Autoethnography is a form of ethnographic research in which a researcher connects personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. It is considered a form of qualitative and arts-based research. arts education, communication studies, education, educational administration, English literature, ethnic studies, gender studies, history, human resource development, marketing, music therapy, nursing, organizational behavior, paramedicine, performance studies, physiotherapy, psychology, social work, sociology, and theology and religious studies.

Definitions

Historically, researchers have had trouble reaching a consensus regarding the definition of autoethnography. Some scholars situate autoethnography within the family of narrative methods, others place it within the ethnographic tradition. However, it generally refers to research that involves critical observation of an individual's lived experiences and connecting those experience to broader cultural, political, and social concepts. They further indicate that autoethnography is typically written in first-person and can "appear in a variety of forms," such as "short stories, poetry, fiction, novels, photographic essays, personal essays, journals, fragmented and layered writing, and social science prose." They also "recognized and wrestled with questions of how to render textual accounts that would provide clear, accurate, rich descriptions of cultural practices of others" At this point, the term autoethnography began to refer to forms of ethnography in which the researcher is a cultural insider. As an anthropologist, David Hayano was interested in the role that an individual's own identity had in their research.

  1. Confessional Tales, which include the researchers' "highly personalized styles" and responses to the observed data

</blockquote>

Process

As a method, autoethnography combines characteristics of autobiography and ethnography. More recently, autoethnography has been separated into two distinct subtypes: analytic and evocative.

Analytic autoethnography

Analytic autoethnography focuses on "developing theoretical explanations of broader social phenomena"

  1. complete member researcher (CMR) status
  2. analytic reflexivity
  3. narrative visibility of the researcher's self
  4. dialogue with informants beyond the self
  5. commitment to theoretical analysis

First, in all forms of autoethnography, the researcher must be a member of the cultural group they are study and thus, have CMR status. This cultural group may be loosely connected without knowledge of one another (e.g., people with disabilities) or tightly connected (e.g., members of a small church). thereby addressing some criticisms of ethnography. Like the evocative autoethnographer, the analytic autoethnographer "is personally engaged in a social group, setting, or culture as a full member and active participant." making themselves "visible, active, and reflexively engaged in the text."

Evocative autoethnography

Evocative autoethnography "focus[es] on narrative presentations that open up conversations and evoke emotional responses."

Symbiotic autoethnography

Symbiotic autoethnography suggests a way of reconciling the differences in various types of autoethnography through suggesting an innovative symbiotic approach. The author uses the concept of 'symbiosis' in its broader sense to denote close interdependence and interrelation between its suggested seven attributes, including temporality, researcher's omnipresence, evocative storytelling, interpretative analysis, political (transformative) focus, reflexivity and polyvocality.

Auto-ethnographic design

Auto-ethnographic design is a materially-oriented practice that ties design research with expression. According to Schouwenberg and Kaethler, "There is a break here between the autoethnographic tradition and how it is taken up in design, where for the 'graphy' the act of reporting and reflection is replaced by creative production; design activates the knowledge component by directly engaging and altering the very world it seeks to make sense of". In contrast to other forms of design, auto-ethnographic designs are deeply personal and tend towards the artistic, using materiality as a way of understanding the self and communicating it. The hyphen that separates auto and ethnography represents the materiality that is needed to understand the self. It is critiqued for being excessively naval gazing.

Minor literature autoethnography

Minor literature autoethnography (MLA) draws on the concept of 'minor literature' as developed by Deleuze and Guattari, which refers to the use of a major language from a minoritarian perspective to challenge dominant cultural narratives. According to De Jong this type of autoethnography focuses on the experiences of marginalized groups and individuals who use the language of the majority to articulate their unique cultural positions and create new forms of expression. By doing so, minor literature autoethnography aims to reveal and critique power structures and give voice to perspectives that are often silenced or overlooked.

Goals

Adams, Ellis, and Jones recognize two primary purposes for practicing autoethnographic research. Given the complicated history of ethnography, "autoethnographers speak against, or provide alternatives to, dominant, taken-for-granted, and harmful cultural scripts, stories, and stereotypes" and "offer accounts of personal experience to complement, or fill gaps in, existing research." For many researchers, experimenting with alternative forms of writing and reporting, including autoethnography, personal narrative, performative writing, layered accounts and writing stories, provides a way to create multiple layered accounts of a research study, creating not only the opportunity to create new and provocative claims but also the ability to do so in a compelling manner. Ellis (2004) says that autoethnographers advocate "the conventions of literary writing and expression" in that "autoethnographic forms feature concrete action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection portrayed in dialogue, scenes, characterization, and plot" (p. xix).

According to Bochner and Ellis (2006), an autoethnographer is "first and foremost a communicator and a storyteller." In other words, autoethnography "depicts people struggling to overcome adversity" and shows "people in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of their struggles" (p.&nbsp;111). Therefore, according to them, autoethnography is "ethical practice" and "gifts" that has a caregiving function (p.&nbsp;111). In essence autoethnography is a story that re-enacts an experience by which people find meaning and through that meaning are able to be okay with that experience.

In Dr. Mayukh Dewan's opinion, this can be a problem because many readers may see us as being too self-indulgent but they have to realise that our stories and experiences we share are not solely ours, but rather that they also represent the group we are autoethnographically representing.

In this storytelling process, the researcher seeks to make meaning of a disorienting experience. A life example in which autoethnography could be applied is the death of a family member or someone close by. In this painful experience people often wonder how they will go about living without this person and what it will be like. In this scenario, especially in religious homes, one often asks "Why God?" thinking that with an answer as to why the person died they can go about living. Others, wanting to be able to offer up an explanation to make the person feel better, generally say things such as "At least they are in a better place" or "God wanted him/her home." People, who are never really left with an explanation as to why, generally fall back on the reason that "it was their time to go" and through this somewhat "explanation" find themselves able to move on and keep living life. Over time when looking back at the experience of someone close to you dying, one may find that through this hardship they became a stronger more independent person, or that they grew closer to other family members. With these realizations, the person has actually made sense of and has become fine with the tragic experience that occurred. And through this autoethnography is performed.

Evaluation

The main critique of autoethnography—and qualitative research in general—comes from the traditional social science methods that emphasize the objectivity of social research. In this critique, qualitative researchers are often called "journalists, or soft scientists," and their work, including autoethnography, is "termed unscientific, or only exploratory, or entirely personal and full of bias." Many quantitative researchers regard the materials produced by narrative as "the means by which a narrating subject, autonomous and independent...can achieve authenticity...This represents an almost total failure to use narrative to achieve serious social analysis."

According to Maréchal, the early criticism of autobiographical methods in anthropology was about "their validity on grounds of being unrepresentative and lacking objectivity."

</blockquote>

Croce illustrates what Adams, Jones, and Ellis refer to as "illusory boundaries and borders between scholarship and criticism." These "borders" are seen to hide or take away from the idea that autoethnographic evaluation and criticism present another personal story about the experience of an experience. Or as Craig Gingrich-Philbrook wrote, "any evaluation of autoethnography...is simply another story from a highly situated, privileged, empowered subject about something he or she experienced."

Rethinking traditional criteria

In her book's tenth chapter, titled "Evaluating and Publishing Autoethnography" (pp.&nbsp;252–255), Ellis (2004) discusses how to evaluate an autoethnographic project, based on other authors' ideas about evaluating alternative modes of qualitative research. (See the special section in Qualitative Inquiry on "Assessing Alternative Modes of Qualitative and Ethnographic Research: How Do We Judge? Who Judges?") She presents several criteria for "good autoethnography", and indicates how these ideas resonate with each other.

First, Ellis mentions Richardson who described five factors she uses when reviewing personal narrative papers that includes analysis of both evaluative and constructive validity techniques. As Adams explains in his critique of his work Narrating the Closet,

<blockquote>

I knew I had to contribute to knowledge about coming out by saying something new about the experience...I also needed a new angle toward coming out; my experience, alone, of coming out was not sufficient to justify a narrative.

Stories and storytelling

Autoethnography showcases stories as the means in which sensemaking and researcher reflexivity create descriptions and critiques of culture. Adams, Jones, and Ellis write:

<blockquote>

Reflexivity includes both acknowledging and critiquing our place and privilege in society and using the stories we tell to break long-held silences on power, relationships, cultural taboos, and forgotten and/or suppressed experiences.

Relationally responsible approach

Among the concepts in qualitative research is "relational responsibility". Researchers should work to make research relationships as collaborative, committed, and reciprocal as possible while taking care to safeguard identities and privacy of participants. Included under this concept is the accessibility of the work to a variety of readers which allows for the "opportunity to engage and improve the lives of our selves, participants, and readers/audiences." who argues

<blockquote>that the real questions is what narratives do, what consequences they have, to what uses they can be put. Narrative is the way we remember the past, turn life into language, and disclose to ourselves and others the truth of our experiences. In moving from concern with the inner veridicality to outer pragmatics of evaluating stories, Plummer [2001, p.&nbsp;401] also looks at uses, functions, and roles of stories, and adds that they "need to have rhetorical power enhanced by aesthetic delight (Ellis, 2004, p.&nbsp;126-127).</blockquote>

Similarly,

<blockquote>Laurel Richardson [1997, p.&nbsp;92] uses the metaphor of a crystal to deconstruct traditional validity. A crystal has an infinite number of shapes, dimensions and angles. It acts as a prism and changes shape, but still has structure. Another writer, Patti Lather [1993, p. 674], proposes counter-practices of authority that rupture validity as a "regime of truth" and lead to a critical political agenda [Cf. Olesen, 2000, p.&nbsp;231]. She mentions the four subtypes [pp. 685-686]: "ironic validity, concerning the problems of representation; paralogical validity, which honors differences and uncertainties; rhizomatic validity, which seeks out multiplicity; and voluptuous validity, which seeks out ethics through practices of engagement and self-reflexivity (Ellis, 2004, pp.&nbsp;124~125).</blockquote>

From "generalizability" to "resonance"

With regard to the term of "generalizability", Ellis points out that autoethnographic research seeks generalizability not just from the respondents but also from the readers.

Also, autoethnography as a genre frees us to move beyond traditional methods of writing, promoting narrative and poetic forms, displays of artifacts, photographs, drawings, and live performances (Cons, p.&nbsp;449). Denzin says autoethnography must be literary, present cultural and political issues, and articulate a politics of hope. The literary criteria he mentions are covered in what Richardson advocates: aesthetic value.

The most recurrent criticism of autoethnography is of its strong emphasis on self, which is at the core of the resistance to accepting autoethnography as a valuable research method. Thus, autoethnographies have been criticised for being self-indulgent, narcissistic, introspective and individualised.

Another criticism is of the reality personal narratives or autoethnographies represent. As Geoffrey Walford states, "If people wish to write fiction, they have every right to do so, but not every right to call it research." This criticism originates from a statement by Ellis and Bochner (2000), conceiving autoethnography as a narrative that "is always a story about the past and not the past itself." Schwandt, for instance, argues that some social researchers have "come to equate being rational in social science with being procedural and criteriological." Building on quantitative foundations, Lincoln and Guba translate quantitative indicators into qualitative quality indicators, namely: credibility (parallels internal validity), transferability (parallels external validity), dependability (parallels reliability), and confirmability (parallels objectivity and seeks to critically examine whether the researcher has acted in good faith during the course of the research). Smith and Smith and Heshusius critique these qualitative translations and warn that the claim of compatibility (between qualitative and quantitative criteria) cannot be sustained, and by making such claims, researchers are in effect closing down the conversation. Smith points out that "the assumptions of interpretive inquiry are incompatible with the desire for foundational criteria. How we are to work out this problem, one way or another, would seem to merit serious attention. Accordingly, autoethnographies have been criticized for being too self-indulgent and narcissistic. Sparkes (2000) suggested that autoethnography is at the boundaries of academic research because such accounts do not sit comfortably with traditional criteria used to judge qualitative inquiries.

</blockquote>

Notable autoethnographers

  • Leon Anderson, sociologist and academic
  • Arthur P. Bochner, academic
  • Jesse Cornplanter, actor, artist, author and Seneca Faithkeeper

References

Sources

  • Ellis, C. (2001). With Mother/With Child: A True Story. Qualitative Inquiry, 7 (5), 598–616.
  • Ellis, C. (2009). Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
  • Herrmann, A. F., & Di Fate, K. (Eds.) (2014). The new ethnography: Goodall, Trujillo, and the necessity of storytelling. Storytelling Self Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Storytelling Studies, 10.
  • Hodges, N. (2015). The Chemical Life. Health Communication, 30, 627–634.
  • Hodges, N. (2015). The American Dental Dream. Health Communication, 30, 943–950.
  • Holman Jones, S. (2005). Autoethnography: Making the personal political. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln. (Eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research, (2nd ed., pp.&nbsp;763–791). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
  • Holman Jones, S., Adams, T. & Ellis, C. (2013). Handbook of Autoethnography. Walnut Creek CA: Left Coast Press
  • Krizek, R. (2003). Ethnography as the Excavation of Personal Narrative. In R.P.Clair(Ed.), Expressions of ethnography: novel approaches to qualitative methods (pp.&nbsp;141–152). New York: SUNY Press.
  • Plummer, K. (2001). The call of life stories in ethnographic research. In P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland, and L. Lofland (Eds.), Handbook of Ethnography (pp.&nbsp;395–406). London: Sage.
  • Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play: Constructing an academic life. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press.
  • Richardson, L. (2007). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln. (Eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research, (2nd ed., pp.&nbsp;923–948). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
  • Stake, R. E. (1994). Case studies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln. (Eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research, (2nd ed., pp.&nbsp;236–247). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.