts its angle slightly in the handover. The structure remains the same, but what becomes visible through it moves with the person holding it - a principle taken up more fully below in relation to positionality as method.

In keeping with a critical realist ontology, some elements like racism or ableism may be unobservable at first glance yet become visible when the analytic lens shifts. Within Kaleidoscope Analysis, critical realism denotes the assumption that social mechanisms and structures, while not always directly accessible in participants’ accounts, have real effects that can be surfaced through a multi‑lens analysis attentive to how power operates. Like turning a kaleidoscope, the movement between lenses reveals patterns that are always present but not always immediately seen. Different patterns surface as the analytic vantage point rotates across lenses and meaning emerges through the movement between them. The experiential, identity, and structural lenses interact dynamically, allowing the analyst to trace how personal experience is shaped by the interplay of social, cultural, and institutional forces. Lenses need not be applied sequentially. Like turning a kaleidoscope tube, analysts can shift vantage points, rotate lenses, and revisit earlier reflections as new patterns become visible. This metaphor emphasises that lived experience is multi‑layered and contextually configured, and that analytic insight emerges through the dynamic interplay of lenses rather than through linear progression.

Figure 1. Kaleidoscope Analysis Framework, developed by (Nelson, 2024), originally illustrated by Dr Zahra Ahmed, with subsequent AI‑assisted digital enhancement.

Before introducing the analytic lenses, it is necessary to foreground the role of positionality within Kaleidoscope Analysis, as the researcher’s standpoint shapes how lenses are engaged, how patterns become visible, and how analytic meaning is configured.

Positionality as method

Positionality is not a supplementary component of Kaleidoscope Analysis; it is one of its core methodological foundations. Grounded in Black feminist epistemology, the framework recognises that researchers are never neutral observers but embodied, positioned knowers whose identities, lived experiences, and structural locations shape all stages of inquiry. The author’s standpoint as a Black neurodivergent woman, practitioner psychologist, and mother of neurodivergent children informed the development and application of the framework, influencing what felt familiar, what demanded scrutiny, and how analytic insights emerged. This is not a source of bias to be eliminated but a constitutive element of knowledge production within this framework. This extended even to the framework's central visual metaphor. In early drawings, the eye representing the analyst was drawn apart from the kaleidoscope structure, though no boundary was ever drawn to separate the two (Nelson, 2024; Nelson and Lichwa, 2025). Through subsequent research and reflexive engagement with the framework's own claims, this open, unbounded relationship came to be understood as significant in its own right. In the current illustration, the eye is positioned inside the structure, reflecting a growing recognition that the analyst is never fully separable from the society and structures under analysis, however much bracketing discipline is applied.

Kaleidoscope Analysis therefore requires researchers to engage in sustained reflexivity about how their identities, values, assumptions, and power relations shape their interpretations. This reflexivity is not prescriptive; researchers may draw on approaches such as reflexive journaling, supervision, conversations with peers, or embodied attentiveness to emotional and sensory responses. The aim is not to bracket oneself out of the analysis but to make interpretive positioning transparent and accountable, in line with calls for reflexive practice that acknowledges discomfort and non‑resolution rather than performing methodological purity (Pillow, 2003). Where researchers occupy positions of greater distance from, or structural power over, the communities in focus, additional ethical and methodological safeguards are needed. Participatory approaches, including co‑production, advisory panels, or collaborative interpretation, help mitigate extractive dynamics and reflect arguments within community‑based and decolonial research that emphasise relational accountability, shared authority, and the political nature of research encounters (Muhammad et al., 2015). These practices redistribute interpretive authority and ensure that analytic insights remain accountable to the communities whose experiences are explored.

In Kaleidoscope Analysis, positionality actively shapes analytic movement: it influences how lenses are engaged, what becomes visible, and how significance is attributed in relation to intersecting identities and structural forces. Treating researcher standpoint as an analytic resource supports a more rigorous, relational, and justice‑oriented methodology, consistent with the framework’s commitment to centring lived and embodied knowledge.

The Lenses of Kaleidoscope Analysis

Lived Experience Lens
In Kaleidoscope Analysis, “lived experience” refers to the embodied, felt, and situated meanings through which participants interpret and navigate their worlds. This lens attends closely to the participant’s lived experience, however it is generated, whether through IPA, RTA, narrative inquiry, case‑based approaches, or other qualitative methods. It operates at the micro‑level of meaning‑making and provides an experiential anchor for the wider analysis. This lens does not need to be applied chronologically or in isolation; rather, it offers a grounding point to which analysts may return as they move intuitively between individual, relational, and structural perspectives. Its purpose is to ensure that broader interpretations remain accountable to the participant’s own sense‑making while allowing for dynamic movement across analytic lenses.

Intersectionality Lens
As the framework’s core, non‑negotiable lens, the intersectionality lens recognises identity as socially constructed, relational, and inseparable from power. It examines how systems such as racism, ableism, sexism, colourism, and classism interact to shape experience, visibility, belonging, affordances, and risk. Rather than treating identities as separate categories, this lens traces how privilege and oppression operate simultaneously within context, influencing how behaviour is interpreted, how people are positioned, and how meaning is made. It brings into focus the socio‑historical forces, stereotypes, and normative assumptions that contour participants’ lives and require continual negotiation at the individual and collective level.

Structural-Systemic Lens
This lens attends to the institutional, structural, and socio‑political conditions that organise everyday life. It draws on perspectives including DisCrit, feminist theory, queer theory, critical pedagogy, and neoliberal critique to examine how broader systems and histories shape the local contexts in which participants act. In line with a critical realist stance, this lens helps render visible the unobservable mechanisms such as gendered norms, ableism, racism, colonial legacies, resource inequities, and heteronormativity that give rise to observable patterns in recognition, support, exclusion, and opportunity. By focusing on policies, discourses, practices, and institutional routines, the structural-systemic lens situates individual experiences within wider arrangements of power.

Movement across the three lenses generates a shifting visual and analytic field, bringing forward patterns that no single lens can reveal. This dynamic refractive interplay gives rise to the Integrative Kaleidoscopic View.

Integrative Kaleidoscopic View
Rather than marking a final analytic step, the Integrative Kaleidoscopic View reflects an ongoing process of seeing differently; a way of revealing how micro‑level experiences, intersecting identities, and socio‑structural forces co‑produce one another, generating a layered, justice‑oriented understanding of the phenomenon. From this standpoint, the Integrative Kaleidoscopic View describes the pattern emergence when the three analytic lenses are brought into dynamic relation. As the analytic vantage point shifts across lived experience, intersectionality, and structural–systemic forces, a new configuration of meaning becomes visible that cannot be accessed through any single perspective alone. This view foregrounds power, oppression, privilege, and discrimination, showing how socio‑political conditions and institutional histories contour what is felt, expressed, recognised, and interpreted. In the Integrative Kaleidoscopic View, these dynamics become visible not as separate mechanisms but as mutually shaping forces that configure the overall pattern of lived experience.

Worked Example: Masking and Camouflaging Black Autistic Girls in UK Education

Kaleidoscope Analysis was developed through previous research exploring how Black Autistic girls experienced masking and camouflaging within UK educational settings. The framework enables an analytic movement across lived experience, identity, and structure, revealing patterns that become visible only when these perspectives interact. Two research questions were used to delineate the analytic lenses in a clear and epistemologically coherent way. The first question, what is the lived experience of camouflaging Black Autistic girls, was addressed in the Findings chapter using an experiential approach centred on participants’ meaning‑making. The second question, how can these lived experiences be understood through intersectionality and DisCrit, was addressed in the Discussion, explicitly marking the shift into identity‑focused and structural-systemic interpretation. Separating the questions across sections allowed each lens to retain its conceptual integrity, preventing theoretical frameworks from shaping the experiential analysis prematurely while still enabling a layered interpretation across lived experience, identity, and structure. The worked example draws on anonymised excerpts from previously approved doctoral research. The excerpts are drawn from anonymised interviews with participants from the original study, including their pseudonyms Poppy, Lily, Maia and SS. Ethical approval was granted by the relevant institutional ethics committee, and informed consent for publication was obtained (Nelson, 2024).

Lived Experience Lens

Using the Lived Experience Lens, the analysis attended closely to how masking and camouflaging were felt, navigated, and made sense of by participants. Poppy described years of suppressing feelings and “laughing everything off,” explaining that she masked so intensely that she eventually “literally didn’t have emotions… I couldn’t name a single emotion when I felt it,” a state of emotional numbness shaped by her efforts to fit in and avoid negative attention. She recalled always using humour, “everything was a joke”, as a way to make friends and deflect discomfort, even though internally she felt “lonely and embarrassed”.

Similarly, Lily described masking as a physical and emotional effort, reflecting that spending time with peers felt like “fighting for my life… mentally and physically I wouldn’t be able to catch up with things,” leaving her exhausted and requiring long periods alone to recover. For SS, masking became, what she called, a form of people‑pleasing: “after I hung out with my friends, I would just come home and be very exhausted, because I felt like I was putting on this sort of act… just to appease people”.

Across the girls’ accounts, the Lived Experience Lens foregrounds masking as an embodied, often draining, strategy used to maintain relationships, manage sensory and social overwhelm, and avoid conflict or judgement.

Intersectionality Lens

Shifting the analytic vantage point to the Intersectionality Lens highlights how their Autistic experiences were simultaneously racialised and gendered, often in ways that constrained visibility and shaped interpretation. Participants repeatedly described their behaviour being misread through racialised stereotypes. Lily explained that when she showed distress, it was interpreted through the “angry Black girl” stereotype, recalling that teachers perceived her as “just being… typically angry,” a preconceived notion that she found “damaging, especially when you’re Autistic”. Such interpretations reflect well‑documented racialised and gendered stereotypes applied to Black girls, including adultification and the “angry Black girl” trope (Epstein et al., 2017; Collins, 1990).

Poppy similarly noted how passionate speech was routinely taken as aggression: “if I’m talking about something I have a lot of interest in… people are like, oh I’m not arguing with you,” illustrating how her natural expressive pattern when discussing subjects she cares about was misread through the racialised and gendered assumptions that frame passion, assertiveness and emotion as aggression. Maia echoed this, explaining that before others recognised her autism, “they just see me as Black… either aggressive or strong”. Maia explained, Black girls are often perceived through masculinised stereotypes noting that “they don’t let Black women be seen as soft or emotional or have feelings”, which shaped how others responded to her distress or assertiveness. These interpretations reflect misogynoir, whereby Black girls’ emotional expression is racialised and gendered through stereotypes including the “angry Black girl” trope, leading to heightened surveillance, punishment, and misrecognition (Bailey and Trudy, 2018). Through this lens, identity emerges as deeply relational and power‑laden, revealing how racialised and gendered norms shaped the visibility and interpretation of the girls’ Autistic expressions, influencing both their self‑understanding and how others made sense of their behaviour and needs.

The Structural-Systemic Lens

Applying the Structural-Systemic Lens makes visible the institutional and socio‑political forces that underpinned these experiences. Participants described feeling that their schools failed to address racism, ableism and misogyny, normalised microaggressions, and relied on behaviourist interpretations that obscured need. SS recalled an incident where a teacher used the N‑word in a PSHE lesson, explaining that “they just don’t do anything about it… we couldn’t even go to Black teachers and be defended when stuff like this happened,” illustrating racial harm that remained institutionally unchallenged.

Poppy similarly described constant racialised comments and microaggressions, including White peers attributing any “black dirt” to her or touching her hair despite objections. She reported that “there was like no Black staff either,” and she “did not feel in any way that I would be able to go and tell anyone”. These experiences align with research showing that racism and ableism operate structurally within educational systems, often remaining unaddressed by institutions (Gillborn, 2012; Annamma et al., 2016). Behaviour policies and classroom norms also constrained recognition. Lily’s sensory distress and response to racial microaggressions, communicated through crying, screaming, shutting down, was framed as “bad behaviour,” demonstrating how structural expectations and teacher interpretations recalibrated her needs as misconduct rather than communication. This lens reveals how racism, ableism, misogynoir, and gendered norms were embedded in school routines, shaping misrecognition, minimising and marginalising distress and discrimination, and making masking an adaptive response to institutional environments.

As the analysis moves fluidly across the three lenses, a layered understanding becomes visible. The Lived Experience Lens foregrounds the girls’ embodied, relational, and affective experiences of masking, showing how they worked to maintain connection, minimise risk, and manage sensory and emotional demands within environments that often misunderstood or misinterpreted them. The Intersectionality Lens reveals how the girls’ Autistic expressions are interpreted through racialised and gendered assumptions and normative ideals; and the Structural-Systemic Lens illuminates the institutional conditions that reward conformity, misinterpret distress, and actively uphold (as well as fail to address) racism, ableism, and other inequities.

Taken together, these perspectives reveal masking not simply as an individual coping strategy but as a socially and institutionally produced adaptation that enabled the girls to navigate racialised and ableist school contexts while simultaneously contributing to emotional strain, delayed diagnosis, and unmet need. Through this Integrative Kaleidoscopic View, the patterned relationships between personal experience, intersecting identities, and socio‑political structures become clear, offering a justice‑oriented interpretation that neither lens could generate alone. This integrative view also clarifies what becomes visible only when the lenses are held together: insights that would remain partial or obscured if analysed solely through experiential, identity‑focused, or structural lenses in isolation.

Adaptability Across Disciplines or Designs

Kaleidoscope Analysis is deliberately adaptable. Its core commitment is to hold lived experience, identity, and structure in dynamic relation while maintaining intersectionality as a non‑negotiable foundation. Within that commitment, researchers can combine lenses to fit their epistemic stance, aims, and data.

Cross‑method integration

Researchers may pair the Lived Experience Lens with methods such as IPA, RTA, narrative inquiry, case‑based approaches, or ethnography, then weave in the Intersectionality and Structural–Systemic lenses to connect meaning‑making with systems and histories. For instance, an RTA study might build themes from experiential accounts and then re‑attune the analysis through DisCrit or Critical Race Theory (CRT) to surface racialised and ableist mechanisms shaping those themes. A narrative inquiry may retain participants’ storied forms while analysing how race, gender, disability, class, and colonial legacies contour what can be said, heard, or legitimised in specific settings.

Across topics and fields

The framework can illuminate complex phenomena where embodiment and power are tightly entangled, such as neurodivergence, chronic illness, migration, reproductive justice, or gendered violence, by tracing how institutional routines, historical discourses, and local practices shape recognition, misrecognition, and response. In education, it can interrogate behaviourist framings that obscure need; in health, it can reveal how triage, diagnostics, and professional norms distribute visibility, credibility, and care; in community psychology, it can link everyday coping to policy architectures and resource geographies.

In some applied research contexts, particularly in health and clinical sciences, researchers face practical constraints that raise questions about method–lens compatibility; IPA, for example, requires a reasonably homogeneous sample sharing a clearly defined phenomenon, which can pose challenges for heterogeneous participant groups such as children, caregivers, and clinical investigators (Peat et al. 2019; Darley et al., 2025). In such cases, researchers may either analyse groups separately or adopt an alternative experiential lens. Methods such as Interpretive Description (ID; Thorne, 2016) can serve as the initial lens within Kaleidoscope Analysis, provided they attend meaningfully to individual experience and are epistemologically aligned with an intersectional and critical orientation. Importantly, the kaleidoscopic movement across lenses does not depend on IPA-level immersion; rather, it rests on the ability of the Lived Experience Lens to generate sufficiently rich experiential insight before shifting outward to identity and structural analysis.

These applications are intended as indicative rather than exhaustive; each names a plausible direction for the framework's use rather than a fully worked demonstration, and researchers are invited to develop these applications, and others, in their own work.

Design flexibility

Two design options preserve rigour while enabling synthesis:

1. Integrated question design - apply multiple lenses within one research question to produce a fused, multi‑layered interpretation or

2. Delineated question design - separate lenses across related questions (e.g., Findings centred on lived experience; Discussion re‑reads findings through intersectionality and structural–systemic analysis).

Both routes uphold epistemic fidelity to each lens while enabling movement between micro‑level experience and macro‑level conditions.

Contributions to Qualitative Research

Kaleidoscope Analysis offers a named, structured approach that integrates experiential, identity‑focused, and structural–systemic lenses, preserving the analytic integrity of each lens while enabling refractive synthesis. It operationalises intersectionality as foundational, not optional, while accommodating the epistemic logics of methods such as IPA (idiographic, phenomenological) and RTA (reflexive, theoretically permeable). By treating movement across lenses as constitutive of analysis (not a linear “step”), the framework makes visible patterned relations among personal meanings, intersecting identities, and institutional conditions. This helps reframe phenomena often pathologised or individualised as socially produced adaptations to interlocking systems of oppression.

Rooted in Black feminist epistemology and a decolonial orientation, the framework centres situated knowers and embodied knowledge. It encourages analytic practices that contest dominant evidence hierarchies not by rejecting quantitative methods, but by foregrounding the indispensable contributions of qualitative insight in revealing mechanisms of harm and possibilities for change.

For practitioners across sectors, the framework supports a shift from pathologising or individualising explanations toward contextual and relational understandings; from awareness‑raising efforts toward systemic redesign; and from isolated adjustments to structural changes in organisational processes, professional practices, and the environments in which people live and work.

Limitations and Considerations

Multi‑lens work is resource‑intensive. Conducting an idiographic experiential analysis and then re‑reading findings through intersectional and structural lenses requires time, collaborative reflexivity, and often multiple analytic cycles. Projects with restricted timelines should plan staged analyses or narrower lens sets to preserve depth.

IPA’s caution regarding early theory‑loading and RTA’s openness to theoretical integration can pull in different directions. Kaleidoscope Analysis accommodates both by demarcating analytic phases or research questions, but researchers must explicitly justify sequencing and boundaries to avoid epistemic drift.

Intersectionality cannot be reduced to a checklist of identity categories. Without sustained engagement with Black feminist scholarship and the materialities of power (e.g., racism, ableism, classed, heteronormative and gendered norms), there is a risk of merely naming identities without analysing co‑produced mechanisms and histories. Dedicated reading, consultation, and advisory input are necessary.

The framework foregrounds lived and embodied knowledge, recognising that when researchers hold greater structural distance from the community in focus, there is an increased risk of misinterpretation or extractive dynamics, even when the researchers are empathetic, well-intentioned or aligned with the community’s aims. To support ethical and accountable knowledge production, safeguards such as co‑design, compensated advisory roles, collaborative interpretation, and clear benefit pathways for participants and communities are recommended.

Kaleidoscope Analysis is context‑attentive and idiographic at its experiential core and therefore does not aim for statistical generalisation. Instead, its contribution lies in analytic and theoretical transferability, with authors encouraged to articulate clearly what aspects of analysis may travel across contexts and what remains situated.

Surfacing structural mechanisms, such as racism, ableism, sexism, classed dynamics, or institutional neglect, can create ethical complexities, including risks of identification, retaliation, or unintended exposure for participants or communities. Kaleidoscope Analysis therefore requires careful decisions about anonymity, composite narratives, and the balance between naming systems and protecting individuals. Ethical safeguards, including negotiated anonymity and attention to potential consequences of disclosure, are essential components of justice‑oriented qualitative inquiry.

Conclusion

Kaleidoscope Analysis advances a flexible yet rigorous way to explore lived experience, identity, and structure together, revealing patterns that no single lens can capture. Its contribution lies in treating intersectionality as foundational, sustaining idiographic depth while making visible the institutional and historical forces that shape what is felt, expressed, recognised, and resourced.

The framework invites creative methodological combinations so long as this creativity is tethered to its Black feminist roots. Those roots centre embodied, positioned knowers; demand reflexivity about power; and orient analysis toward collective flourishing rather than mere description. In practical terms, this means designing with, not just about, the communities whose lives are under study; treating interpretation as dialogic; and prioritising implications that shift conditions, not just narratives. It is an invitation to researchers and practitioners to hold the lenses in motion, remain reflexively answerable for what becomes visible, and commit analytic work to material change in the settings that people must navigate. Used in the spirit of creativity, supple in method, and steadfast in principle, Kaleidoscope Analysis supports justice‑oriented qualitative inquiry that is accountable to those most affected.

Acknowledgements: I thank Dr Hannah Lichwa for her supervision of the empirical doctoral research from which the worked example is drawn. Her guidance enabled creative freedom and supported the development of the critical depth achieved within the research. I also thank Dr Zahra Ahmed for illustrating the visual representation of the Kaleidoscope Analysis framework and for her critical reading and reflective feedback, which challenged me to consider alternative perspectives.

All interpretations, analytic decisions, and the development of the framework are my own.

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