Autoethnography - Evaluating Autoethnography

Evaluating Autoethnography

The main critique of autoethnography — and qualitative research in general — comes from the traditional social science methods that emphasize the objectivity of social research. In this critique, qualitative researchers are often called “journalists, or soft scientists,” and their work, including autoethnography, is “termed unscientific, or only exploratory, or entirely personal and full of bias” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p. 4). As Denzin and Lincoln (1994) argue, many quantitative researchers regard the materials produced by “the softer, interpretive methods” as “unreliable, impressionistic, and not objective” (p. 5).

According to Maréchal (2010), the early criticism of autobiographical methods in anthropology was about “their validity on grounds of being unrepresentative and lacking objectivity” (p. 45). She also points out that evocative and emotional genres of autoethnography have been criticized by mostly analytic proponents for their “lack of ethnographic relevance as a result of being too personal.” As she writes, they are criticized “for being biased, navel-gazing, self-absorbed, or emotionally incontinent, and for hijacking traditional ethnographic purposes and scholarly contributions” (Maréchal, 2010, p. 45).