Forum: Qualitative Social Research (Jan 2004)
Auto-Interviewing, Auto-Ethnography and Critical Incident Methodology for Eliciting a Self-Conceptualised Worldview
Abstract
Knowing oneself has been an age-old humanistic concern for many western and oriental philosophers. The same concern is now shared by modern psychologists and anthropologists who seek to understand the "self" and others by elucidating their worldviews. This paper presents an auto-anthropological methodology which can effectively elucidate one's worldview. This introspective qualitative methodology uses integratively three methodological processes, namely auto-interviewing, auto-ethnography and critical incident technique to elicit baseline cultural data. The paper reports on how this methodology was used to elicit my current worldview. It first explains how emic data were educed and rendered in emotionally enhanced narratives, which were then deconstructed to elicit the major recurring themes in the etic interpretive content analysis. To illustrate this auto-anthropological methodology, two cultural life events have been used: a critical incident in Singapore and a consciousness raising process in Fiji. The first event revealed my own education ideology while the second made me realise my mitigated support for cultural diversity. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0401371
