Locating the researcher and practitioner:
Autoethnography as a method for
Reflexive Research and Practice
PETER McILVEEN
Overview
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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
• Personal application of evocative approach (McIlveen, 2007)
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Awareness of Oneself: Our Shared Value
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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 researchpractice 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
embrace of subjectivity and explicitly requires intervene using the
self.
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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”
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– Transformative engagement with “my being” in it.
• Trans-paradigmatic performance therefore entails:
– Either: extricate, diminish, accept, engage, or use myself
– And
– Transformation of my self through “my being in it”.
• How does one reflexively research-practice?
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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
practitioner or the participant and researcher;
– the supervision of research or practice; and
– research per se
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Copyright 2007 by McMahon & Watson
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
contextual systems of influences and, therefore, can become the
focus of narrative psychology and narrative research.
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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)
– Contextual Action Theory (Young, Valach, & Collin, 2002)
– Dialogical self (McIlveen & Patton, 2007).
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Narrative Research: Story as Data and Method
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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
• Thinking through and with stories
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Autoethnography: Reflexive Narrative Research
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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).
Transgresses and subverts the subjective-objective duality of the
researcher-practitioner.
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Performing Autoethnography
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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;
– Informs the reader of the unfamiliar, the unlikely, or the
unexpressed.
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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
into infertility (Kirkman, 1999).
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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 person-experiencetheory-practice and is, therefore, an ideal vehicle for reflexivity in
research/practice.
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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
social class (McIlveen, Beccaria, du Preez, Patton, in prep).
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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”
(Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878/1994, p. 238)
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References
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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.
Hesse-Biber, S. N., & Leavy, P. (2006). The practice of qualitative research.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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References
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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.
McIlveen, P. (in prep). Reflexive scientific practice: Self-administration of My
Career Chapter.
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References
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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.
Patton, W., & McMahon, M. (2006). Career development and systems theory:
Connecting theory and practice. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
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References
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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.
Young, R. A., Valach, L., & Collin, A. (2002). A contextualist explanation of
career. In D. A. Brown (Ed.), Career choice and development (4th ed., pp. 206252). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
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