You can find a fair bit in qualitative research about about locating yourself and explaining how you, as the researcher, influenced how your research developed. Feminist methodologies often talk quite a lot about this, from a first person point of view, or you could try looking at narrative studies - Riessman for example has some interesting points about explaining your positioning. You could look at:
Riessman, Catherine Kohler. 1993. Narrative Analysis. London: Sage Publications.
Any of her articles would have some similar points.
How you refer to yourself depends on your discipline and the tone of your thesis. You could try something like "As the primary researcher, my background [blah blah was important because]."
I hope that's useful, and good luck!