For their data, autoethnographers draw on memory as well as data from their own life (diaries, notes, memorabilia, art, or objects). Such retrospective data might be disparaged in some quarters, but in autoethnography and other “narrative” strains of interpretivist research, such as narrative inquiry, life story, and collective memory work, using retrospective data is vital where the focus is on the meaning of the past event, within its particular social cultural and historical context (Snelgrove & Havitz, 2010, p. 345). The purpose of using the past is for increasing understanding, rather than for the discovery of underlying social facts.
My data therefore consisted of small sets of textual data relating to my son, including his poems and other writings, instead of interviews, surveys or
questionnaires. I also drew on my own writing – notes, journaling, poems. My autoethnographic account composed from this data along with my recollection and critical reflection then became a further iteration of that data. In this way, the product of autoethnographic research – the storied account itself – becomes data.
Simultaneously, as the autoethnographic process unfolds, data analysis begins. This “performance” of autoethnography is part of its unique way of doing qualitative data analysis.
Qualitative data analysis – an equivalent term for the positivist’s “coding” of data – has been described by Lather as the “black hole” of qualitative research (cited in St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014, p. 715). I will delve deeper into the nature of qualitative data analysis in Chapter 5, where I travel into the “black hole” of my data (Lather, 1991, p. 194), a black hole emblematic of both the process of mining for meaning,
and of the exploration of a kind of interstellar space in the hopes of finding meaning, or at least explain all the lacunae in my own understanding of my son’s life. For now, to explain “data analysis” as a part of my methodology, it is as if the shades of grey, in what I had always known to be black and white, became increasingly apparent. My chosen research method made me become tentative, especially about coming to any definitive “conclusions” from my data.
Autoethnography’s data is unconventional, since, as a method, from collection to analysis, it is essentially “not ‘data-driven’ (using induction) nor ‘hypothesis- driven’ (using deduction)” but instead, is “driven by astonishment, mystery, and breakdowns in one’s understanding (abduction)” (Brinkmann, 2014, pp. 720, 722). My autoethnography hinges on what Flyvbjerg (n.d.) has called “tension points” – deliberately chosen, emblematic, critical or “living moments” (Shotter & Katz, 1999) in my life experience and/or my son’s life. Brinkman (2014) calls them critical “instances”. They explain the non-linear and break-step structure of the
autoethnography (Chapter 4 and Chapter 5). “Critical instances” are for me autoethnography’s unconventional data – “any material we use to think about an astonishment or breakdown in one’s understanding … of life events, big or small”; there is “no line between life, research, theory, and methods because research is part of the life process” (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014, p. 717). In this way, in the
autoethnographic account, my life and my son’s life intersect, as my youth studies self with her outmoded “youth transitions” views of youth, comes face-to-face with 21st Century youth culture in the person of my son.
It is here in this state of breakdown that I worked. It is also where I found a stance for my “poet” self which I can best describe in sociologist Andrew Abbott’s (2007) words, as a lyrical approach to research writing. In a lyrical approach, the
researcher is focused on the image, rather than on “sequences of events” that in purely narrative accounts explain the phenomenon of interest. There are some parts of the autoethnography where poetry was the only way to write. Using the poetic image is to me to use a telescopic, condensed, compressed form of writing, handy to convey the rich meanings behind a situation, event, episode or instance in my or my son’s life, and a way to succinctly convey cultural, contextual knowledge into the small space of a thesis. For Abbott, images in this sense are “viewed in different ways, through different lenses, to evoke the sources of the writer’s emotional reaction” (Abbott, 2007, p. 76).
3.4.1 Using poetry as data to contribute to meaning-making
I have used my own poetry and my son’s within the autoethnographic account if doing so quickly and or concisely covers the narrative territory, or usefully
symbolises certain themes. Some of my data are in his own handwriting. For me, poetry is not an imaginary world concocted out of a romantic image, but arises from a deep place in my life – indeed, perhaps even the same place where “Truth” and “Authenticity’ and “Sincerity” might dwell were such abstracts allowed a presence in our postmodern world. A successful poem or autoethnography contains threads leading outwards, towards if not universal truths then at the very least towards contexts wider than the writer’s purview – with which the reader can relate. A well- written poem transcends its author’s subjectivity, or its topic’s narrow focus, when it conveys a universality that resonates with its reader and contributes to meaning- making. The methods for making sense of experience are always personal, as Dewey has famously said (cited in Denzin, 2010b, p. 87). A poem can convey precise and multi-faceted meanings. To adapt Richardson, “writing [poetry] is also a way of ‘knowing’ – a method of discovery and analysis” (1994, p. 516, emphasis added).
Instead of dealing with “data collection” and “data analysis” as separate and separated activities, in autoethnographic research, data collection, data analysis and interpretation can happen during the writing of the autoethnography. This is due to the heuristic quality of autoethnography as both process and product, as method and text (Ellis et al., 2011, p. 273; Humphreys, 2005, p. 841; Meerwald, 2013, p. 45; Reed- Danahay, 1997, p. 9; Spry, 2011, p. 501). Earlier seminal research by Richardson (1994) laid the foundation for this approach, emphasising that qualitative researchers do not ‘write up’ what has already been found or discovered. Rather, the writing itself is a form of analysis, or as subsequent researchers have stated, “performs” the
analysis. It is in writing that the data collection for an autoethnography primarily occurs. To me this explains a key difference between quantitative and qualitative methods regarding data: the former is focused on data and then the writing happens, while the latter is focused on writing in order to capture the data.