Creative Research Methods 2e. Kara, Helen
but in different ways; for example, people in some online environments routinely use misleading avatars – symbols denoting the presence online of a human – and pseudonyms.)
•Quality of data: data gathered online may not be as rich, detailed or multidimensional as data gathered in other arenas. Even ‘big data’, which can appeal because it is so plentiful, may not be good quality.
•Text from web pages: researching online text can be challenging because it is subject to change or deletion. Also, it is necessary to decide what to do with links from the researched pages: should those links also be followed and researched? And what if there are further links from the resulting pages? Screenshots can be used to preserve text from web pages, but they don’t enable the use of embedded links. The Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/) can be helpful here, but it doesn’t archive everything, although it does enable you to archive web pages of interest.
•Dissension in online communities: this may be caused by a researcher’s intervention into such a community. Even if it is not, members of that community may see any dissension as caused by research activity. Either way, apologies and other damage-limitation exercises are necessary.
This is not presented as an exhaustive list, but as an illustration of the need to think carefully when considering the option of doing research online. It is not simply a case of transferring offline methods to an online environment (Markham 2013b: 435). Even with questionnaires, working online offers far more flexibility than hard copy. For example, there is no need for standard formulations such as, ‘If yes, please continue with the next question; if no, please go straight to question 8’. An online questionnaire can be designed to take respondents to the next question that is relevant for them, depending on their answer to the current question. Therefore, there can be a variety of routes through an online questionnaire, which makes online questionnaire design even more complex than the offline equivalent. With qualitative methods the complexity increases, such that any researcher will need to think very carefully through all the ramifications and implications of attempting to use these methods online. For some projects a multi-modal approach, combining online and offline methods, may be best (Ignacio 2012: 244).
Smartphones offer audio and video recording and editing tools and distribution facilities (Pool 2018: 13). As a result, creatively producing and sharing media has become an everyday practice for many people, which can be very useful for researchers. From these few examples alone it is evident that advances in technology enable researchers’ methods and practices to change and develop. Our methods help to produce our reality (Law 2004: 5), and our reality also helps to produce our methods.
Autoethnography is ‘an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience’ (Ellis et al 2011: 1). It was devised by US ethnographer Carolyn Ellis in the 1990s (Gergen and Gergen 2012: 44). ‘Auto’ comes from the Greek word for ‘self ’, ‘ethno’ from the Greek for ‘folk’ or ‘people’ and ‘graphy’ from the Greek for ‘write’. Autoethnography has huge potential for creativity, but this is not just a case of writing down your life experiences in a clever way. Autoethnographers tend to focus on specific and intense experiences such as crises and major life events, and to link them with their cultural location and identity (Ellis et al 2011: 4). Literary conventions of autoethnography link life experiences with wider concerns such as ethnicity, gender, social class and key reference points in time (Denzin 2014: 7–8), as well as with relationships, the past, cultural themes, social constructs and theory (Chang 2008: 132–7). Autoethnography ‘transcends mere narration of self to engage in cultural analysis and interpretation’ (Chang 2008: 43).
Like any research method, autoethnography needs to be linked with theory and practice or policy, although at times it can be hard to see how that could be achieved. This has led to claims that autoethnography is self-indulgent, irrelevant and unacademic (Denzin 2014: 69–70; Forber-Pratt 2015: 822). These claims are usually based on critiques that compare autoethnography with conventional ethnography, wider social science or arts disciplines and find it wanting (Ellis et al 2011: 10–11). Those who assess autoethnography in its own terms are more likely to assert that it can be a truly scholarly practice, and some have demonstrated its impact on practice and policy (Chang 2008: 52–4; Lenza 2011). However, this is all culturally specific to Euro-Western settings, and autoethnography can be even more challenging in parts of the global South (Zapata-Sepúlveda 2016b: 472).
Autoethnography has been used to focus on a diverse range of topics, such as: the emotional aspects of a teacher’s return to learning (Benozzo 2011), anorexia and psychosis (Stone 2009), cross-cultural performance (Fournillier 2010) and outward-bound activities (Tolich 2012). Autoethnography can be used by a single researcher or collaboratively (Dumitrica and Gaden 2009: 2). Also, it can be used as a stand-alone method or as part of a multi-modal study (Leavy 2009: 38). Writing is an art (Adams and Holman Jones 2018: 141), and autoethnographers often incorporate techniques such as poetry, photography and creative fiction to ‘produce aesthetic and evocative thick descriptions of personal and interpersonal experience’ (Ellis et al 2011: 5). The aim is to produce ‘accessible texts’ that ‘make personal experience meaningful and cultural experience engaging’ (Ellis et al 2011: 5) (for example, Box 2.14). For example, one classic autoethnographic textbook is written as a ‘methodological novel’ (Ellis 2004) and another is written as the story of a fictional workshop (Bochner and Ellis 2016).
Box 2.14: Autoethnography, memoir and travelogue by Cho
Grace Cho, a Korean immigrant living in the US, combined memoir and travelogue with autoethnography in Samgwangsa (the name of a temple in Busan, South Korea). She investigates the impact of displacement on herself and her family, focusing on concepts such as home, freedom, health, mobility and the American dream (Cho 2015: 59). Cho narrates the longing to return to Korea that she shared with her mother, and her attempts to return with her mother. Her poignant account questions what brings families together and what keeps them apart, what creates closeness and what creates distance.
Autoethnographic methods can also use technology (Box 2.15).
Box 2.15: Collaborative online autoethnography by Dumitrica and Gaden
Delia Dumitrica and Georgia Gaden, from the University of Calgary, Canada, spent six months collaborating on an autoethnographic project investigating ways in which gender is perceived and performed in Second Life (SL), a huge online virtual world that has tens of thousands of users at any one time. The researchers became interested in SL at an academic conference, joined SL at the same time and spent a month exploring as individuals before joining up to explore the virtual world together. Both researchers are female, but one chose a male avatar. They both experienced technical problems, which led to frustration and even despair at times, but they were able to overcome these sufficiently to complete their fieldwork. They gathered data in the form of field journals, which they reread closely and discussed at length. ‘The collaborative dimension furthered our critical self-reflexive process by allowing us to explore and compare each other’s understanding and performance of gender in the virtual world’ (Dumitrica and Gaden 2009: 8). This method enabled the researchers to take an analytical and critical approach to their research questions and to conclude that ‘How gender is “done” in SL resides not only at the intersection between our own gendered perspectives and the platform, but also in the technical skills we have’ (Dumitrica and Gaden 2009: 19).
Dumitrica and Gaden’s work demonstrates that, despite ‘auto’ meaning ‘self ’, autoethnography may also be collaborative. Indeed, collaborative autoethnography can overcome some of the methodological and ethical difficulties faced by solo researchers. For example, it can introduce more rigour through multiple perspectives that help to reduce bias and enrich analysis and interpretation (Lapadat 2017: 598).