Autoethnography for reflexive research and practice

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Locating the researcher and practitioner:

Autoethnography as a method for

Reflexive Research and Practice

Locating the researcher and practitioner:

Autoethnography as a method for

Reflexive Research and Practice

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Peter McIlveen (2008) 2

Overview

• Advance autoethnography

• Awareness of oneself and reflexivity in research-practice • Contextualising oneself

• Narrative psychology and narrative research • Overview of autoethnographic method

• Potential for application of autoethnography – Reflexivity

– Critical Consciousness

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Awareness of Oneself: Our Shared Value

• Regardless of ontological and epistemological assumptions, the awareness of one’s self—the researcher/practitioner—is a core requirement for “good” science and practice.

• We all agree philosophically: the researcher/practitioner is somewhere, somehow, and at all times in the mix of the research-practice process. • We all differ pragmatically: extricate, diminish, accept, engage, or use

oneself.

– Positivist and Post-positivist approaches require “objectivity” and concomitant separation of the self from the focus of the research-practice process.

– Constructivist and Social Constructionist approaches accede “subjectivity” and the self is inherent to the research-practice process: co-construction toward shared meaning.

– Critical and Ideological approaches extend the constructivist

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Beyond Awareness of Oneself: Reflexivity

• Reflexivity is more than reflective awareness of oneself—of knowing I am “in it”.

• Reflexivity entails:

– Awareness and acceptance of my being “in it” – And

– Transformative engagement with “my being” in it. • Trans-paradigmatic performance therefore entails:

– Either: extricate, diminish, accept, engage, or use myself – And

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Contextualising Research & Practice

• The focus of research-practice does not exist in a vacuum; therefore research-practice cannot occur in a vacuum.

• In vocational psychology, the Systems Theory Framework (STF; Patton & McMahon, 2006) is a heuristic lens for

comprehensively conceptualising research and practice. • The STF captures:

– the individual client/participant and researcher/practitioner; – the professional engagement between the client and

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Contextualising Research & Practice

• The STF identifies content influences and process influences

that constitute, surround, and permeate research-practice in vocational psychology and career development (McMahon & Watson, 2007)

• Myriad influences of the STF contextualise—in space, time, and relation—the research-practice process.

• The researcher, the practitioner, and the processes of research and practice must be contextualised—subjectively or objectively —as a condition of genuine reflexivity.

• The STF process influence story carries the meaning of

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Narrative Psychology: Life

in

Stories and

as

Stories

Narrative Psychology: Life

in

Stories and

as

Stories

• Narrative psychologies comprehend the person and identity as a social construction formed within the dynamic interactions of

socially mediated and embodied talk, text, and image. • Predominant narrative psychology theorists:

– Gergen, Harre, Hermans, McAdams, Polkinghorne, Sarbin. • “In the end we become the autobiographical narratives by which

we ‘tell about’ out lives (Bruner, 2004, p. 694). • Narrative theory in vocational psychology:

– STF (Patton & McMahon, 2006)

– Theory of Career Construction (Savickas, 2005)

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Narrative Research: Story as Data and Method

• Narrative research may include (Hosmand, 2005):

– A descriptive report of a privately constructed self-account in its original narrated form;

– A recounting of a dialogically generated narrative or set of narratives in story form;

– A storied account of an experience constructed from interviews, reports, observations, and artefacts.

• Analysis of Narrative and Narrative Analysis (Smith & Sparkes, 2006) – Story as data entails analysis of narrative/s.

• Thinking about and of stories – Story as method is narrative analysis

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Autoethnography: Reflexive Narrative Research

• Autoethnography entails the researcher/practitioner performing a narrative analysis of his/her experience of a particular phenomenon.

– The researcher/practitioner him/herself and his/her story is the focus of enquiry

– Combination of autobiography and ethnography • Conceptualised as:

– “research, writing, story, and method that connect the

autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social and political” (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2006, p. 189).

– “a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context” (Reed-Danahay, 1997, p.9).

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Performing Autoethnography

• Methodically stories the nexus of person-experience-theory-practice.

• Evocative autoethnography (Ellis & Bochner, 2000):

– Emotive, radically subjective, poetic, free-form rhetoric; seeks empathic understanding from the reader.

• Analytic autoethnography (Anderson, 2006):

– Factual, objectified reporting of experience, similar to traditional, empirical field note reporting.

• Indicators of quality (cf. Morrow, 2005).

– Faithful and comprehensive rendering of experience; – Transforms the author through self-explication;

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Examples of Autoethnography

• Related to vocational psychology and career development:

– Exploration of the construction and personal experience of a career assessment and counselling procedure (McIlveen, 2007, in prep)

– Exploration of the experience of a workplace promotion— failure and success (Humphreys, 2005).

• Other examples:

– The experience of eating behaviour with respect to exploring the phenomenology of eating disorder (Smith, 2004);

– The influence of race, class, and gender in the process of a community psychology research project (Langhout, 2006). – The experience of infertility in context of feminist research

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Application: Learning Reflexivity

• Reflexivity as a discipline can be attained through training: – Cultural awareness training (Watson, 2006):

• Questions the background and influence of beliefs, values, and culture,and their role and expression (cf. McIlveen, 2007).

– Reflecting on My Career Influences (McMahon & Patton, 2006):

• Explores connectedness, reflection, meaning-making, learning, and agency (cf. McIlveen, in prep).

• Autoethnography as a narrative analysis of an experience of “being in it”, is a report on the nexus of

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Application: Critical Consciousness

• Emancipatory communitarian practice and critical consciousness (Blustein, 2006):

– Raising critical self-awareness in the oppressed, disenfranchised, disadvantaged.

– Redirecting vocational psychology and career development toward those “outside” the mainstream of society.

• Autoethnography has potential to raise the critical consciousness of researchers and practitioners by:

– Bringing their attention to their “being in it”; and

– Engaging in transformative writing for self and others in the field who are the unfamiliar, the unlikely, or the unexpressed. – Using autoethnography to generate critical consciousness of

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In Conclusion

“However far man may extend himself with his

knowledge, however objective he may appear to

himself – ultimately he reaps nothing but his own

biography”

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References

• Anderson, L. (2006). Analytic autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 373-395.

• Blustein, D. L. (2006). The psychology of working: A new perspective for career development, counseling, and public policy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

• Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative,

reflexivity: Researcher as subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 733-768). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

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References References

• Hoshmand, L. T. (2005). Narratology, cultural psychology, and counseling research. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52(2), 178-186.

• Humphreys, M. (2005). Getting personal: Reflexivity and autoethnographic vignettes. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(6), 840-860.

• McIlveen, P. (2007). The genuine scientist-practitioner in vocational psychology: An autoethnography. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 4(4), 295-311.

• McIlveen, P., & Patton, W. (2007). Dialogical self: Author and narrator of career life themes. International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 7(2), 67-80.

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• McIlveen, P., Beccaria, G., du Preez, J., & Patton, W. (in prep). Wearing Your Class on Your Sleeve: Autoethnography and Critical Consciousness in

Vocational Psychology.

• McMahon, M., & Patton, W. (2006). The systems theory framework: A conceptual and practical map for career counselling. In M. McMahon & W. Patton (Eds.), Career counselling: Constructivist approaches (pp. 94-109). London: Routledge.

• Morrow, S. L. (2005). Quality and trustworthiness in qualitative research in counseling psychology. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52(2), 250-260. • McMahon, M., & Watson, M. (2007). An analytic framework for career research

in the post-modern era. International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 7(3), 169-179.

• Nietzsche, F. (1994). Human, all too human. London: Penguin Group.

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• Reed-Danahay, D. E. (1997). Introduction. In D. E. Reed-Danahay (Ed.),

Auto/Ethnography. Rewriting the self and the social (pp. 1-17). Oxford: Berg. • Savickas, M. (2005). The theory and practice of career construction. In S. D.

Brown & R. W. Lent (Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (pp. 42-70). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

• Smith, B., & Sparkes, A. C. (2006). Narrative inquiry in psychology: Exploring the tensions within. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(3), 169-192.

• Watson, M. B. (2006). Career counselling theory, culture and constructivism. In M. McMahon & W. Patton (Eds.), Career counselling: Constructivist approaches

(pp. 45-56). London: Routlege.