PRE QUESTIONS:
This methods section will demonstrate to the reader how I will be presenting new information into the medical field. It will identify what an autoethnography is and why I choose to write an autoethnography. This method will help me to analyze my personal experiences as a mobile caregiver/direct caregiver and demonstrate my experiences more clearly to my audience. This is prepared to be read by nursing journals and medical peers. I will taylor this methods section to my audience by basing it off of other peer reviewed autoethnographic journal articles that have already been published.
POST QUESTIONS:
This Methods section demonstrates the importance of Autoethnography to the medical field. It shows how this method can be a valid source of information for nursing journals and nursing professionals. It also demonstrates how other plubished authors have used this methodology.
Running Head: METHODS
Methods
Andrea Chandler
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Methods:
An Autoethnography examines an author’s personal thoughts and feelings. “Autoethnographic writing values ordinary language over scientific language, and the use of metaphor, satire and irony to engage more fully with descriptions of life” (Foley 2002 as quoted by Foster, McAllister, and O’Brien 2006). With the use of this methodology, the reader has insight into the author’s personal experience. Jane Wright says of autoethnography in 2008, “I suggest that by researching ourselves we can learn how our beliefs, attitudes and values about health, illness and care have been constructed. We can perhaps imagine how others have developed theirs and appreciate that others perspectives may be as valid as our own.”
A caregiver is in constant communication with their patient. The patient shares their problems, experiences, and personal feelings with the caregiver. The nurse then uses this information in the care that they give to their patients. Whether to be comforting, clarifying in information, or to assist in judgment making, the caregiver must be able to understand their client and listen to the “stories” told to them. Foster, McAllister, and O’Brien state of this relationship in Mental Health Nursing, “The sharing of the client’s story is a privilege bestowed on the nurse, and brings with it particular responsibilities. In this context, psychiatric mental health nursing requires the ability to ‘be with’ others whose emotional state is often distressed. It also requires the use of personal qualities/ abilities such as empathy, warmth, respect, patience, and trustworthiness. This form of nursing may be seen to resonate well with qualitative inquiry.” They then go on to conclude, “The role of the researcher in qualitative inquiry may be viewed as synchronous to that of the psychiatric mental health nurse. Both are attempting to use their selves – their thoughts, feelings, understandings, and experiences, to work in partnership with others so that further understandings and meanings of the lived experience may be understood and the lives of the ‘others’ in particular, enriched.” All nursing involves the use of these skills that are “synchronous” to the role of the researcher in qualitative inquiry. By sharing a caregiver’s insight into particular situations, this “story telling” can assist in making novice nurses into expert ones.
This methodology allows for the documentation of personal experience and to show the growth and ever changing understanding of the author. Working in an Assisted Living Facility as a mobile caregiver/direct caregiver can both reflect and challenge what is learned in a Bachelor of Science in Nursing Program. By using this methodology one can show their personal experiences and what they view needs to be changed/ revised in a more detailed manner.
References
Foster, K., McAllister, M., & O’Brien, L. (2006). Extending the boundaries: autoethnography as an emergent method in mental health nursing research. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 15(1), 44-53.
Wright, J. (2008). Searching one’s self: the autoethnography of a nurse teacher. Journal of Research in Nursing, 13(4).
