Qualitative Inquiry 18(10) 823 –829 © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission:

One challenge when conducting qualitative social science research is positioning the self within society. A self must be posited for each participant and there must be an end-point to that self (i.e., the boundary between self and nonself). Each participant must also be afforded a certain amount of agency, history, and context. The limits of agency as they relate to the boundaries of selfhood are unlikely to be under-stood empirically. The self then is perhaps best understood metaphorically, and an adequate metaphor is one that cap-tures the tensions between the historical Western viewpoint of the self as functioning somewhat independently (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991) and the contemporary social science understanding of the self as at least partially shaped by larger cultural forces. One such metaphor is that of a patchwork quilt