Recently the nature and contents of art education have been rapidly expanded. Along with the change of visual culture environments, there has been an effort to re-construct the meaning of 'art' as a subject. In addition, the government has established and implemented various culture and arts education policies so as to provide the equal chance for all citizens to learn and appreciate art. In order to improve art education using these increasing social demand and attention as a positive impetus, there should be more vigorous and systematic art educational research. In other words, weneed the researchers and research methods that can recognize the contextual meanings of art and that can draw the knowledge and understanding of aesthetic experiences of those who have different social and cultural backgrounds. In art educational research, the academic attitude that encompasses only scientific and mathematic methods as valid research has placed the hinderance that has led art educational researchers to quantify something that cannot be measured. However, qualitative research methods have been introduced and experimented augmenting the range of research methods for drawing the contextual understandings and meanings of art education. Although the term ‘qualitative research' has become widespread, it is not easy to find a comprehensive qualitative research at this point. This study purports to discuss the nature and characteristics of qualitative research from the methodological perspective. Paying attention to the importance of the researcher in the whole process of research, this article explores the meaning of self-reflection of a qualitative researcher based on the theoretical background and cases. In order to illustrate this methodological discourse, the methods and cases of self-reflection are presented. This study aims at providing a guideline with which a researcher can develop the ability to reflect upon field experiences and to execute a qualitative research with scrutiny.