autoethnography research report

Autoethnography as a Phenomenological Tool: Connecting the Personal to the Cultural

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• Jayne Pitard 2  

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Autoethnography retrospectively and selectively writes about experiences that have their basis in, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or owning a specific cultural identity. Telling about the experience though must be accompanied by a critical reflection of the lived experience in order to conform to social science publishing conventions (Ellis et al., Forum Qualitat Social Res 12, 2001). In researching my role as the teacher of a group of vocational education professionals from Timor-Leste, I conducted a phenomenological study using autoethnography to portray the existential shifts in my cultural understanding. I used vignettes to firstly place me within the social context, and then to explore my positionality as a researcher, carefully monitoring the impact of my biases, beliefs, and personal experiences on the teacher–student relationship. Initially, I lacked structure in my vignettes, and found it difficult to maintain a format which would guide the reader through my developing cultural awareness. In searching for analytical and representational strategies that would enable me to increase self-reflexivity and honor my commitment to the actual, I used vignettes to describe (show) moments of cultural existential crises, and then explore my experiences by reflecting on the reactions I had, and the actions I subsequently took, in dealing with these crises (telling). My structured vignette analysis framework helped me to reveal layers of awareness that might otherwise remain experienced but concealed, and to take the reader on a collaborative journey of cultural discovery. In this chapter, I present to you my framework as used in a cross-cultural setting.

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A Critical Co/Autoethnographic Exploration of Self: Becoming Science Education Researchers in Diverse Cultural and Linguistic Landscapes

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Pitard, J. (2019). Autoethnography as a Phenomenological Tool: Connecting the Personal to the Cultural. In: Liamputtong, P. (eds) Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5251-4_48

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13 The Purposes, Practices, and Principles of Autoethnographic Research

Carolyn Ellis, Department of Communication, University of South Florida

Tony E. Adams Bradley University Peoria, IL, USA

• Published: 04 August 2014
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This chapter details the authors’ approach to understanding and practicing autoethnography. It begins by defining autoethnography and describing its history and emergence within qualitative social research and within psychology. It then proposes general guiding principles for those seeking to do autoethnography, principles such as using personal experience, acknowledging existing research, understanding and critiquing cultural experience, using insider knowledge, breaking silence, and maneuvering through pain, confusion, anger, and uncertainty. It continues with a discussion of autoethnography as a process and as a product, and a method that can take a variety of representational forms. After offering ways to evaluate and critique autoethnography, it concludes with a discussion of autoethnography as an orientation to the living of life and an approach that has the potential of making life better—for the writer, reader, participant, and larger culture.

In this chapter, we detail our approach to understanding and practicing autoethnography. We begin by defining autoethnography and describing its history and emergence within qualitative research and within psychology. We then propose general guiding principles for those seeking to do autoethnography, which include using personal experience, acknowledging existing research, understanding and critiquing cultural experience, using insider knowledge, breaking silence, and maneuvering through pain, confusion, anger, and uncertainty. We continue with a discussion of autoethnography as a process and as a product, one that can take a variety of representational forms. After offering ways to evaluate and critique autoethnography, we conclude with a discussion of autoethnography as an orientation to the living of life and an approach that has the potential for making life better—for the writer, reader, participant, and larger culture.

What Is Autoethnography?

Autoethnography refers to research, writing, stories, and methods that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political. This approach considers personal experience as an important source of knowledge in and of itself, as well as a source of insight into cultural experience. As Ellis (2004) notes, autoethnographers “look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations,” and, simultaneously, focus “outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience” (p. 37; see Ellis, 2009 a ; Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011 ). Autoethnographers use reflexivity to illustrate intersections between self and society, the particular and the general, the personal and the political ( Berry & Clair, 2011 ). They also recognize and respect a researcher’s relationships with others ( Ellis, 2007 ), treat research as a socially conscious act ( Holman Jones, 2005 a ), and help humanize emotionally sterile research processes ( Ellis, 1991 ).

Autoethnography implies connection: the stories we write connect self to culture; the way we research and write these stories blends social science methods with the aesthetic sensibilities of the humanities, ethnographic practices with expressive forms of art and literature, and research goals of understanding with practical goals of empathy, healing, and coping. We write concrete stories about our lives because we think that the stories of a particular life can provide a useful way of knowing about general human experience. These stories also offer insight into the patterned processes in our interactions and into the constraints of social structures. As well, telling and listening to stories and comparing our stories to those of others are how we learn, cope, and make our way in society.

Claiming the conventions of literary writing, autoethnography features concrete action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection portrayed in dialogue, scenes, characterization, and plot. Autoethnography can take a variety of forms, including short stories, poetry, performance, new media, art, and multivoiced work, such as collaborative autoethnography ( Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2012 ), co-constructed narrative ( Bochner & Ellis, 1995 ), and collaborative witnessing ( Ellis & Rawicki, 2013 ; in press). Additionally, autoethnography can be used in a variety of ways, from positioning oneself in the text as the researcher to being a participant to being a focus of research. We elaborate on many of these ideas throughout this chapter.

History of Autoethnography

Heider (1975) employed the term “auto-ethnography” to describe a study in which cultural members give their own accounts about their culture. Goldschmidt (1977) noted that “all ethnography” is “self-ethnography” in that it reveals personal investments and particular kinds of analysis, and he used autoethnography to investigate anthropology’s position in and relevance to the academy and in society (p. 294). Hayano (1979) used “auto-ethnography” to describe anthropologists who “conduct and write ethnographies of their ‘own people’” (p. 99) and researchers who choose a “field location” tied to one of their own identities or group memberships. Although these views of autoethnography foreground distinctions of insider–outsider, the move toward the personal is implied, with Heider making a case for the value of cultural members telling their own stories, Goldschmidt arguing that traces of the personal are present in all ethnographic work, and Hayano describing the importance of a researcher’s identities and connection with similarly identified others.

Although the term “autoethnography” was not employed often during the 1980s, sociologists, anthropologists, communication scholars, and others doing oral interpretation, performance ethnography, and feminist research began writing and advocating for forms of personal narrative, subjectivity, and reflexivity in research (see Benson, 1981 ; Conquergood, 1986 ; Crapanzano, 1980 ; Denzin, 1989 ; Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ; Oakley, 1981 ; Pacanowsky, 1988 ; Reinharz, 1984 ; Shostak, 1981 ; Van Maanen, 1988 ; Zola, 1982 ). These scholars were interested in the importance of storytelling and enactments of culture, and they progressively became engaged by the personal traces in ethnographic practice. Rejecting the idea that ethnographers should hide behind or perpetuate an aura of objectivity and innocence, these researchers began including themselves as part of what they studied, often writing stories about the research process and sometimes focusing on their own experience. At the end of the decade, literary and cultural critics began to apply the term “autoethnography” to work that explored the interplay of the introspective, personally engaged self with cultural descriptions mediated through language, history, and ethnographic explanation (see Deck, 1990 ; Lionnet, 1989 ).

The 1990s saw the emergence of more emphasis on personal narratives and the continuation of the autoethnographic movement that crossed many social scientific disciplines. I (CE) published one book ( Final Negotiations;   Ellis, 1995 a ) and more than two dozen essays about autoethnography, and I co-edited two books about the use of personal experience in research— Investigating Subjectivity (with Michael Flaherty; Ellis, 1992 ) and Composing Ethnography (with Art Bochner; Ellis, 1996a ). Bochner (1994 ; 1997 ) published essays about the importance of personal stories and their relationship to theory, and, together, the two of us began editing the Ethnographic Alternatives book series, all of which illustrated how and why personal experience should be used in research. Other key works from this decade included Reed-Danahay’s Auto/Ethnography (1997) and the first Handbook of Qualitative Research ( Denzin & Lincoln, 1994 ), which contained chapters on personal experience and research ( Clandinin & Connelly, 1994 ) and writing as a method of inquiry ( Richardson, 1994 ). Also important were Goodall’s Casing a Promised Land (1989) , Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer (1996) , Richardson’s (1997)   Fields of Play , and Pelias’s Writing Performance (1999) . All of us (along with many others!) helped carve out a special place for emotional and personal scholarship, and the term “autoethnography” soon became the descriptor of choice.

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw the publication of the second and third editions of the Handbook of Qualitative Research ( Denzin & Lincoln, 2000 ; 2005 a ), both of which included numerous references to personal ethnography, personal experience, personal narrative, personal writing, autobiography, and reflexivity, as well as specific chapters about autoethnography ( Ellis & Bochner, 2000 ; Holman Jones, 2005 a ). I (CE) published two additional books about autoethnography ( Ellis, 2004 ; 2009 a ) and two more co-edited collections about autoethnography ( Bochner & Ellis, 2002 ; Bartlett & Ellis, 2009 ). Art and I also started Writing Lives , a second book series about autoethnography published by Left Coast Press. In this decade, there were many more notable books (e.g., Alexander, 2006 ; Chang, 2008 ; Goodall, 2001 ; 2006 ; Holman Jones, 2007 ; Pelias, 2004 ; Poulos, 2009 ; Tillmann-Healy, 2001 ), essays (e.g., Adams, 2006 ; 2008 ; Adams & Holman Jones, 2008 ; Anderson, 2006 ; Berry, 2006 ; 2007 ; 2008 ; Boylorn, 2006 ; 2008 ; Crawley, 2002 ; Holman Jones, 2005 b ; Jago, 2002 ; Pelias, 2000 ; Pineau, 2000 ; Spry, 2001 ; Tillmann, 2009 ; Wall, 2006 ; 2008 ), and special issues of journals about autoethnography, reflexivity, and personal narrative (e.g., Boyle & Parry, 2007 ; Ellis & Bochner, 1996b ; Gingrich-Philbrook, 2000 ; Hunt & Junco, 2006 ; Warren & Berry, 2009 ). Furthermore, in 2005, Norman Denzin began the International Center for Qualitative Inquiry and the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, an organization and a conference that recognized the importance of reflexivity and personal experience in research.

Currently, in the second decade of this century, excitement about autoethnography continues to flourish. Denzin and Lincoln (2011) published the fourth edition of the Handbook of Qualitative Research —a collection that, similar to the two previous editions, includes numerous references to ethnography, personal experience, and reflexivity, as well as two chapters about autoethnography ( Pelias, 2011 a ; Spry, 2011 ). There continue to be more books (e.g., Adams, 2011 ; Boylorn, 2013 ; Boylorn & Orbe, 2014 ; Chang & Boyd, 2011 ; Denzin, 2014 ; Gergen & Gergen, 2012 ; Diversi & Moriera, 2011 ; Pelias, 2011 b ; Spry, 2011 ; Tamas, 2011 ), essays (e.g., Boylorn, 2011 ; Foster, 2010 ; Fox, 2010 ; Jago, 2011 ; Holman Jones, 2011 ; Holman Jones & Adams, 2010 ), and special issues of journals devoted to autoethnography (e.g., Adams & Wyatt, 2012 ; Berry & Clair, 2011 ; Myers, 2012 a ; Ngunjiri, Hernandez, & Chang, 2010 ). The International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry is entering its tenth year. Finally, and certainly notable, are the four volume set, Autoethnography , edited by Pat Sikes (2013) , and the Handbook of Autoethnography (2013) , which we (TEA and CE) have edited with leading author Stacy Holman Jones. Along with Sikes’s collection of reprinted articles and chapters, our Handbook of new chapters further legitimates the approach, offers practical advice for using personal experience in research, and poses future possibilities for doing autoethnographic work.

Autoethnography and Psychology

Although coming later to the qualitative revolution than other disciplines, psychologists have increasingly begun to embrace qualitative methods ( Marecek, Fine, & Kidder, 1997 ; Wertz, 2011 ). Along with this embrace has come an increased interest in autoethnography. Given the emphasis in psychology on the mind and the self, autoethnography would seem like a good methodological fit. So why the delay? Perhaps this should not be surprising, given psychology’s desired separation from the humanities and its preferred identity as a science ( Wertz, 2011 ). Additionally, psychology has had complex and contradictory responses to introspection and self-observation in terms of evaluating its scientific rigor, reliability, and measurability (see Ellis, 1991 ; McIlveen, 2008 ; Polkinghorne, 2005 ; Schultz & Shultz, 2012 ). Nevertheless, some interpretive psychologists—whether they refer to themselves as autoethnographers or not—have embraced autoethnographic practices for some time. Some have composed autoethnographies and others have examined the use of personal narratives in research. Psychologist Amia Lieblich, for example, authored Conversations with Dvora (1997) , a book about the imagined conversations between herself and an early modern woman writer, and Learning about Lea (2003) , which is both a biography of Lea Goldberg, a poet, and about Lieblich’s personal journey and discovery of Goldberg. Ruthellen Josselson (1996 ; 2011 ) has composed personal stories about herself as a researcher, her feelings about the research process, and the issues that arise in doing research with others. Psychologist George Rosenwald (1992) has examined autobiographical stories and self-understanding (see also Rosenwald & Ochberg, 1992 ), and psychologist Dan McAdams and other colleagues from psychology have explored personal narratives and life stories (see McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006 ).

There are also many others in psychology who have begun to write autoethnograpically and to refer to what they do as autoethnography. For example, vocational psychologist McIlveen (2007) used autoethnography to examine his career counseling process. Health psychologist Smith (2004) autoethnograpically examined eating disorders. Community psychologist Langhout (2006) employed autoethnography to look at issues of race, class, and gender in a research project. Du Preeza (2008) examined autoethnography as an example of reflexive practice that brought her to and through her research. Psychologist Tessa Muncey wrote Creating Autoethnographies (2010) , a practical guide that details the steps for doing an autoethnographic project. Jane Speedy (2013) and her colleagues and students (e.g., Martin et al., 2011 ) and other psychotherapists and counselors now embrace autoethnography as well.

As well, other supportive psychologists help open up spaces for autoethnographic work. For example, Ken and Mary Gergen celebrate autoethnographic writing and performance in their book, Playing with Purpose: Adventures in Performative Social Science (2012) and also in other publications ( Gergen & Gergen, 2000 ; Gergen & Gergen, 2002 ), and they often do autoethnographic performances. Although they themselves do not do autoethnography, psychologists Günter Mey and Katja Mruck from Germany published a chapter on autoethnography ( Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2010 ) in their Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology and reprinted the chapter in their online journal, Forum: Qualitative Social Research ( Ellis et al., 2011 ). For the past two years, there has been a “Day in Qualitative Psychology” at the International Congress for Qualitative Research that includes several autoethnographic presentations. In 2012, a session there, entitled “Critical ‘I’ and Qualitative Psychology,” included three autoethnographic papers ( Benjamin, 2012 ; Benozzo & Bell, 2012 ; Trostin, 2012 ).

We predict that this interest in autoethnography, along with the entirety of qualitative methods, will increasingly move into mainstream psychology. This is evidenced by the new American Psychological Association’s “Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology” (started by Kenneth Gergen, Ruthellen Josselson, and Mark Freeman), as well as by the new handbooks, journals, textbooks, and conferences in psychology that feature qualitative work (see Wertz, 2011 ). The spread of qualitative work, including autoethnography, will happen for many of the same practical and social reasons that it has occurred in other disciplines.

Why Autoethnography? Why Now?

Although we provide an overview of the history of autoethnography in terms of those who have been involved, the history does not illustrate specifically why autoethnography came to exist. We are aware that this movement has developed alongside the cultural emphasis on self and self-revelation expressed in such popular cultural phenomena as reality TV, the self-help movement, new media where folks blog and tell their stories, and the popularization of memoirs and autobiographies. Although we see a strong connection from autoethnographies to memoirs and autobiographies (thus, the “auto” in autoethnography) in terms of the emphasis on telling one’s story, we view our work as more analytic and scholarly than what is shown on reality TV and in most blogs. Furthermore, our goals are broader than those of the self-help movement, which is more focused on and committed to individual change as the sole outcome of their work. As autoethnographers, we emphasize interpretation and reflection, and we attempt to compare, normalize, and understand how folks experience emotions, bodies, and thought. We investigate the ways that authors complicate recovery processes ( Tamas, 2011 ) or being survivors ( Spry, 2011 ). We have a heightened concern about ethics, and we also examine the influence of culture, politics, and power relations on personal experience. Many of these aspects often are neglected by more popular forms of self expression, especially reality TV, which tends to sensationalize the personal, perpetuate the victim status, forego ethical considerations, focus on individual concerns at the expense of cultural concerns, and reinforce the oppressive structures of capitalism that contribute to victimization ( Rothe, 2011 ).

Although this cultural movement of telling one’s story in memoirs and healing one’s self in the self-help movement may have served to bring attention to what we do, we do not think this is a primary reason for why autoethnography has emerged in many academic contexts. In this section, we describe why we think this happened, and, in particular, focus on three interrelated conditions that contributed to the emergence and solidification of autoethnography as an approach to research: (1) the growing appreciation for qualitative research and personal storytelling in academia, (2) a greater recognition of research ethics, and (3) the influx of women and minorities into academia and the continuing emergence and importance of identity politics.

The Growing Appreciation for Qualitative Research

In the 1970s and 1980s, concerns mounted that quantitative, social scientific research could not solve all social problems, was inadequate for capturing the particulars of social experience, and, in many ways, adhered to invasive and unethical procedures for studying and representing others. A “crisis of representation” occurred—a moment when scholars questioned strongly the objectives of traditional research. Such objectives included the goal of seeking universal Truth, especially with regard to social relations; the disregard of stories and storytelling in human life; a bias against affect and emotion; and a neglect of the ways in which social positions (e.g., race, sex, age, sexuality) influence how persons research, write, read, and evaluate. This lack of emphasis on feelings, chaos, and nonrationality, as well as on personal involvement in research and the use of subjectivity and first-person voice, paved the way for the emergence of a greater appreciation for qualitative research—research grounded in quality (not quantity!) and research that tends to embrace, or at least be more cognizant of, ethical and humane ways to study others.

Autoethnography emerged within qualitative research for many of these same reasons, although it has responded to these troubles to a greater extreme than traditional qualitative work. As with much of the interpretive side of qualitative research, autoethnography is a partial response to the crisis of representation; it emerged to dismiss any possibility of universal Truth; recognize the importance of storytelling ( Bochner, 2002 ) and the existence of messy, emotional, and leaky bodies ( Lindemann, 2010 ); and to counter use of colonialist and invasive ethnographic practices, such as going into and studying a culture, leaving to write about—represent—this culture, and disregarding what the representation might do to cultural members (see DeLeon, 2010 ; Ellis et al., 2011 ; Wall, 2006 ).

Autoethnography also emerged to address aspects of social life that were neglected by social scientists. For instance, much of my (CE) work with autoethnography grew out of my awareness of the deficiencies of traditional social science research for dealing with day-to-day realities of chronic illness and relational process (see Ellis, 1998 a ). To get to the essence of what I wanted to examine meant violating the taken-for-granted conventions of social science research and writing, breaching the separation of subject and researcher, and disrupting the traditional idea of generalizability across cases. To understand life as lived, especially intimate life involving relationships and death, I had to disclose details of my private life that are usually hidden and to highlight emotional experience, all of which challenged the “rational actor” model of social performance (p. 52). If our task as researchers, as social scientists, is to study people, the creators of “social life,” then we should try to include as much of the person as possible and not relegate parts of our lives and our selves to the periphery.

An Emphasis on Ethics

The second condition that allowed for the emergence of autoethnography was the growing instances of ethical violations in the social sciences during the past fifty years. Of historical importance are the abuses brought on by the Milgram experiments of the 1960s and the Tuskegee syphilis study that took place from the 1930s until the 1970s, two primary cases that contributed to the emergence of institutional review boards (IRBs) within the United States. Coupled with these concerns were ethical considerations in traditional ethnographic practices about the possible exploitation of the people being studied.

Stanley Milgram (1963 ; 1964 ), a social psychologist at Harvard, conducted an experiment to investigate the unquestioned “destructive obedience” that occurred in the Holocaust ( Milgram, 1964 , p. 848). He wanted to figure out how millions of victims were slaughtered from 1933 to 1945 by people who were only, supposedly, obeying orders from authorities ( Milgram, 1963 , p. 371). Milgram designed a study to test obedience, which illustrated how everyday people would succumb to the perceived authority of a researcher and harm others upon the researcher’s command. Although Milgram’s intentions were commendable, other scholars raised significant questions about his research implementation (see Baumrind, 1964 ). For instance, other researchers asked: What gives a researcher the right to make people “sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan, and dig their fingernails into their flesh” for the purposes of knowledge (p. 375)? Does the researcher have any concern for and responsibility toward participants for whom their research motivates seizures and cultivates “serious embarrassment” (p. 375)? Do the benefits of social scientific inquiry, of achieving understanding by examining situations “in which the end is unknown,” justify the use of risk among participants ( Milgram, 1964 , p. 849)?

The Tuskegee syphilis study, which investigated different kinds of treatments for curing syphilis, also illuminated numerous ethical issues of traditional research processes. White researchers solicited only poor, African-American men infected with syphilis and treated them as “‘subjects, not patients; clinical material, not sick people’” (Heller, cited in Thomas & Quinn, 1991 , p. 1501). Researchers showed a “minimal sense of personal responsibility and ethical concern” throughout the project, especially since effective treatments for syphilis were found but never revealed to the participants (p. 1501). Such deception among researchers has made some people suspicious about any kind of social science research. For instance, as Thomas and Quinn observe, “strategies used to recruit and retain participants in the [Tuskegee] study were quite similar to those being advocated for HIV education and AIDS risk reduction programs today” (p. 1500). Thus, some African-American groups are leery of this education and these programs, fearing they might be a continuation of racial eradication supported (or at least not objected to) in the past by white people doing research on African-American populations.

Concerns were not limited to biomedical and social psychological social science research practices. Within ethnography, questions arose about researchers who entered a culture, observed and interviewed cultural members, and then left to write their articles and books. Often, researchers did not maintain contact with members and unselfconsciously used the information they obtained solely for their own personal gain (e.g., fulfilling academic responsibilities, monetary rewards, and academic reputation; see Rupp & Taylor, 2011 ). The emergence of feminist understandings of research ( Keller, 1995 ) and postcolonialism ( Smith, 1999 ) made such ethnographic practices appear suspicious and questionable: What gives a researcher a right to do this? Is the ethnographer taking advantage of vulnerable, different, and “exotic” populations? What responsibility does the ethnographer have to the people studied? What gives a researcher the authority to represent and speak on behalf of others ( Alcoff, 1991 )?

A Concern with Identity Politics

A third condition that promoted the emergence of autoethnography was the influx of women and minorities into academia and the heightened attention to identity politics. Within the United States, most noticeably since the mid-twentieth century, significant backlash occurred to considering whiteness, maleness, classism, heterosexuality, Christianity, and able-bodiness as the norms to which all people were compared or as norms that implicitly informed how research was represented and valued. For example, Lorde (1984) argues that the valuing of prose and the devaluing of poetry by traditional social scientific researchers comes from racist, classist, and sexist evaluations. Not everyone has the time, ability, financial resources, or desire to use prose to express their knowledge, nor is prose the only way knowledge can, or should, be expressed. Furthermore, orthodox researchers privileged objectivity, uncompromising rigor, and debate—characteristics typically considered to be masculine—over subjectivity, emotion, and care—characteristics typically viewed as feminine ( Keller, 1995 ; Pelias, 2011 b ). Some researchers also continued to presume language’s neutrality, advocate the use of the “generic he,” and neglect the racist characteristics of everyday speech, such as the use of “black” to describe anything that is evil, unacceptable, and undesirable and “white” to describe anything that is safe, honest, and pure ( Moore, 1976 ). Some writers, such as Berger (1972) , critiqued how women were represented in art and research, especially how these representations cultivated harmful stereotypes about and perpetuated ignorance toward women. Other writers raised questions about research that maintained heterosexual assumptions and ideas about commitment, partnership, and family life ( Foster, 2008 ; Frye, 1983 ; van Gelder, 1998 ).

Such concerns motivated significant changes in research design and evaluation. It became more difficult for a researcher to remain unaware of or silent about human difference, or to promote racist, sexist, classist, heterosexist, and able-bodied beliefs. If researchers failed to take into account human difference, they risked being considered uninformed and being called to account for such absence (see Keller, 1995 ; McIntosh, 1995 ). These concerns brought into question decades and centuries of extant research; much of the research now needed to be revised to include the recognition of others. Furthermore, these concerns did not (and should not) preclude white, male, upper-class, heterosexual, and/or able-bodied persons from doing research, but only encourage them to reflexively account for the possible ways in which their identities impact what and how they see and write, as well as who and how they study. It has become much more important for researchers to reflexively situate themselves in the text and say explicitly and to the best of their ability how they arrived at the outcome of a study and show their awareness of the ethical issues that might arise when representing others.

The three conditions that contributed to the emergence of autoethnography are interrelated and inseparable. Concerns about research being an invasive and oppressive colonialist enterprise are directly connected with the ethics of researching and representing others. Storytelling is an important way of knowing for many communities, and the ethical dilemmas brought on by social science practices raised questions about the legitimacy of social scientific inquiry. Performance studies scholars—scholars who long have valued storytelling, narrative, and the body—often recognize the ways in which identity is manifest in bodies. The ethics of the Tuskegee syphilis project also included dilemmas in identity politics, particularly when African-American populations became leery of researchers, especially white researchers. Furthermore, as Thomas and Quinn (1991) argue, the end of the Tuskegee syphilis study was heavily influenced by the rise of the civil rights and Black Power movements, movements tied to certain populations/identities.

Autoethnography thus emerged partly to help accommodate the space of navigating difference and to acknowledge how and why identities matter. Consequently, autoethnography is often considered a feminist ( Allen & Piercy, 2005 ), queer ( Holman Jones & Adams, 2010 ), and indigenous ( Tomaselli, 2003 ; Tomaselli, Dyll, & Francis, 2008 ) approach to research, one that recognizes past treatments (abuses) of research participants and instead tries to advocate for more humane treatments of selves and others in research. The self—the “auto” part of autoethnography—is central because the investigator is explicitly or implicitly part of the studied group and will not leave or cut ties to the group being represented. As such, it is assumed that researchers will take more or better responsibility in representing others. Being a member of or closely connected to the studied culture helps alleviate ethical concerns about access and colonization. Rather than speaking on behalf of others, autoethnographers may focus on their own personal experience to illuminate nuances of cultural experience, although this would occur without a claim that the researcher’s experience represents the experience of all members of the cultural group. Rather than a retreat from fieldwork or studying others, autoethnography tries in its practice to honor and respect those being studied and to work alongside and with them rather than to invade and do research on them (see Rawicki & Ellis, 2011 ). At the same time, autoethnography has its own particular ethical considerations brought on by its practices, design, and subject matter, which we will discuss later in the chapter.

Given all of these concerns, the question arises: What must we take into account to do autoethnography well?

Guiding Principles for Autoethnography

We offer the following principles as a possible roadmap when one considers doing an autoethnographic project or to use when reading and contemplating the personal narratives of others. The first two principles—the use of personal experience and a familiarity with existing research—are two features that cut across almost all autoethnographic work. The remaining five elements—using personal experience to describe and critique cultural experience; taking advantage of and valuing insider knowledge; breaking silence, (re)claiming voice; healing and maneuvering through pain, confusion, anger, and uncertainty; and writing accessible prose—are more specific goals, advantages, and rewards for using autoethnography in research.

An Emphasis on Personal Experience

All autoethnographies include personal experience, although it may occupy different roles depending on the form and scope of a project. In embracing personal experience, social scientists take on the dual identities of academic and personal selves in order to tell stories about some aspect of their experience. For instance, in reflexive autoethnographies, researchers may write about their own experiences along a continuum, starting from their own life story or how they got interested in the phenomenon being examined, to studying their experience as part of a culture, to being researchers who examine a particular culture. In indigenous autoethnographies, researchers who are natives of cultures that have been marginalized or exoticized by others write about and interpret their native cultures for themselves and others. In complete-member research, researchers explore groups of which they already are members or in which they become full members during the research process. In all cases, including when the focus is on the other, autoethnographers observe the participation between themselves and the people they study ( Reed-Danahay, 2001 ; Tedlock, 1991 ).

Familiarity with Existing Research

Autoethnographers show familiarity with existing research on a topic, although this work may be included and/or referred to in different ways. For instance, if I [TEA] write about my experiences with coming out as gay, I should know what other people have said about this experience. I would then frame my discussion within what others have said or write my story in a way that adds insight into existing research. Or consider my [CE] essay “Maternal Connections” (1996) . Although I do not cite existing daughter–mother research, I write to offer a description of a caregiving encounter and a counter-story to dominant stories about caregiving as a burden. I tell a story about caregiving as love, one that is not given enough credence in existing research. Offering readers a new way to think about their experiences with caregiving, this story invites readers to enter the experience and feel it with body and emotion, as well as with head and intellect. Writing in this way required being familiar with the caregiving literature, although I did not cite it or explicitly reference it.

Using Personal Experience to Describe and Critique Cultural Experience

Stein (2010) says the “best ethnographic work” tells the “story of lives lived in specific social and historical contexts and draws readers in, helping them to understand their own hopes and fears and personal and political investments” (p. 567; see Goodall, 2001 ). Critical ethnographers agree with Stein that they tell stories, and add that they also evaluate these stories. As Thomas (1993) says, critical ethnography is “conventional ethnography with a political purpose,” a method that facilitates “social consciousness and societal change,” aids “emancipatory goals,” and negates “repressive” cultural influences (p. 4; see DeLeon, 2010 ). Although the telling of stories itself can be a critical act in that description can generate knowledge and knowledge can be powerful, critical ethnographers explicitly work toward cultural change (see Boylorn & Orbe, 2014 ; Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008 ).

As part ethnography, autoethnography describes cultural beliefs and practices and helps audiences understand “hopes and fears and personal and political investments” ( Stein, 2010 , p. 567). For instance, Herrmann (2005) describes what it can mean to be a son as well as the fears and feelings of father abandonment. Jago (2002 ; 2011 ) describes how depression can be lived and how it can impact relationships with others. I (CE) describe the process of caring for an aging parent, and, in so doing, show how the love between a mother and daughter can look and feel (see Ellis, 1996 ; 2001 ). I (TEA) describe characteristics of and everyday struggles with coming out of the closet—the process by which those with same-sex attraction reveal this attraction to others (see Adams, 2011 ). The power of these accounts rests on an author’s ability to use personal hopes, fears, and investments to provide complex and engaging descriptions of cultural life.

Some researchers consider autoethnography an inherently critical approach—a method that describes and critiques a person’s experiences on behalf of promoting social change, and a method that not only disrupts norms of representation but also treats research as a socially—and relationally conscious—act ( Ellis, 2007 ; Holman Jones, 2005 a ; Spry, 2011 ). For instance, Pineau (2000) and Defenbaugh (2011) describe and critique medical practice and error, while Denzin (2011) concentrates on interpretations of Native Americans and US history; Boylorn (2011) , Marvasti (2006) , and Myers (2008) address instances of racism in everyday conversation, and Diversi and Moreira (2010) highlight hegemonic characteristics of academic writing and research. The power of these accounts is each author’s ability to describe and critique harmful aspects of cultural life.

Given autoethnographers’ critical edge, there is a tendency to tell stories about tragic events and painful experiences in order to promote awareness and change (see Myers, 2012 a ). Pleasant and comfortable experiences, such as a birthday party, graduation, or church service, may not require awareness or change; for some, these experiences may already be pleasant and comfortable. However, for others, a birthday party might be viewed as promoting capitalism; a graduation as involving grandiose, class-laden discourse; or a church service as representing or advocating sexist, racist, and/or homophobic practices. In those cases, autoethnography might provide an avenue for promoting awareness of and suggested change in these practices.

Elsewhere, I (CE) have argued that social change happens one person at a time ( Ellis, 2002 ). In autoethnographic writing, collective action is connected to personal biography and emotionality, and abstract collective change can be represented by personal stories of actors.

Taking Advantage of and Valuing Insider Knowledge

Throughout the history of ethnography, ethnographers have debated the benefits and consequences of being insiders in and outsiders to the cultures being studied. The method of participant observation—of taking part in the culture but distancing oneself enough to credibly and “objectively” observe this culture—is a hallmark of ethnographic practice, as are concerns about the dangers of “going native” and establishing “over-rapport” with cultural members ( Atkinson, Coffey, & Delamont, 2003 ). Being close but not too close to the people we study, finding ways to create (and manipulate) trust among different others and then exiting the field post research, are often taken-for-granted principles of ethnographic practice.

With autoethnography, however, the relationship between insiders and outsiders is fluid and untenable. More specifically, given that researchers use personal experiences to study cultural identities or experiences that have affected them, autoethnographers always are insiders (or closely related) to the groups and cultures they describe. This is helpful for several reasons. First, in adhering to philosophies of feminism, queer theory, and indigenous research, autoethnographers must carefully and respectfully represent the culture in which they study, especially given that they will be affected by the representation. For instance, instead of a more traditional ethnographer writing about people with depression, the autoethnographer who writes about living with depression often has a personal investment in how depression is represented (see Jago, 2002 ; 2011 ). Likewise, an autoethnographer who defines herself as a black, southern, rural woman will care about how she represents this culture ( Boylorn, 2013 ).

Second, insiders or members of a culture will have different kinds of knowledge of the culture than will strangers or outsiders to the culture (see Droogsma, 2007 ; Marvasti, 2006 ; Wood, 1992 ). We do not suggest that this knowledge is better, more truthful, or more complete. We understand that outsiders sometimes can observe taken-for-granted acts and beliefs or distinguish patterns that cultural members may not see. But there also are benefits of being an insider to a cultural group: an insider can talk about the everyday feelings and negotiations of a cultural identity or experience, as well as intentions and motivations that might otherwise be unavailable or inaccessible to observers.

For instance, through providing everyday feelings, internal conversations, witnessed negotiations, and relational conversations grounded in concrete detail, I (CE) provide insight into the experiences of having a minor bodily stigma to which outsiders, for the most part, would not be privy ( Ellis, 1998 b ). In writing about bulimia, Tillmann-Healy (1996) notes, “I can show you a view no physician or therapist can, because, in the midst of an otherwise ‘normal’ life, I experience how a bulimic lives and feels ” (p. 80). In these examples, autoethnographers are able to explore emotional trauma without worrying about invading respondents’ personal experiences, revealing what they might prefer remain private, or worrying about doing emotional harm to other vulnerable participants. Likewise, these writers do not have to fear losing control of their words and experiences to another researcher. As in all autoethnographies, however, the storyteller and related loved ones may be made vulnerable by what is revealed ( Ellis, 2004 ).

Breaking Silence, (Re)Claiming Voice

With autoethnography, cultural members now have a way to tell and justify telling their personal stories, particularly within academic contexts; no longer must they rely on others to speak on their behalf. Although textual gatekeepers still exist for those who can and do write (e.g., editors, reviewers, artistic directors), autoethnographers, when compared to more traditional research norms, have more choices as to what to publish and what compromises they will make to a text ( Chatham-Carpenter, 2010 ; Wall, 2006 ; 2008 ). Thus, another tenet of autoethnography is the ability for the autoethnographer to represent oneself complexly and justly, simultaneously recognizing that there are things that others know about us that we may never know ( Mead, 1934 ), or that we may not know yet ( Ellis, 2009 a ).

Autoethnography also allows a researcher to break silence and reclaim voice by adding nuanced personal perspectives to and filling experiential “gaps” ( Goodall, 2001 ) in traditional research—research that often disregards emotions ( Ellis, 1991 ), perpetuates canonical narratives ( Bochner, 2002 ), and promotes hegemonic beliefs and practices ( Pathak, 2010 ). For instance, Ronai (1996) describes her experience of living with a “mentally retarded” mother—experience often left out of texts on cognitive impairment, family communication, and parenting. Defenbaugh (2011) writes about her experience with inflammatory bowel disease in order to “give voice to those who have been silenced by dominant discourses” about chronic illnesses (p. 13). Berry (2007) , Crawley (2002) , and Eguchi (2011) voice concerns about cultural norms of sex, gender, and sexuality. In critiquing traditional academic practices, Diversi and Moreira (2010) not only describe their experiences navigating the (white, masculine, colonialist) academy, but also stress the importance of using alternative writing strategies to represent cultural phenomena. Thus, autoethnography offers the possibility for researchers to describe their experiences of hegemonic beliefs and practices, experiences often disregarded in extant research.

Healing and Maneuvering Through Pain, Confusion, Anger, Uncertainty

Writing (and performing) is a way of knowing cultural experiences—a way to learn about social phenomena differently (see Colyar, 2008 ; Richardson, 1994 ; Spry, 2011 ). Through writing, we can make sense of a repetitive or problematic cultural experience and have the possibility of venting our frustrations or at least making these frustrations known to others. Through writing, we have the potential to heal ( DeLeon, 2010 ; hooks, 1991 ), seek freedom ( Chatham-Carpenter, 2010 ), and work through emotions such as anger, pain, and confusion, and, in so doing, better cope with these emotions ( Berry, 2006 ). Through writing, we can try to understand or make sense of the pain of losing a brother ( Ellis, 1993 ) or missing a father ( Adams, 2006 ; 2012 ), the anger of feeling prejudice and being judged inappropriately ( Boylorn, 2006 ; 2011 ), or the uncertainty of living with the memory of a father who has passed away ( Bochner, 1997 ; 2012 ; Patti, 2012 ).

Another tenet of autoethnography thus involves the possibility of learning about oneself and healing through writing and, in the process, alleviating anger, pain, and confusion, and coming to feel better. This is not to say that writing will serve as conclusive therapy or that with writing recovery is possible or always desirable ( Tamas, 2011 ; 2012 ). But for some people and for some topics, writing can permit an autoethnographer to work through negative feelings and/or uncertainty about a cultural experience or a particular cultural identity.

Writing Accessible Prose

In writing about bulimia, Lisa Tillmann-Healy (1996) notes that physicians and therapists tend to “write from a dispassionate third-person stance that preserves their position as ‘experts’” and, in so doing, “keep readers at a distance” (p. 80). Instead, Tillmann-Healy uses autoethnography to write from an “emotional first-person stance that highlights [her] multiple interpretive positions” with bulimia and invites readers to “come close” and experience the world of bulimia for themselves (p. 80).

Tillmann-Healy is one of many scholars who express concerns about traditional, academic writing. bell hooks (1991) also notes that “the only work deemed truly theoretical”—and, consequently, truly valuable in academic contexts—is often “highly abstract, jargonistic, difficult to read, and containing obscure references that may not be at all clear or explained” (p. 4). Eric Mykhalovskiy (1996) characterizes the traditional work of academics as “insular and isolated, as if cut off from the lives and experiences of people outside the academy” and only read “by a handful of other academics” (p. 137). Ron Pelias (2000) describes his frustrations on looking through a new issue of Communication Monographs —a traditional, heavily quantitative, esoteric communication journal. The articles, Pelias says, are

located in a paradigmatic logic you find less than convincing. You read the abstracts and shake your head, not because you are confused by the content, but because you cannot understand how the scientific model continues to thrive in the [Communication] discipline given the number of arguments that show why the heart needs to accompany the head. (p. 223)

Pelias then describes putting the unread issue on his bookshelf, “along side other unread Monographs ” (p. 223).

Another principle of autoethnography is to make meaning and knowledge available to more people than a select, academically trained few. I (CE) have described this previously as one of the “great rewards” of the method ( Ellis, 2004 , p. 35). I can count on one hand how many people ever wrote to me about my more orthodox social science work, but I have gotten hundreds of responses to my autoethnographic stories about loss and identity from those who have had similar experiences. I (TEA) also receive many responses from people who, after reading my stories about coming out, ask for advice about how to love their queer selves or queer others and from people who, after reading stories about my troubled familial relationships, want to learn more about disrupting harmful relational systems. For the autoethnographer, this means creating texts that do not contain “obscure references” ( hooks, 1991 , p. 4) or that leave our emotions and engagement with the heart ( Pelias, 2000 ), texts that do not “keep readers at a distance” ( Tillmann-Healy, 1996 , p. 80) or make others feel “insular and isolated” ( Mykhalovskiy, 1996 , p. 137).

Autoethnographers accomplish increased accessibility through using innovative techniques to represent experience, rather than following traditional academic writing forms ( Ronai, 1995 ) or relying solely on prose ( Adams, 2008 ; Lorde, 1984 ). They welcome and value nontextual, performative instances of research ( Leavy, 2009 ; Pelias, 2011 b ; Pineau, 2000 ; Spry, 2011 ), as well as innovative representational forms, such as poetry ( Boylorn, 2006 ; 2008 ), art ( Minge, 2007 ), and music ( Bartlett & Ellis, 2009 ). Embracing innovative, dynamic, and nontraditional ways to do and represent research helps transcend emotionally sterile and intellectually inaccessible academic walls.

Given these principles, how should one begin to do and write autoethnography?

Autoethnography as a Process

In this section, we discuss how to start an autoethnography, appropriate questions to ask, and key principles to consider. In particular, we focus on four ways that an autoethnographic project might begin: (1) from epiphanies or personal struggles, (2) from common experiences, (3) from dilemmas or complications in doing traditional fieldwork, and/or (4) for the purpose of adding to existing research.

Sometimes, the start of an autoethnographic project may be informal and personal, such as my (TEA) personal narrative about telling my father that I was gay ( Adams, 2006 ). A personal struggle might extend into a more formal project about a community of others who share this struggle, as happened when I wrote about coming out of the closet ( Adams, 2011 ). At other times, an autoethnographer might include herself as a participant in writing about another community, as I (CE) did with my collaborative interviews with Holocaust survivors ( Rawicki & Ellis, 2011 ) or write about her experiences of researching a community, as I did after my research in an isolated fishing community ( Ellis, 1995 b ).

Some autoethnographies begin with an epiphany ( Denzin, 1989 )—an event after which life never seems quite the same; an event that often generates pain, confusion, anger, and/or uncertainty, or that has made a person feel immensely vulnerable; an event, often a turning point, that changes the perceived and often desired trajectory of life. Some examples include the death of a sibling ( Ellis, 1993 ), the disclosure of sexuality ( Adams, 2011 ) or religion ( Myers, 2012 b ), or, after numerous years of schooling, failing to find a stable academic job ( Herrmann, 2012 ). In these accounts, writers begin by describing and analyzing their personal experiences with the epiphany, focusing in particular on revealing embedded cultural politics and telling what the experience means for themselves and others.

Both of us have written numerous accounts of personal struggles ( Ellis, 1993 ; 1995 a ; 1998 a ; 2009 b ; Adams, 2006 ; 2011 ). We often begin autoethnographic research with personal experiences riddled with pain, confusion, anger, and/or uncertainty; experiences that just don’t make much sense and that seem to significantly alter our perceived trajectory about how life should work; experiences that we think about often and desperately want to understand and cope with; and experiences that illustrate interpersonal and social problems that need to be addressed.

For instance, I (TEA) structured my book— Narrating the Closet: An Autoethnography of Same-Sex Attraction ( Adams, 2011 )—around experiences that troubled me and that I knew I had to cope with in order to live the life I wanted to live. One epiphany for me was realizing that my intimate attraction toward other people could be classified as “gay.” Before this realization, throughout much of my youth, I tried to envision whom I would marry, when this might happen, and how many children I might have. As a teenager, I made many efforts to date women and find my perfect partner—a “wife.” When I began to embrace my attraction to men and recognize that marriage to a woman would be a sham, I realized that such an act would harm not only me but also the woman I married. My life changed for the better the moment I recognized and embraced my same-sex attraction; this moment significantly altered how I thought I would live.

Recognizing and embracing my same-sex attraction also required learning what it means to be gay in the United States. One common story about same-sex attraction is that such attraction is tied to coming out of the closet—the moment when a person reveals same-sex attraction to self and others—and about how to reveal the attraction safely, with care and respect. In my investigation, however, I realized that few, if any, stories in the literature told how people entered into the closet. Were they born there? Was the closet constructed around them, discursively, throughout life? Once a person comes out of the so-called closet, does the person ever go back in?

Thus, I embarked on an investigation of how I entered the closet. I started reflecting on my early experiences of same-sex attraction and noted contradictory moments when I felt some desire for men but others pushed me toward women. I recalled times when I looked at images of men in magazines and catalogs—shirtless images of men with bulging muscles and genitalia—but didn’t know what to say about my attraction. Throughout my youth, I learned that mentioning this attraction would bring on ridicule and possible abandonment from friends and family. I started writing through these experiences, spinning out their possible meanings, looking back and reflecting on how my experiences pre–coming out might resonate with others.

In addition, I also interviewed self-identified gay men about their coming out stories, read memoirs of gay men, and analyzed mass-mediated scripts that represented gay male coming out experiences.

During the research process, and after publication of my book on this topic, I came to realize further that my experiences seemed to be applicable to many people who possessed not only same-sex attraction but also a variety of other socially marginal identities; for example, coming out as atheist ( Myers, 2012 b ) or as having a particular medical condition ( Defenbaugh, 2011 ). I started with my experience in order to not only highlight cultural processes, but also to speak to others. My doing of autoethnography meant starting with a life-changing experience—an epiphany—as well as moments characterized by conflicting and painful emotions..

Some autoethnographies begin with cultural experiences that seem to perpetually happen or with common occurrences of troubling social behaviors. These experiences might include moments of racism and prejudice in everyday interaction ( Boylorn, 2011 ; Marvasti, 2006 ), mundane and troubling ascriptions of heterosexuality ( Foster, 2008 ), repetitive feelings of dissonance around the possession of and inability to call attention to a minor bodily stigma ( Ellis, 1998 b ), or frequent frustrations with flippant responses to disclosures of a medical disorder ( Defenbaugh, 2011 ). If these experiences only happened once or twice, they might be jarring but not epiphanical; with time and repetition, however, these experiences often become frustrating and indicative of larger cultural problems, and, consequently, worthy of attention.

Some autoethnographies begin by adding personal insights to the fieldwork experience. Although early ethnographers (e.g., Malinowski, 1967 ) may not have used the term “autoethnography” to describe such accounts, their backstage, behind-the-scene stories that described their feelings about and ethical dilemmas in the doing of fieldwork (e.g., Barton, 2011 ; La Pastina, 2006 ; Stein, 2010 ) fit the category of autoethnography. Such accounts were—and still sometimes are—published as texts separate from the primary research texts ( Heath, 2012 ).

Likewise, I (CE) published several pieces ( Ellis, 1995 b ; 2007 ; 2009 b ) that discussed ethical dilemmas of writing about the fishing folk in my dissertation study ( Ellis, 1986 ). I raised questions about the way I had conducted the study and about some of the ways ethnography was being done and taught at this time. What do we owe those we study? How should we treat them? How much do they have a right to know about us, both our personal lives and what we are doing in their lives? Are there ways to write about people that honor and empower them?

Some autoethnographies begin when a researcher recognizes critical silences and crucial voids in the existing research on particular topics, and, as such, uses personal experience to fill in these silences. For instance, Herrmann (2012) provides the necessary but raw complications of pursuing an academic career; Ronai (1995 ; 1996 ) writes against the absence of personal experience in research on child abuse; Ellis (1995 a ) addresses key silences in aging, dying, and close, personal relationships; Jago (2002 ; 2011 ) illustrates the day-to-day feelings of living with depression; and Tamas (2011) critiques the heightened emphasis on recovery among survivors of domestic violence. In these accounts, the authors use their particular knowledge and experience to illustrate problems with and failures in extant research.

Although these may not be the only ways to begin an autoethnographic project, they are the most common. Also note that some of the ways to begin autoethnography may overlap. For instance, a researcher might have an epiphany while doing more traditional, fieldwork research, or an autoethnographer might be aware of an epiphany or common, unsettling experiences and note the absence of any discussion of these events in existing research.

Once a start to a project is determined, the basics of fieldwork apply: take detailed notes, collect relevant texts, read popular press and more traditional research articles about the topic, and consult with others, when possible.

Doing Autoethnographic Fieldwork

If autoethnography consists of autobiography and ethnography, then doing autoethnography means using practices of autobiography or memoir and ethnography. For instance, in ethnography, a researcher usually does fieldwork by finding a community to study, accessing this community, observing and interviewing members of this community, and then leaving to report observations. Sometimes the researcher has personal connections to this community (e.g., Barton, 2011 ), and sometimes the researcher does not (e.g., Stein, 2010 ). Sometimes the researcher will maintain contact with members of the community (e.g., Ellis, 1995 b ; Heath, 2012 ; Rupp & Taylor, 2011 ), and sometimes the researcher will not or cannot (e.g., Adelman & Frey, 1994 ).

But for the autoethnographer, fieldwork is a bit different (see Anderson & Glass-Coffin, 2013 . If a researcher writes about personal experience with a cultural identity (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and so on), then the field may be difficult to define and may always exist ( Barton, 2011 ). For instance, if I (TEA) write about coming out as a cultural experience, and if I, as a gay man, feel as though I come out to a variety of audiences almost every day, then where do I begin and end my analysis ( Adams, 2011 )? If a researcher writes about the lives of rural black women and how race can be lived in the United States, and if she identifies as a black woman who spends much of her time in rural contexts, then when does she turn off her observations of and reactions to her raced body ( Boylorn, 2006 ; 2011 )? If I (CE) write about the experiences of possessing a minor bodily stigma such as a speech impediment ( Ellis, 1998 b ) or others write about excess body hair ( Paxton, 2013   Santoro, 2012 ), are all of our experiences open to analysis? If an author has had an eating disorder since her teens, has she been in the field of eating disorders for that long ( Tillmann, 2009 )? What happens when the “self and the field become one,” when “ethnography and autobiography” become “symbiotic” ( Atkinson et al., 2003 , p. 63)?

For the autoethnographer, everyday experience can serve as relevant “data” and everyday life can become part of an ambiguous and ever-changing field. Kleinman (2003) articulates what this may mean methodologically:

Being a fieldworker in my everyday life means that I attend to the social patterns around me, analyze my own actions, and piece together the observations I make and the words I hear. Being a feminist fieldworker means that I attend to the subtleties of inequalities (in race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, etc.), including the ways in which I live out sexist programming. (p. 230)

But when everyday life has the potential for fieldwork, can I include the conversations I have with students, coworkers, and relatives about my sexuality, race, minor bodily stigma, or eating disorder in my research? Do I need IRB approval or to tell these people that I might write about them in some way at a later time ( Tullis, 2013) ? Must we identify as researchers always and everywhere?

The Ethics of Doing Autoethnography

Autoethnographers have connections to the communities they study, but the extent of the connections may differ depending on the project. Consequently, autoethnographers must be aware of some key ethical concerns.

Institutional review boards espouse “procedural ethics” ( Ellis, 2007 ) when researching others. These ethics often require obtaining informed consent from the people we study, respecting and protecting vulnerable populations, and guarding access to data. Given an autoethnographer’s use of personal experience, however, relations with the IRB may be tricky: If I am writing about my experience, am I the only person who gives consent? If not, from whom do I have to get consent? Am I part of a vulnerable population? How do I protect my data, whatever I consider it to be—should I destroy my photographs, diaries, and work to forget key memories? As such, some autoethnographic projects may require IRB approval (e.g., projects that include interviews with other people), but other autoethnographic projects—projects that rely on personal narratives ( Adams, 2006 ), are solely focused on the researchers ( Ellis, Kiesinger, & Tillmann-Healy, 1997 ), or involve deceased others ( Goodall, 2006 )—may or may not, depending on the interpretations of the local IRB (see Tullis, 2013) .

Although the IRB may sanction procedural ethics, most fieldwork dilemmas are not often under the purview of the IRB. These dilemmas are complicated and impossible to address with any kind of certainty. Responsible autoethnographers, however, acknowledge what I (CE) call “relational ethics” ( Ellis, 2007 )—ethics that apply to the people implicated in or represented by autoethnographic works and ethics that apply to studying others with whom we have familiar, friendly, and meaningful connections (e.g., parents, friends, students). For instance, if a daughter does not want to show her mother an essay she wrote about the two of them, then, as an ethical autoethnographer, the daughter should at least acknowledge and make a persuasive case about why she chose not to do so ( Ellis, 2001 ). Or, if an autoethnographer wants to use conversations overheard in a classroom, at a meeting, or on a bus, it might be necessary to mask identifying details of the people participating in the conversation, especially if the others have no idea that the researcher is writing about them ( Adams, 2011 ; Barton, 2011 ). Or, if autoethnographers write about their experiences with a community, they must consider if and how they allow the community to respond to their work, especially if members of the community cannot read or understand academic jargon, or if they speak a language different from that spoken by the researchers ( Adams, 2008 ; Tomaselli, 2003 ). Or, if a researcher does not believe a person or community should know of or needs to approve the autoethnographic work, then the autoethnographer should at least justify why access has not or cannot be granted (see Adams, 2006 ; Ellis, 2009 b ; Kiesinger, 2002 ). Regardless of course of action, responsible autoethnographers welcome such ethical considerations, and, at the least, should make sure to acknowledge and justify how they might proceed with a project, especially a project that implicates easily identifiable others.

Furthermore, even if an autoethnographer gets IRB approval to enter the field and study others, there are ethics about leaving the field, too. If I have come in to interview a person about an intimate and controversial topic, what gives me the right to sever that relationship? If I establish a relationship grounded on my need to research, and the other person comes to consider me a friend, am I able to ethically cut ties to this person? I might have approached the relationship in a utilitarian way, trying to figure out how it can best serve me and my project, but that doesn’t mean the other person will view the situation similarly. I might have received informed consent from another person, but that does not mean my ethical obligations are satisfied. Closeness to and intimacy with the people we study can offer insights that distanced and impersonal observation cannot, but closeness and intimacy can also facilitate meaningful, and possibly even intimate, connections that make it difficult to aggressively and determinately leave the field. As autoethnographers, we have responsibilities for the relationships we help cultivate, or else we will continue to function as patronizing and elitist members of society and keep the perception of the academic ivory tower intact. Furthermore, given the personal characteristic of autoethnography, the autoethnographer cannot leave the metaphorical field; we cannot easily run away from our identities and experiences, neighbors and colleagues, friends and family.

Autoethnography as Product

Autoethnography can take numerous, interrelated forms. The following are common forms, which also illustrate some of the aforementioned principles of autoethnography (e.g., the use and valuing of insider knowledge, the attempt to make research accessible). We present these as possible kinds, not as definitive representational forms that autoethnographies must resemble.

Personal narratives are the most common form of autoethnography. Here, the autoethnographer tells stories about her or his life ( Pelias, 2011 ; Pineau, 2000 ) with the hope that others will use these stories to better understand and cope with their lives ( Ellis, 2004 ; 2009 a ). In these first-person accounts, the inner workings of the self are investigated and presented in concrete action, thoughts, and feelings; developed and problematized relationally through dialogue; shown processually in vivid scenes and dramatic plot; and contextualized by history, social structure, and culture, which themselves often operate as unstated subtexts that are dialectically revealed through action, thought, and language ( Ellis, 1998 a , p. 50).

Personal narratives often are the most controversial form of autoethnography, especially if the stories do not include more traditional academic analysis or are not situated among relevant scholarly literature. These are the autoethnographies critics often charge as not being research or as being narcissistic and self-indulgent. Of course, as authors, we reject that assessment for successful autoethnographies, given that we have learned much from personal narratives—our own and others’—about social and cultural life. We suggest that it is narcissistic to think that we are somehow outside our studies and not subject to the same social forces and cultural conditioning as those we study or that somehow our own actions and relationships need no reflexive thought ( Ellis, 2004 , p 34).

Layered accounts ( Rambo, 2005 ; Ronai, 1992 ; 1995 ; 1996 ) are texts that assemble fragments of personal experience, memory, extant research, introspection ( Ellis, 1991 ), and other sources of information alongside each other in creative and juxtaposed ways. The primary purpose of layered accounts is to textually represent selves as lived—as fragmented, uncertain, and exposed to different kinds of information at different times. With layered accounts, autoethnographers work as bricoleurs who make textual mosaics of cultural experiences ( Denzin & Lincoln, 2005 b ).

Interactive interviews take place when two or more people come together to share their stories about a cultural identity, experience, or epiphany ( Ellis, Kiesinger, & Tillmann-Healy, 1997 ; Ellis & Berger, 2001 ). What people learn together in the interview process is valued along with the experiences each person brings to the interview (see also Schoen & Spangler, 2011 ). Furthermore, interactive interviews allow all participants in the interview process to meaningfully participate, and a distinction between interviewer and interviewee is, in the best interactive interviews, indistinguishable.

Reflexive, dyadic interviews also involve interviews with other people. However, in this form of autoethnography, personal experience is used to complement interview data; there is a focus on the self and the other—an emphasis on the thoughts, feelings, and subject positions of the researcher, as well as on interviewees’ stories ( Ellis, 2004 ; Marvasti, 2006 ). When using reflexive, dyadic interviews, autoethnographers might reflect deeply on the personal experience that brought them to the topic, what they learned about and from themselves and their emotional responses in the course of the interview, and/or how they used knowledge of the self or the topic at hand to understand what the interviewee was saying ( Ellis & Berger, 2001 , p. 854).

Reflexive, dyadic interviews are different from oral histories in that the researcher not only intentionally contributes to the interview but also notes personal feelings and struggles before, during, and after the interview.

Co-constructed narratives are tales jointly constructed by relational partners used to show multiple perspectives of an epiphany ( Ellis & Berger, 2001 , p. 859). When doing a co-constructed narrative, two or more people write about their experiences of the agreed upon epiphany, come together to talk about their separate stories and their reactions to the other accounts, and then assemble all of their stories into one collective story (see Alexander, Moreira, & Kumar, 2012 ; Bochner & Ellis, 1995 ; Cann & DeMeulenaere, 2012 ; Hill & Holyoak, 2011 ). Co-constructive narratives are helpful for illustrating how people “cope with the untidy ambiguities, ambivalences, and contradictions of relationship life” ( Ellis, 1998 a , p. 50).

Indigenous/native autoethnographies are “self-made portraits” composed by colonized or economically subordinated people ( Erikson, 2004 , p. 346). Focused on “transforming the conditions of knowledge production” ( Bainbridge, 2007 , p. 54), these autoethnographies address the workings and abuses of power in culture, research, and representation, and they often try to correct the inaccuracies and harms of extant research. Indigenous autoethnographies acknowledge the “immediate ecology” of a community, as well as the community’s spiritual practices, stories, rituals, “various forms of literacies in holistic ideographic systems,” and “legendary archetypes” ( Battiste, 2008 , p. 499), and they disrupt the belief that a (outside) researcher has the right and authority to study marginal others.

All of these forms are interrelated and may overlap. For instance, all use personal narratives, although there is a difference in how personal experiences are integrated into the text (i.e., by itself, or along with others’ experiences). A co-constructed narrative could simultaneously be an indigenous/native autoethnography, an interactive interview might include some characteristics of a co-constructed narrative, and an indigenous/native autoethnography might be structured like a layered account.

Added to these forms are other less common types. Reflexive auto/ethnographies resemble “confessional tales” ( Van Maanen, 1988 ) in that they describe the ways in which a researcher may be implicated by or changed during and after fieldwork (see Barton, 2011 ; La Pastina, 2006 ). C ommunity autoethnographies involve collaboration with community members to investigate a particular issue (e.g., whiteness; see Toyosaki, Pensoneau-Conway, Wendt, & Leathers, 2009 ). C ollaborative autoethnographies ( Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2012 ; Ngunjiri, Hernandez, & Chang, 2010 ) involve two or more researchers writing and sharing their personal stories and analysis about some issue. And collaborative witnessing ( Ellis & Rawicki, 2013 ; in press; Rawicki & Ellis, 2011 ) involves working with community members in a way that focuses compassionately on their lives, with the idea of developing long-term relationships between the researcher and respondent.

With all research, we story life and experience. We craft it into reports; change identifying characteristics such as time, place, and name; and, for more traditional reports, include an introduction, literature review, method, findings, discussion, and conclusion. Some autoethnographers follow this structure (e.g., Marvasti, 2006 ), but many autoethnographers story their experience as well as their literature reviews in novel, more evocative ways. This does not mean that experiences are fictionalized or that what is told never happened. Rather, the report is crafted in an engaging way to achieve narrative truth ( Bochner, 2002 )—the truth of experience—and to strive for accessibility so that the report is read by and useful for many different audiences.

Given this requirement, training in creative writing and storytelling is crucial for autoethnographers. Such training means taking classes in the craft of writing and/or performing; reading memoirs, autobiographies, and books about writing memoirs and autobiographies; working to create thick descriptions of cultural life; providing sufficient and engaging detail to bring readers into the text; and attending to characteristics of good storytelling, such as different uses of voice, plot, character development, and dramatic tension ( Caulley, 2008 ) and other techniques often associated with fiction ( Leavy, 2012 ). This way of representing social life is more representative of life as lived than is the traditional academic form of introduction–literature review–method-findings–analysis–conclusion, a form that reveals more about academic structure and rules than about social life, which is rarely, if ever, organized in such a way.

Evaluation and Critique

Given the focus on personal experience, autoethnographers receive criticisms that other methods do not. For instance, autoethnographers often are critiqued for using too much subjectivity and doing too little fieldwork, and, consequently, for being self-indulgent and narcissistic ( Delamont, 2009 ). Many autoethnographers might do little traditional fieldwork—which consists of going out to live with a (strange, different) group, participating in this group, and then leaving to write about this group. But some of their hesitation in this regard may be because they do not want to perpetuate and participate in past, unethical research practices, especially given that the topics they often choose to study are intimate and emotional. Nevertheless, autoethnographers often do interview others and try to do so ethically (e.g., Adams, 2011 ; Marvasti, 2006 ). Given the personal nature of a particular project, they may be in the field for much of their lives, much longer than traditional ethnographers (see Barton, 2011 ). For many autoethnographies, there is much fieldwork to do: analyzing diaries and journals, recalling memories, searching through archives, and talking with friends and family ( Goodall, 2006 ).

Suggesting that autoethnography is self-indulgent and narcissistic fails to recognize the ways in which selves are constituted and implicated by larger cultural systems or that there are connections between selves and these systems. The accusation assumes that researchers are self-contained entities isolated from all others, and, in using their own experiences, they are engaging in “intellectual masturbation” that somehow occurs absent from or outside of social life ( Gobo, 2008 ). Consequently, criticisms of too much subjectivity and too little fieldwork and of being self-indulgent and narcissistic are just too simple, especially since many of the critics who make these judgments do so because they do not approve of the approach under any circumstances; by their standards and criteria, a good autoethnography could never exist.

Traditional notions of generalizability, validity, and reliability also are inadequate for evaluating autoethnography. Ethnography is the study of a particular culture by a particular researcher who is part of what is studied. As such, generalizing the findings of ethnography or autoethnography across people/cultures or thinking in terms of replicability is dangerous and impossible. An autoethnographer might make some tentative comparisons about others, but should never suggest that others’ experiences are the same. Rather, an autoethnographer often turns to readers to assess generalizability as they determine if a story speaks to them about their experiences or about the lives of others they know. Readers provide theoretical validation by comparing their lives to ours, by thinking about how our lives are similar and different and the reasons for these differences ( Ellis, 2004 , p. 195). Validity in autoethnography means that our work seeks verisimilitude; it evokes in readers a feeling that the experience described is lifelike, believable, and possible. The validity of an autoethnography can be determined by whether it helps readers communicate with others different from themselves or offers a way to improve the lives of participants and researchers ( Ellis, 2004 , p. 124).

Along with these revised uses of generalizability, validity, and reliability, we suggest that writers and critics should examine autoethnographies based on the principles of the method that we have offered in this chapter. More specifically, we should expect autoethnographies to (1) use personal experience; (2) have a familiarity with existing research; (3) describe and/or critique cultural experience; (4) illuminate insider knowledge; (5) break silence and reclaim voice about a topic; (6) maneuver through pain, confusion, anger, and/or uncertainty; (7) and be accessible.

Other scholars offer additional criteria for evaluating autoethnographic texts. Laurel Richardson (2000) states that good autoethnography helps us understand cultural life, has “aesthetic merit” in that the text is “artistically shaped, satisfying, complex, and not boring,” and illustrates important facets of the “author’s subjectivity.” Autoethnographers, Richardson (2009) says, should be “concerned with (1) literary values, (2) narrative thrust, (3) reflexivity, and (4) the ethics of research and representation” (p. 346).

Art Bochner (2000) suggests that autoethnographies should contain “abundant” and “concrete” details, “not only facts but also feelings.” He asks for “structurally complex narratives” that illustrate a vulnerable, honest, and emotional author, and he expects a “tale of two selves”—a “believable journey” that shows how an author is “transformed by crisis” (pp. 270–271)

Ron Pelias (2011 a ) makes a distinction between “flat” and “engaging” autoethnographic texts. A flat text—a text that would be, for us, insufficient as autoethnography—is simple and abstract. It offers “easy and ready answers” in order to “prove itself right,” positions the author as “invisible” and “bodiless,” buries “passion” and “politics,” and “decorates the status quo”; it is a smug text that “proceeds unaware of its moral consequences.” Conversely, an engaging text—a text that would be, for us, an ideal autoethnographic text—provides homage to previous research and works to “further conversation”; it is a structurally complex and tentative text, one that offers “small,” “nervous,” and “cautious” solutions; it is a text that recognizes bodies as “historically, culturally, and individually saturated,” and a text riddled with passion, danger, politics, and uncertainty; it is a text that “speaks of and to the heart,” and tries to recognize the ways in which others are implicated in the work (pp. 666–667).

These authors’ approaches to evaluating autoethnography combine criteria from the social sciences and humanities. Consequently, none of these criteria is rooted solely in traditional social science or in humanistic standards; for autoethnography, evaluative flexibility is a must.

Autoethnography as an Orientation to Research and the Living of Life

We end this chapter with a discussion of the ways in which autoethnography describes an orientation to research and a way of living in addition to being a set of practices and products. First, I (CE) briefly describe my recent study, which demonstrates an autoethnographic orientation that works in a loving, caring, and relationally engaged way to help others to tell their stories and leads into a discussion of autoethnography as an orientation to the living of life.

Collaborative Witnessing

I (CE) somehow always knew I would work with Holocaust survivors. For decades, I had been interested in and written about loss and grief, usually my own—the loss of my partner from chronic illness ( Ellis, 1995 a ), my brother from an accident ( Ellis, 1993 ), and my mother from various illnesses of old age ( Ellis, 1996 ; 2001 ). I could imagine no richer place to learn more about long-term grief and coping than through talking with Holocaust survivors, people who had lived with trauma for more than sixty years.

In 2009, I began working with the University of South Florida Holocaust and Genocide Center and the Florida Holocaust Museum to interview forty-five survivors living in the Tampa Bay area ( http://guides.lib.usf.edu/content.php?pid=49131& sid=443218# ). I had found out from a friend in university administration that the Museum needed someone to interview survivors and I had jumped at the chance. Not content to do traditional interviews alone, early in this interviewing process I made arrangements to continue meeting with several survivors who showed interest in continuing to talk about their experiences. That was when I met survivor Jerry Rawicki.

I first conducted an initial four-hour interview with Jerry. I was impressed with how deeply he considered my questions and the emotionality and insight with which he told his stories. As of this writing, Jerry and I have been meeting, talking, and writing together for almost five years. We have recorded numerous collaborative sessions thus far and plan to record many more. We have published one short story together ( Rawicki & Ellis, 2011 ) and several articles ( Ellis & Rawicki, 2012 ; 2013 ; in press). The stories that we write involve months of daily back-and-forth editing, commenting, and decision making, as we figure out how best to convey his experience and gain insight into its meaning. This process involves building trusting and caring relationships that go beyond traditional research and that require an extensive—in my case, a lifelong—commitment to stay in relationship as long as it is possible to do so and welcomed by the participant.

I call this approach “collaborative witnessing.” Collaborative witnessing connects the roles of storyteller and listener so that both come to be narrators together, to know and tell with each other in mutual engagement of hearts and minds joined in long-term relationships and dialogic exchange. This approach encourages survivors to take greater ownership of the interpretation and meaning of their testimony and interviewers to have greater latitude for improvisation, questioning, and engagement with survivors and their stories. As a researcher, I play an active role in the stories that are told by survivors in terms of the questions I ask and the verbal, nonverbal, and emotional responses I give, and Jerry is an integral part of the analytic process. I am a character in Jerry’s telling of the story at this present moment—a person he speaks with and tells his story to—a feeling recipient and co-creator who allows myself to enter and experience Jerry’s story, and who speaks and listens from a place of my own losses. Thus, we tell our story—his and mine and ours together—but it is his story that allows us insight into the experiences of survivors and adds to our understanding of grief and loss. More significantly, Jerry’s well-being is the most important part of the project, as I constantly take into account his current life situation and the ways in which storytelling may affect his life, those to whom he is related, and survivors in general ( Ellis & Rawicki, 2012 ; 2013 ; in press).

For us, autoethnography is not simply a way of knowing about the world, but also a way of being in the world. An autoethnographic perspective requires living consciously, emotionally, and reflexively. It asks that we not only examine our lives but also examine how and why we think, act, and feel as we do. Autoethnography requires that we observe ourselves observing, that we interrogate what we think and believe, and challenge our own assumptions, asking over and over if we have penetrated as many layers of our own defenses, fears, and insecurities as our project requires. It asks that we rethink and revise our lives, making conscious decisions about who and how we want to be. In the process, it seeks a story that is hopeful, one in which authors ultimately write themselves as survivors of the story they are living.

For us, autoethnography is a relational practice. The approach asks that we not only examine our experiences but also view them in the context of our emerging and ever-changing relationships. Autoethnography asks that we enter the experience of the other as much as we think about the experience of the self. By the other, we mean participants in our ethnographic studies and characters in our personal stories, as well as those who read and hear our stories. Autoethnography requires that we locate ourselves through the eyes of others, that we take others’ roles as fully as we can, and consider why, given their histories, locations, and reflexive processes, they act on the world and respond the way they do. Autoethnography requires that we consider alternative points of view and interpretations, being conscious in our analyses of the role of structure, power, and inequality.

Autoethnography also requires us to think about, think with, and ultimately live with and in the stories we tell and hear from others (see Frank, 1995 ). Autoethnography asks that we and others strive to understand and cope with our struggles, so that we might be better equipped to “bear witness” to the pain and struggles of others. We might do this by offering our stories to others, including their stories with ours, and/or assisting others in writing their stories. In so doing, our goal is to make life better and offer companionship to those who feel troubled and whose experiences have been so terrible that they may feel alone.

Both of us feel called to do our part in trying to make life better, especially for those who feel unwarranted pain and anguish. For me (TEA), I feel called to tell my stories of the closet and to lessen the harm done by the limiting constructs of “normal” (hetero)sexuality. I do so with the intent to provide companionship, cultivate hope, and make queer people feel as though their lives matter. For me (CE), I feel called to tell my personal stories of loss and grief and to be a secondary witness for Holocaust survivors, to assist in their telling and meaning-making, to listen intimately and respond from my heart to stories that are too terrifying and painful to remember in isolation. Finally, I hope to contribute to stories that might be read, remembered, and retold by future generations hoping to stem the possibility of such tragedies, as the Holocaust, happening again.

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