Autoethnography in Research | Definition, Methods & Examples

Introduction

What does qualitative inquiry look like when a researcher's own experiences are the main source of data? In this article, we'll examine autoethnography as a research practice and its contribution to the social sciences as a vehicle for personal experience to critique cultural beliefs and report new angles on a cultural experience through personal narrative. Even qualitative researchers who employ methods besides autoethnography can benefit from a fundamental understanding of the role of autoethnographic writing in social science research.

What is autoethnography as a qualitative research method?

In simple terms, autoethnography uses the researcher's personal experience as the main source of data collection. In many cases, the objective is to capture cultural phenomena from an insider's point of view of everyday life through personal narratives.

This approach to research has the potential to highlight ways of knowing and doing that are previously unfamiliar in existing literature. This capacity is essential to critical research, which is oriented toward challenging established assumptions about the world by asserting that certain voices are marginalized and silenced, thus keeping different epistemologies from becoming expressed and known in the development of scientific knowledge.

The practice of autoethnography in centering different perspectives and knowledge bases resonates with feminist, Black, indigenous, and LGBTQ scholars, all of whom have faced historical and institutional disadvantages in contributing to formal research. Rather than uncritically accepting an objectivist and positivist stance to understanding the world, autoethnographers share unfamiliar and different perspectives to emphasize the different ways that meaning can be interpreted and how those differences can impact and develop our mutual understanding of our shared reality.

This means that qualitative studies that employ autoethnography can often be found in social justice research to bring attention to potential real world problems that may not have received sufficient attention by other scholars. When these problems are formally brought to light in published research, other scholars can employ other research methods to more fully conceptualize frameworks and insights to address them.

By necessity, autoethnography also relies on the use of narrative to tell cultural stories and anecdotes to present insights in a way that cannot necessarily be captured through other research approaches. Compared to other research methods, autoethnography combines characteristics of ethnographic research and narrative inquiry in order to propose new lines of inquiry and theoretical developments.

The narratives employed in an autoethnography are often said to borrow conventions of creative writing strictly in terms of how to tell a story that is compelling enough for the research audience to give it weight and apply it to their own scholarship. This inevitably invites critiques of autoethnography as potentially unempirical and lacking the necessary research rigor.

Keep in mind that the goal of autoethnography is often to identify socially-constructed concepts or phenomena that other research methods have yet to identify, but could develop through further studies once they are brought into the research realm. As a result, autoethnographic studies are fertile ground for finding relatively unexplored research topics in the social sciences from which new qualitative research can produce robust theoretical frameworks.

As different as these research methods may be, autoethnography is fundamentally similar to other methods in terms of the research process. An autoethnography follows the same process of identifying a problem, conducting a literature review to determine how well it is researched (or not), collecting data, and analyzing that data to uncover any novel insights.

What is the difference between autoethnography and traditional research methods?

Autoethnography serves a unique purpose different from that of other research methods. Experimental methods, especially in the physical and material sciences, often look at the physical reality to examine how different forces and objects react to one another.

Research that observes a falling object, for example, usually aims to make generalizations about the results that are perceived from an objective stance: the rate of descent is predictable and the likelihood that that object will break or shatter can be assumed beforehand. Experimental research works well with phenomena that are sufficiently defined from a theoretical standpoint that their behavior can be predicted and measured.

As with all other qualitative research, the ethnographic method differs from quantitative methods typically found in experimental research in that it seeks to describe a phenomenon rather than measure it. An autoethnographer brings attention to and expresses concern about a particular concept that is overlooked or ignored by scholarly research precisely because other methods have yet to capture it.

Autoethnography challenges prevailing scientific knowledge by providing new perspectives yet to be disseminated in published research. Think of autoethnography as a way to propose new ideas that other research methods can develop further.

Naturalistic methods are closer to autoethnography than to experimental or controlled research in that they can develop theoretical coherence of socially-constructed concepts. Grounded theory research and thematic analysis are similar to autoethnography in the ability to describe and systematically analyze qualitative data.

However, the focus of methods such as interviews and observations is on the perspectives and actions of the insiders of a particular culture or community, with the researcher often as an outsider, or at least as an investigator with an interest in perspectives different from their own. This approach is appropriate for examining differences between cultures or understanding how interpersonal communication and shared activity contributes to the broader context.

Where naturalistic methods uses external investigation to understand the world, an autoethnography identifies insights through introspection and critical reflection. Qualitative inquiry focused on cognition, emotion, consciousness, or other internal phenomena can benefit from autoethnography as the researcher as the autoethnographer has direct access to data that addresses epistemology.

When is autoethnography preferable to ethnography?

Ethnographic research is useful in many research inquiries regarding cultures. Ethnographers engage in participant observation, interviews, and document analysis in order to provide what is called thick description about a cultural practice or social phenomenon that allows the research audience to fully understand the research topic in its full context. So what distinguishes ethnographic research from autoethnography?

There are a couple of reasons where you might prefer to choose an autoethnographic approach, particularly if you want to explore new research areas or provide a detailed analysis of individual epistemology.

New research inquiries

Autoethnography is an ideal research method when you are looking to document a particular cultural identity or practice that existing research has yet to conceptualize. When a researcher has a hunch based on their own personal experience about a potential theoretical development yet to be found in existing scholarship, they can employ autoethnography to document that experience and analyze it for key findings.

Both approaches to research require the use of field notes to collect data. A field note is a record of events or developments over a period of time that can be analyzed and reported later. Researchers adopting either research method are observers constantly documenting data that is significant to their research inquiry.

Whether you're conducting autoethnographic or ethnographic research, you might also be considering the use of recorded video or audio in place of field notes. The idea, after all, is to document observations. However, field notes can never be fully replaced in the data collection process.

In either research approach, you are expected to not only document events as they arise, but also your personal, methodological, and theoretical reflections in the moment. Much of the richness of ethnographic or autoethnographic data lies in observations that have relevant connections to the context being studied. Without these connections, autoethnographic writing is simply creative nonfiction.

The goals of both autoethnographic and ethnographic research are similar in terms of immersing the research audience with an abundance of detail about the research topic. With the acknowledgment that socially-constructed phenomena cannot be replicated or generalized across cultures, the goals of thick description are constant across both qualitative approaches.

What makes autoethnography different from ethnographic research is the focus on a particular worldview, namely that of the researcher. While ethnography looks at cultures and how participants within it interact with each other, autoethnography examines the researcher's place within a culture and the epistemology that informs how the researcher makes sense of that culture.

Focus on epistemology

Research literature in psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and any social science that focuses on emotional responses and interactions within cultural practices all benefit from autoethnographic research. While research in physics and chemistry examine physical reality, research through autoethnography looks into how people look at the world through their individual lens from moment to moment.

Consider how life history research can thoroughly detail the life of a particular person from different angles of data collection and data analysis without sufficiently capturing the knowledge and perspective of that person. Interviews and observations can only provide so much detail about someone's way of thinking, and responses may not reflect the true essence of what people believe or think.

In an autoethnography, the researcher collects and analyzes their own data, and thus can trust the authenticity of that data and how it is interpreted. Interview and survey respondents are always capable of being less than truthful in their answers without the researcher being able to tell, while the autoethnographer knows the extent to which they are being authentic about their thoughts and actions.

Collecting data for your autoethnography

Autoethnographers look inward at their own lives for their data collection. The story they want to tell has a meaningful contribution to the relevant theories that they as researchers want to study. Moreover, autoethnographic writing provides license to engage in creative expression to craft the narrative that conveys a compelling message to research audiences.

That said, there are considerations to autoethnographic writing that ensures a level of research rigor expected by other scholars looking to incorporate new theoretical developments to their own research. Writing autoethnography balances the elements of narrative with the demands of collecting and analyzing data in an empirical manner.

In essence, the researcher in an autoethnography is collecting data on their own practices and experiences. This creates a challenge of multitasking: the demands of thick description in naturalistic inquiry still apply, requiring the construction of meaningfully and structurally complex narratives, but how do you balance the time and energy needed to make sense of the world through your own perspective with the time and energy needed to write it down?

Autoethnographic data collection can benefit from a theoretical framework based on existing scholarship that informs what the researcher should center their writing on. This keeps the researcher focused on aspects of the world they perceive that would yield important theoretical insights rather than have the research focus on a meandering stream of consciousness.

More importantly, rigorous research depends on the researcher connecting their findings, from autoethnography or other methods, to existing scholarship. Having a robust understanding of the literature relevant to your desired research inquiry in tandem with conducting your autoethnography allows you to identify insights during data collection that are relevant to relevant theories and frameworks at the time you document your experiences.

With that in mind, autoethnographers recommend writing their experiences as they happen, much in the same way that ethnographers record field notes of what they observe. The data collected for an autoethnography should provide as much detail as possible to allow for an analysis that draws connections to theory and existing scholarship.

Moreover, the level of detail recorded in field notes ensures that the autoethnographer can rely more on a written record and less on memory. Important details and developments can be forgotten or, even worse, misremembered or misinterpreted later on without some sort of documentation.

In terms of reporting your autoethnography, it's important to note that published autoethnographies seldom adopt the clinical research paper format. As different as qualitative research is from quantitative research, published research employing most qualitative methods often follows traditional conventions of research paper writing. Even a significant portion of published ethnographic research reports findings in the standard research writing genre (e.g., sections for theoretical background, methodology, findings, and discussion).

Writing an autoethnography for research publication, on the other hand, permits more freedom and creativity. An autoethnography is no less rigorous than other research studies, but autoethnographers are less bound to the rigid structures of research paper writing given the particular audience and the research goals commonly pursued through autoethnographic writing.

As a result, an autoethnography will more often resemble a narrative from which research findings become obvious as the researcher tells the story of their personal experiences. Rather than a traditional ethnographic report where researchers excerpt data segments from field notes or transcripts in a clinical findings section, an autoethnography oftentimes crafts a narrative where creative developments ultimately point to the theoretical developments that are being proposed.

As with all qualitative methods, autoethnography relies on reflective practice to establish the necessary research rigor. This requires the study examining the researcher's relationships with the research context and the other interactants within it.

When you draw connections between your data and existing scholarship, think about your positionality relative to your social context and the positionality between other researchers and their research. Principles of reflexivity require all researchers to consider how their interpretations of theory are affected by their positionality, and this demand is even more critical when conducting an autoethnography.

Ethics of autoethnography

Keep in mind that, although you are the central focus in your own autoethnography, there is a code of ethics that needs to be respected just as with other research practices. Your interactions within your context involve the presence of other people whose words and behaviors will be incorporated into your data. How you treat that data when writing and disseminating your autoethnography is a key ethical consideration.

Standard ethical practices in any human subjects research includes informed consent, privacy and confidentiality, and data anonymization. The requirement of having research participants give informed consent, where they are made aware of and accept how their data is collected and used for analysis and dissemination, might depend on the institution you are affiliated with and should be clarified in ethics review.

In many cases, explicit informed consent is recommended where the researcher, whose identity is made known in an autoethnography, has a close relationship with those whose data is being disseminated. As a result, it may be easy for readers to guess the identities of those within the research context. Whether required or not, informed consent under these circumstances benefits everyone involved by making clear the ethical boundaries of the research.

Regardless of informed consent, protecting the privacy and confidentiality of close contacts as best as possible is a core ethical principle in any research study. Unless participants give explicit consent, names and other identifying information should almost never be part of the final published work. The responsibility of anonymizing data in field notes and transcripts remains the same in autoethnographic research. Researchers should take care to ensure that identifying information is left out of research dissemination wherever possible.