Autoethnography

Autoethnography is a research method that utilizes the researcher's own experiences as ethnographic data. The term autoethnography denotes both a research method and the resulting text that is produced by the researcher. The term derives from the Greek auto, which means self, ethno meaning culture, and graphy meaning the research process. Each of these three elements can be differently emphasized by different researchers. As a method, autoethnography generally entails the study of the researcher's own experiences to make sense of social reality. It is a relatively new method; the earliest use of the term is from the 1970s, and the popularity of the method has increased since the turn of the millennium, although despite its potential it has yet to be widely used in the study of consumer culture.

Autoethnography is a method mainly used by anthropologists and sociologists. There exist, broadly speaking, two uses of the term. In its original form, autoethnography was defined as a form of auto-anthropology, where the researcher researches his or her “home” society, culture, or group. In later usage, the term has come to also mean self-observational research, where the researcher's own biography, experiences, and emotions constitute data that are analyzed in relation to the broader social context.

Autoethnography has its roots in a long tradition of qualitative social science research where individual experiences are studied to make sense of broader social or cultural phenomena. It is furthermore not uncommon for social scientists to study either the settings and groups of which they themselves are members or experiences they are personally familiar with, though this is not always explicitly discussed by the researcher, as it is in autoethnography.

Autoethnography can also be seen as part of the recent narrative turn in the social sciences. Autoethnographies are told in narrative form, and autoethnographers highlight the role that narratives play in our understanding of the world. People employ narratives to make sense of their experiences and surroundings, for example, when constructing a coherent sense of self or when creating causal explanations of why something happened. While some critics would argue that such personal narratives are idiosyncratic and biased, and therefore of little scientific use, autoethnographers maintain that all knowledge is from a point of view. In other words, a “God's eye view” or value-free knowledge is impossible, while understanding subjective experience is valuable.

Autoethnography is thus also related to the postmodern turn in the social sciences, which has led to a “crisis in representation,” where the researcher's ability to represent the “other” has been questioned. Autoethnographers argue that the researcher has best access to his or her own inner life, that is, his or her own thoughts and feelings, and that these are valid sources of knowledge. At the most extreme, it has been argued that we can only know and study ourselves. Furthermore, as part of the postmodern turn, the ability of researchers to represent the world in a “truthful” manner has come under criticism, with some suggesting a need to find alternatives to the traditional criteria for judging social science research, such as objectivity, validity, reliability, representativeness, and generalizability.

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