« Autoethnographic stories are artistic and analytic demonstrations of how we come to know, name, and interpret personal and cultural experience. With autoethnography, we use our experience to engage ourselves, others, culture(s), politics, and social research. In doing autoethnography, we confront “the tension between insider and outsider perspectives, between social practice and social constraint.” Hence, autoethnography is a research method that:

- Uses a researcher’s personal experience to describe and critique cultural beliefs, practices, and experiences.

- Acknowledges and values a researcher’s relationships with others. Uses deep and careful self-reflection—typically referred to as “reflexivity” to name and interrogate the intersections between self and society, the particular and the general, the personal and the political.

- Shows “people in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of their struggles.”

- Balances intellectual and methodological rigor, emotion, and creativity.

-Strives for social justice and to make life better. »

Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, Carolyn Ellis, Autoethnography. Understanding qualitative research, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2015, pp.1-2.

« Autoethnography is a reflexive means by which the researcher–practitioner consciously embeds himself or herself in theory and practice, and by way of intimate autobiographic account, explicates a phenomenon under investigation or intervention. Autoethnography is presented as a vehicle to operationalise social constructionist research and practice that aims to establish trustworthiness and authenticity. »

Peter Mcillveen, « Autoethnograpy as a method for reflexive research and practice in vocational psychology » Australian Journal of Career Development, Vol 17, No 2, Juillet 1, 2008, p.13

« Autoethnography broadly operationalises three different conceptions of self: self as representative subject (as a member of community or group) self as autonomous subject (as the itself the object of inquiry, depicted in « tales of the self ») and other as autonomous self (the other as both object and subject of inquiry; speaking with their own voice). »

Albert J. Mills, Gabrielle Durepos, Elden Wiebe, Encyclopedia of Case Study Research, Londre : Sage, 2010, p.43