Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno).
A researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography.
what social sciences would become if they were closer to literature than to physics, if they proffered stories rather than theories, and if they were self-consciously value-centered rather than pretending to be value free.
ways of producing meaningful, accessible, and evocative research grounded in personal experience, research that would sensitize readers to issues of identity politics, to experiences shrouded in silence, and to forms of representation that deepen our capacity to empathize with people who are different from us.
personal experience influences the research process
Even though some researchers still assume that research can be done from a neutral, impersonal, and objective stance, most now recognize that such an assumption is not tenable
autoethnography is one of the approaches that acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don’t exist.
autobiographers write about “epiphanies”—remembered moments perceived to have significantly impacted the trajectory of a person’s life, times of existential crises that forced a person to attend to and analyze lived experience, and events after which life does not seem quite the same.
epiphanies reveal ways a person could negotiate “intense situations” and “effects that linger—recollections, memories, images, feelings—long after a crucial incident is supposedly finished”
When researchers do ethnography, they study a culture’s relational practices, common values and beliefs, and shared experiences for the purpose of helping insiders (cultural members) and outsiders (cultural strangers) better understand the culture
Ethnographers do this by becoming participant observers in the culture—that is, by taking field notes of cultural happenings as well as their part in and others’ engagement with these happenings.
An ethnographer also may interview cultural members, examine members’ ways of speaking and relating, investigate uses of space and place, and/or analyze artifacts such as clothing and architecture, and texts such as books, movies, and photographs
==When researchers do autoethnography, they retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity. However, in addition to telling about experiences, autoethnographers often are required by social science publishing conventions to analyze these experiences.
an autoethnographer must
==“look at experience analytically. Otherwise [you’re] telling [your] story—and that’s nice—but people do that on Oprah [a U.S.-based television program] every day. Why is your story more valid than anyone else’s? What makes your story more valid is that you are a researcher. You have a set of theoretical and methodological tools and a research literature to use. That’s your advantage. If you can’t frame it around these tools and literature and just frame it as ‘my story,’ then why or how should I privilege your story over anyone else’s I see 25 times a day on TV?” (personal interview, May 4, 2006)
Autoethnographers must not only use their methodological tools and research literature to analyze experience, but also must consider ways others may experience similar epiphanies; they must use personal experience to illustrate facets of cultural experience, and, in so doing, make characteristics of a culture familiar for insiders and outsiders. To accomplish this might require comparing and contrasting personal experience against existing research, interviewing cultural members, and/or examining relevant cultural artifacts
An autobiography should be aesthetic and evocative, engage readers, and use conventions of storytelling such as character, scene, and plot development, and/or chronological or fragmented story progression.
An autobiography must also illustrate new perspectives on personal experience—on epiphanies—by finding and filling a “gap” in existing, related storylines.
Autobiographers can make texts aesthetic and evocative by using techniques of “showing”, which are designed to bring “readers into the scene”—particularly into thoughts, emotions, and actions—in order to “experience an experience.” Most often through the use of conversation, showing allows writers to make events engaging and emotionally rich.
“Telling” is a writing strategy that works with “showing” in that it provides readers some distance from the events described so that they might think about the events in a more abstract way. Adding some “telling” to a story that “shows” is an efficient way to convey information needed to appreciate what is going on, and a way to communicate information that does not necessitate the immediacy of dialogue and sensuous engagement.
Autobiographers also can make a text artful and evocative by altering authorial points of view.
Sometimes autobiographers may use first-person to tell a story, typically when they personally observed or lived through an interaction and participated in an intimate and immediate “eyewitness account.
Sometimes autobiographers may use second-person to bring readers into a scene, to actively witness, with the author, an experience, to be a part of rather than distanced from an event.
Autobiographers also may use second-person to describe moments that are felt too difficult to claim.
Sometimes autobiographers may use third-person to establish the context for an interaction, report findings, and present what others do or say.
patterns of cultural experience—repeated feelings, stories, and happenings—as evidenced by field notes, interviews, and/or artifacts
==When researchers write autoethnographies, they seek to produce aesthetic and evocative thick descriptions of personal and interpersonal experience. They accomplish this by first discerning patterns of cultural experience evidenced by field notes, interviews, and/or artifacts, and then describing these patterns using facets of storytelling (e.g., character and plot development), showing and telling, and alterations of authorial voice. Thus, the autoethnographer not only tries to make personal experience meaningful and cultural experience engaging, but also, by producing accessible texts, she or he may be able to reach wider and more diverse mass audiences that traditional research usually disregards, a move that can make personal and social change possible for more people (BOCHNER, 1997; ELLIS, 1995; GOODALL, 2006; HOOKS, 1994).
The forms of autoethnography differ in how much emphasis is placed on the study of others, the researcher’s self and interaction with others, traditional analysis, and the interview context, as well as on power relationships.
==Narrative ethnographies refer to texts presented in the form of stories that incorporate the ethnographer’s experiences into the ethnographic descriptions and analysis of others. Here the emphasis is on the ethnographic study of others, which is accomplished partly by attending to encounters between the narrator and members of the groups being studied (TEDLOCK, 1991), and the narrative often intersects with analyses of patterns and processes.
==Reflexive ethnographies document ways a researcher changes as a result of doing fieldwork. Reflexive/narrative ethnographies exist on a continuum ranging from starting research from the ethnographer’s biography, to the ethnographer studying her or his life alongside cultural members’ lives, to ethnographic memoirs (ELLIS, 2004, p.50) or “confessional tales” (VAN MAANEN, 1988) where the ethnographer’s backstage research endeavors become the focus of investigation (ELLIS, 2004).
Layered accounts often focus on the author’s experience alongside data, abstract analysis, and relevant literature. This form emphasizes the procedural nature of research. Similar to grounded theory, layered accounts illustrate how “data collection and analysis proceed simultaneously” (CHARMAZ, 1983, p.110) and frame existing research as a “source of questions and comparisons” rather than a “measure of truth” (p.117). But unlike grounded theory, layered accounts use vignettes, reflexivity, multiple voices, and introspection (ELLIS, 1991) to “invoke” readers to enter into the “emergent experience” of doing and writing research (RONAI, 1992, p.123), conceive of identity as an “emergent process” (Rambo, 2005, p.583), and consider evocative, concrete texts to be as important as abstract analyses (RONAI, 1995, 1996).
==Personal narratives are stories about authors who view themselves as the phenomenon and write evocative narratives specifically focused on their academic, research, and personal lives (e.g., BERRY, 2007; GOODALL, 2006; POULOS, 2008; TILLMANN, 2009). These often are the most controversial forms of autoethnography for traditional social scientists, especially if they are not accompanied by more traditional analysis and/or connections to scholarly literature. Personal narratives propose to understand a self or some aspect of a life as it intersects with a cultural context, connect to other participants as co-researchers, and invite readers to enter the author’s world and to use what they learn there to reflect on, understand, and cope with their own lives (ELLIS, 2004, p.46)
In using personal experience, autoethnographers not only implicate themselves with their work, but also close, intimate others
Autoethnographers thus consider “relational concerns” as a crucial dimension of inquiry
On many occasions, this obligates autoethnographers to show their work to others implicated in or by their texts, allowing these others to respond, and/or acknowledging how these others feel about what is being written about them and allowing them to talk back to how they have been represented in the text. Similar to traditional ethnographers, autoethnographers also may have to protect the privacy and safety of others by altering identifying characteristics such as circumstance, topics discussed, or characteristics like race, gender, name, place, or appearance. While the essence and meaningfulness of the research story is more important than the precise recounting of detail (BOCHNER, 2002; TULLIS OWEN et al., 2009), autoethnographers must stay aware of how these protective devices can influence the integrity of their research as well as how their work is interpreted and understood. Most of the time, they also have to be able to continue to live in the world of relationships in which their research is embedded after the research is completed.
In particular, autoethnographers ask: “How useful is the story?” and “To what uses might the story be put?” (BOCHNER, 2002).
Autoethnography, as method, attempts to disrupt the binary of science and art. Autoethnographers believe research can be rigorous, theoretical, and analytical and emotional, therapeutic, and inclusive of personal and social phenomena. Autoethnographers also value the need to write and represent research in evocative, aesthetic ways (e.g., ELLIS, 1995, 2004; PELIAS, 2000). One can write in aesthetically compelling ways without citing fiction or being educated as a literary or performance scholar. The questions most important to autoethnographers are: who reads our work, how are they affected by it, and how does it keep a conversation going?
Autoethnographers view research and writing as socially-just acts; rather than a preoccupation with accuracy, the goal is to produce analytical, accessible texts that change us and the world we live in for the better (HOLMAN JONES, 2005, p.764).
References
Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An Overview. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-12.1.1589