Example Of Autoethnography

When writing up reports and projects, one would normally use the method of finding sources and resource from other places and people; but the method of autoethnography is to use your own thoughts and experiences as a form of resource. Writer Joan Didion states simply that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” and stories allow us to be more reflective and enable us to live better. Autoethnography is a method of research that uses the personal experiences of the researcher in order to critique; it connects the story to the researcher on a deeper level acknowledging the relationship of the researcher with others. Autoethnographic research is a form of qualitative data, the method seeks to describe and methodically examine personal experience in order to understand cultural experience. It is a combination of autobiography and ethnography; self-writing on cultural and social experiences. Although the definition is difficult to pin-point, it is not easy to reach a unanimous term; a famous autoethnographer, Carolyn Ellis defines it as “research, writing, story, and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political” but in the 1970’s autoethnography was
Two examples of autoethnography are: Personal narratives are stories about authors who view themselves as the phenomenon and write evocative narratives specifically focused on their academic, research, and personal lives. Narrative ethnographies refer to texts presented in the form of stories that incorporate the ethnographer's experiences into the ethnographic descriptions and analysis of others. Here the emphasis is on the ethnographic study of others which is accomplished by encounters with the writer and those he is