Autoethnography and severe perineal trauma—an unexpected journey from disembodiment to embodiment

BACKGROUND: There is a lack of research reporting on the physical and emotional experiences of women who sustain severe perineal trauma (third and fourth degree tears). When the researcher identifies with the group being researched, autoethnography can allow an insight into the experiences of the marginalised group through the telling of a personal story. The aim of this paper is to share the journey travelled by an autoethnographer who on examining the issue of severe perineal trauma came to understand the challenges and rewards she experienced through this reflective and analytic process. METHODS: A transformative emancipatory approach guided the design, data collection and analysis of findings from this study. For this paper, a multivocal narrative approach was taken in presenting the findings, which incorporated the words of both the autoethnographer and the twelve women who were interviewed as a component of the study, all of whom had sustained severe perineal trauma. RESULTS: As an autoethnographer, being a member of the group being researched, can be confronting as the necessary reflection upon one’s personal journey may lead to feelings of vulnerability, sadness, and emotional pain. The transformation from disembodied to embodied self, resulted in a physical and emotional breakdown that occurred for this autoethnographer. CONCLUSION: Autoethnographers may experience unexpected emotional and physical challenges as they reflect upon their experiences and research the experiences of others. When incorporating a transformative emancipatory framework, the hardships are somewhat balanced by the rewards of witnessing ‘self-transformation’ as a result of the research

Autoethnography

Autoethnography is a branch of ethnography that enables a practitioner to also be a researcher and vice versa. While ethnography is concerned with the descriptive documentation of the sociocultural relationships within a given research environment, the researcher remains an observer of the situation under study. Autoethnography enables the researcher to maximize her (his) personal involvement with the action. The researcher’s lived experience is an integral part of the learning; her engagement with the context, stakeholders, and processes, along with her reflections on that engagement, is paramount to the autoethnographic methodology. Autoethnography is considered to have two clear branches: emotive and analytic. Emotive autoethnography seeks to bring the readers to an empathetic understanding of the writer’s experience. Analytic autoethnography allows for the researcher’s engagement in the situation to be included in the analysis, adding to the theoretical understanding of the social processes under study by making more interpretive use of available data. Analytic autoethnography is, therefore, particularly useful for the design phases of community-based action research in areas such as community development, health promotion, and social work. This chapter will provide an overview of methods involved in autoethnography, with focus on analytic autoethnography as an “action-oriented” method for social science researchers. Advantages and limitations will be discussed and illustrated with lived experience from the authors’ study of complex community interventions

Innovation and Reduction in Contemporary Qualitative Methods: The Case of Conceptual Coupling, Activity-Type Pairs and Auto-Ethnography

During the course of this paper we mobilise an ideal typical framework that identifies three waves of reduction within contemporary qualitative inquiry as they relate to key aspects of the sociological tradition. The paper begins with a consideration of one of sociology's key questions; namely how is social organisation possible? The paper aims to demonstrate how this question moves from view as increased specialisation and differentiation in qualitative methodology within sociology and related disciplines results in a fragmentation and decontextualisation of social practices from social orders. Indeed, the extent to which qualitative methods have been detached from sociological principles is considered in relation to the emergence of a reductionist tendency. The paper argues that the first wave is typified by conceptual couplings such as 'discourse and the subject', 'narrative and experience', 'space and place' and the second by 'activity type couplings' such as 'walking and talking' and 'making and telling' and then, finally, the third wave exemplified through auto-ethnography and digital lifelogging. We argue each of these three waves represent a series of steps in qualitative reduction that, whilst representing innovation, need to reconnect with questions of action, order and social organisation as a complex whole as opposed to disparate parts