Lived Experience

Lived experience, as it is explored and understood in qualitative research, is a representation and understanding of a researcher or research subject's human experiences, choices, and options and how those factors influence one's perception of knowledge. Lived experience speaks to the personal and unique perspective of researchers and how their experiences are shaped by subjective factors of their identity including race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, political associations, and other roles and characteristics that determine how people live their daily lives. Lived experience, then, leads to a self-awareness that acknowledges the integrity of an individual life and how separate life experiences can resemble and respond to larger public and social themes, creating a space for storytelling, interpretation, and meaning-making. Lived experience allows a researcher to use a single life to learn about society and about how individual experiences are communicated.

Carolyn Ellis and colleagues have done extensive work on the usefulness of lived experience as a research technique, investigating emotions, gendered experiences, loss, and the inevitable transitions of life. Pioneers in the field have demonstrated writing and research [Page 490]techniques that best utilize this method of privileging the voice and experience of the author-researcher, including autoethnography, memoir, narrative writing, and performance.

Lived experience responds not only to people's experiences, but also to how people live through and respond to those experiences. The body of work on lived experience focuses on everyday life occurrences and self-awareness. As a life history or life story, lived experience concentrates on ordinary, everyday events (language, rituals, routines) while privileging experience as a way of knowing and interpreting the world. Lived experience also offers a perspective through which to make comparisons for research and serves as a testimonial to survival.

The lived experience method does not critique individual lives, but rather it presents them for comparison with others. The method is evaluated based on its verisimilitude and ability to evoke an emotional response from readers and scholars. The work represents common experiences that are life changing and life affirming. Lived experience seeks to understand the distinctions between lives and experiences and tries to understand why some experiences are privileged over others. The method concentrates on what people do and how they do it.

Research questions for this method are generally centered on the lived experiences of the participants, but they also focus on the topic of research. Lived experience acknowledges every aspect of a person's life and identity, even those areas that are not directly connected to the research topic or question.