Autoethnography

In social research

Autoethnography is a recognised qualitative social research method where the researcher documents a group by recording his or her own individual experience as it relates to social history. Often, but not always, the researcher is a member of the group in question rather than the traditional outsider ethnographer. As a variation of conventional ethnography it has its roots in anthropology but is now becoming more widely used in other contexts.

A good example of this is Israel Zangwill's novel Children of The Ghetto.

In film

An 'autoethnography' is also a variant of the standard documentary film. It differs in that its subject is the film maker himself. An autoethnography typically relates the life experiences and thoughts, views and beliefs of the film maker, and as such it is often considered to be rife with bias and image manipulation. Unlike other documentaries, autoethnographies do not usually make a claim of objectivity. Some people consider this style of documentary less popular than traditional documentaries.

In sociology, auto-ethnography is a form of participant observation research where non-traditional forms of research writing and performance are used in order to fully realize the ideal of reflexivity, which is the idea that the researcher needs to be aware of his or her role as a researcher. In embracing personal thoughts, feelings, stories, and observations as a way of understanding the social context they are studying, they are also shedding light on their total interaction with that setting by making their every emotion and thought visible to the reader. This is much the opposite of hypothesis driven, or positivist research, but is not very far from traditional ethnography as practiced by anthropologists and sociologists. A special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (Vol 35 No 4, August 2006) contains several articles on the diverse definitions and uses of auto-ethnography. An autoethnography can be analytical (see Leon Anderson), like a novel (see Carolyn Ellis), performative (see Norman K. Denzin) and many things in between. Symbolic Interactionists are particularly interested in this increasingly popular method, and examples of autoethnography can be found in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism as well as in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. It is not considered "mainstream" as a method by most positivist or traditional ethnographers.