How Biography Influences Research: An Autoethnography
Author | Dr Jaime Waters |
Introduction
Encouraged by the crisis of confidence in the social sciences engendered by postmodernism, many scholars in the 1980s began to question, amongst other things, the nature of the ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ that they had supposedly ‘found’ (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011: 1). The impact of the researcher’s own background assumptions on the research process, which had hitherto been largely unacknowledged, was belatedly admitted, along with the possibility that so called ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard, 1984) were not only impossibly difficult to construct, but actually undesirable. It was in this context that the autoethnographic approach, which ‘recognises the innumerable ways personal experience influences the research process’ (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011: 1), began to emerge. Autoethnography can be loosely defined as ‘an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno). […] A researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography’ (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011: 1). It is through this combination of autobiography (retroactively and selectively writing about past experiences) and ethnography (studying the relational practices, common values and beliefs of a culture) (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011: 2) that the approach can contribute to the production of ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973: 10) of particular cultures and social phenomena.
When compared with other branches of the social sciences, criminology has arguably been rather reluctant to grapple with the idea that qualitative inquiry has autoethnographic dimensions, and that there are intimate links between the biographies of researchers themselves and the outcomes of the research projects that they engage in (Jewkes, 2013). For Jewkes (2011: 65), the ‘fixations of criminology’ identified by Joe Sim (2004), namely methodology, objectivity, restrained language and appropriate form, discourage any form of biographical or emotional intrusion by the researcher. As Wakeman (2014: 707) puts it, ‘the crux of the matter is this: for various reasons, and despite significant advances in recent years, many criminologists remain hesitant to include much detail of themselves, their life histories and their emotive processes in the presentation of their research findings’12* Recently however, there have been signs of a shift in this regard. For example, Phillips and Earle (2010) have candidly outlined the manner in which their own biographies, identity and memories framed their study of prisoner identities. More recently still, Wakeman, in the course of his argument for a ‘lyrical criminology’, suggests that an autoethnography which focuses upon the ‘researcher’s biographic and emotive self’ can potentially ‘significantly enhance criminology’s methodological repertoire’ (2014: 705).
In light of this nascent trend in criminological research, this article tells the story (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011: 3) of how aspects of my own personal biography impacted upon the research that I undertook for my PhD and beyond on ‘hidden’ older illegal drug users. Jewkes (2011) has discussed how academics often present their fieldwork and findings as if it has gone smoothly in a way that does a ‘disservice’ to those that follow them, for it obscures the often messy business of doing research. As the autoethnography presented here will show, the progress of this particular research project was far from serene. The next section will introduce the research project and the sampling and data collection techniques that were employed. Following this, I present the story of what happened during the fieldwork, paying particular attention to how my own biographical characteristics seemed to impact upon the sample building and data collection phases of the study. I will explore how, as time passed and some of my own biographical characteristics developed, a number of the difficulties involved in conducting the research were alleviated, at least to a degree. Ultimately, I was able to reflect on my earlier struggles in a new light and see more clearly how they helped to reveal something about the nature of those I was attempting to study (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011; Wakeman, 2014). As such, the article will go on to briefly consider some of the lessons I learned about the target population through this often testing and occasionally rather demoralising process. My experience suggests that developments in the biography of a researcher can, over time, alter the nature of their relationship with research subjects and contribute to a greater understanding of them, and that this process can occur over the duration of a single study.
The research project
The roots of the work that I have been engaged in, on and off, for well over a decade, lie in a PhD (Waters, 2009) that was started in the early years of the 21st century. The sense that inspired this work, derived from personal contacts and experience, was that there are a considerable number of older adults using illegal drugs quietly and under the radar. These people are not the ‘junkies’ of popular imagination, but what Cohen and Sas called ‘mainstream citizens’ (1994: 72) who combine their drug use with a range of other more ‘conventional’ pursuits such as work and family. At the outset of the project, I felt that such individuals’ historical experience with drugs would likely coincide with the flowering of various post-war ‘spectacular’ subcultures (Hebdige, 1979). These erstwhile hippies, punks and the like, whose drug use had begun in the 1960s and 1970s, might well have interesting tales to tell about how they had sustained their use over the long term, how they had integrated it into their lives, and how their use had changed as they grew older.
The plan was to locate and interview adults aged 40 and over who had used an illegal drug on at least one occasion in the preceding 12 months, and who were not in contact with either the criminal justice system or treatment agencies regarding their use. Such users are tremendously underrepresented in the vast majority of drugs research, where the focus tends to be upon those who are much younger, or those who are institutionalised in some way and whose use is seen as ‘problematic’. It was hoped to build a picture of these individuals’ drug use ‘careers’, explore fluctuating patterns of use over the life course and examine how drug use had interacted and continues to interact with various aspects of people’s lives such as family, health and employment. Fundamental to the research was the decision to not make contact with potential participants through criminal justice agencies or treatment centres but instead to find ‘hidden’ users. This was because such people are not only the most seldom researched, but are also most likely to have evolved ‘non-problematic’ drug-using careers alongside otherwise ‘conventional’ lifestyles. Ultimately, the aim was to discover something about the nature of hidden, ‘normal’ (Hammersley, 2005; 2011) drug use that has been sustained over the long term and combined with an otherwise conventional lifestyle, and in so doing address something of a blind spot in the drugs research field.
Snowball Sampling
Snowball sampling seemed to offer the best chance of building a sample of ‘hidden’ older users. For Noy (2008: 330), ‘a sampling procedure may be defined as snowball sampling when the researcher accesses informants through contact information that is provided by other informants. This process is, by necessity, repetitive: informants refer the researcher to other informants, who are contacted by the researcher and then refer her or him to yet other informants, and so on. Hence the evolving ‘snowball’ effect’. As Biernacki and Waldorf (1981: 141) argue, the method is well suited for a number of research purposes and is particularly applicable when the focus of study is on a sensitive issue, possibly concerning a relatively private matter, and thus requires the knowledge of insiders to locate people for study. Snowball sampling has been used with some success in the study of illegal drug users, particularly younger users (Kaplan, Korf & Sterk, 1987; Ditton & Hammersley, 1996; Griffiths et al., 1993; Avico et al., 1998; Hammersley, Khan & Ditton, 2002; Notley, 2005; Potter & Dann, 2005; Shewan & Dalgarno, 2005), although not unequivocally (Goode, 2000). It has also been used to build ‘community based’ samples of drug users (Cohen & Sas, 1994).13*
Thus, it was hoped to build a snowball from a starting point of a non-probability, convenience sample of individuals who fit the research criteria. Various initial contact points, chiefly friends and colleagues, were contacted in order to locate potential participants to start off the sampling process. In addition, information was sent out to as many people as possible to advertise the research. Colleagues also sent out ‘feelers’ to their own friends and contacts in the field of drugs research. Six to ten initial contact points from which to snowball were sought, on the assumption that this would provide a strong base to work from. Once individuals who met the criteria had been located and interviewed, the researcher asked these people if they knew of anyone else who might be willing to partake; the researcher then chased up these leads. Interviewees were not asked to ‘deliver’ subsequent participants due to a lack of resources (specifically, the lack of a ‘shop front’). In addition, due to the highly sensitive nature of the research topic, it was felt that it was more appropriate for the researcher to be the one in control of the evolving sampling chains, so that discretion could be assured. The use of ‘privileged access’ (Griffiths et al., 1993) or ‘indigenous’ (Power, 1994) interviewers was also considered, but this was not pursued due to a lack of suitable and...
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