I’m standing very still. My toes are curled over a stone ledge, a gaping dark chasm below me. It is decision time. But which way to go?
I had been contemplating this decision for some months. Walk purposefully off into the darkness or carefully step backwards and take a more recognised and safer route to the next point in my research journey. Having a science degree, my research strategies should have been firmly entrenched in empirical data and scientific methods. But, for some time now I had been lured in a different direction. While reading about methodology I had come across autoethnography: a research method that focused on using self-reflection as the primary source of data, and the outcomes of which were shared in a self-narrative (Chang, 2008).
But I had concerns and even worries.
My reading about autoethnography brought me to articles reporting the struggles of researchers to get published and the negative feedback and even possible ridicule from reviewers: the ‘tuts’ of disgust and the suppressed giggles when mentioning the approach; the constant need to justify and produce additional evidence before academics would accept it as a valid research strategy (Holt, 2003). No doubt there are people out there who celebrate and welcome the approach, but as a new researcher these voices, mainly Ellis, Bochner and Chang (see for example Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Chang, 2008) appeared as solo evangelists of the method. Maybe there was a hidden society out there? A group of people who celebrated and supported the approach but did so from dark corridors and conferences in secret locations.
