Over breakfast one day last week, my son gave me a rundown of the relative pros and cons of several cinemas in Derby. This developed into a discussion about what exactly you would need to compare – what data would be needed – to make a proper comparison. We made a list of things that would need investigation, including:
- The booking experience
- The location of the cinema
- Parking availability
- The appeal of the venue’s welcome area
- Collecting tickets
- The variety of snacks and drinks
- The cost of snacks and drinks
- Customer service offered by staff
And that was all before you made it to the screen to sit down and watch the film. There were so many variables to consider in the customer’s journey from booking through to leaving the cinema and potentially completing an online review that the process was revealed to be very complex.
We then discussed how you would go about doing the research to answer all these questions about the different cinemas. My son favoured visiting each of the cinemas to watch a film and making a record of what he thought of all the various things we had listed. He liked this idea because (a) he felt it was better than asking cinema-goers to complete a survey when they got home because they might forget the details and (b) it meant he would get to go to the cinema multiple times. He was also interested in how he felt throughout the experience and how he used his senses, for example, noticing the aroma of popcorn and that this increased his anticipation for the film. ‘Aha!’ I said, ‘you want to do some autoethnography.’
What is autoethnography?
I once heard a very engaging conference paper giving the results of some autoethnographic research about the Harry Potter Experience. As an inexperienced researcher at the time, I remember thinking that this couldn’t possibly be a real research method. Surely, making a note of what you thought of a tourist attraction and writing it up afterwards wasn’t real research. Or was it?
There is a value to recording and exploring individuals’ experiences, whether these are your own or those of others. This first-hand, lived experience can yield rich, deep insights into how people think and feel about their environment. Often, data about lived experience is gathered through interviews, focus groups, observations, ethnography and so on. But these methods are all about the researcher interacting with those having the experience, rather than the researcher having the experience themselves. Autoethnography uses the researcher’s personal experiences to explore and connect with the social and cultural world around them (Ellis, Adams and Bochner, 2011). It’s like a mixture of ethnography and autobiography. But it is not just observing and then writing about your own experiences – the researcher must also analyse those experiences, compare them with others’ experiences or the findings of other research, dig deeper into them to find meaning. This then helps to throw light on those experiences for those living through them and for those outside of the experience who may be yet to live through it or who may never live through it.
Advantages of autoethnography
One of the advantages of autoethnography is that the researcher can use all their senses – sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste – and this provides much more depth and interest than merely observing others having the same or similar experience. Autoethnographers tread a fine line between being a participant observer (which requires objectivity) and sentimentality (informed purely by emotions). Instead, they must observe themselves, their reactions, their feelings, their words and actions, as part of the situation they are in, in the context of the society and culture in which they are working. To do this, they must understand fully the society and culture, of course, and this may involve preliminary work to obtain that full understanding.
Autoethnography can also be used to inform other research or can be used as part of a larger research project, helping to triangulate data collection. I have seen autoethnography used alongside interviews, in which the researcher took part in an activity alongside a group of other people, who then gave interviews about their experience. The researcher analysed the data from the interviews to find common themes and issues, and also analysed her own experience as recorded in her autoethnographic notes. The difference of perspective can be illuminating.
Criticisms of autoethnography
The method has its critics. Some question the reliability, validity and generalisability of the data – similar criticisms are levelled at other qualitative research methods. There are ways to counter these criticisms – the researcher may not be seeking to generalise findings from the research, and ideas of reliability and validity, commonly associated with quantitative research, can be viewed in terms of transparency, credibility, dependability, confirmability and transferability. If the research is situated in the literature, the methods are clearly described, the voice is believable, the findings are likely to be similar at other times and in other similar places and the researcher has not allowed their own values and opinions to intrude on the analysis, then these are all marks of robust research of good quality. And these are all achievable with autoethnography. (For more information about how to ensure qualitative research is trustworthy, see Nowell et al., 2017).
Final thoughts
An autoethnographic study is clearly not the only way to explore the customer experiences of various cinemas and useful data about consumers’ views and experiences could be gained through interviews, surveys, observational research, focus groups and other ways. But my son feels that autoethnography is definitely the way to go – for him, it’s the most fun, the most personal, the most ‘real’ and the most relevant. For me, it’s the most expensive…
References
Ellis, C., Adams, T.E. and Bochner, A.P. (2011) Autoethnography: an overview, Forum: qualitative social research, 12(1), http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1101108.
Nowell, L.S. et al. (2017) Thematic analysis: striving to meet the trustworthiness criteria, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 16, 1-13.
Musings on methodology 