Autoethnography and Theory Testing.

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Bibliographic Details
Title:	Autoethnography and Theory Testing.
Authors:	Livesey, Peter Vincent¹ peter.livesey@uts.edu.au, Runsen, Goren¹ karl.runeson@uts.edu.au
Source:	Construction Economics & Building. 2018, Vol. 18 Issue 3, p40-54. 15p.
Subjects:	Autoethnography, Common method variance, Willingness to pay
Abstract:	One of the problems in construction management research is how to harvest the living experience of people working in the profession. Surveys and interviews are the common methods, but they have obvious problems, not only with defining terminology and targeting the appropriate populations but also with the knowledge of the respondents and their willingness to reflect. Different forms of ethnography, in their conventional forms overcome most of these problems, but create a new set of problems, particularly in terms of our ability to generalise and verify the results. The purpose of this paper is firstly to advocate that one such approach: autoethnography, which allows researchers to introduce their own lived experience into their research and secondly, to show how this approach can be structured to overcome common - and justified - objections to autoethnography. To do this we use a study involving a recent research project investigating the importance of emotional intelligence (EI) in the management of large projects. The paper shows that autoethnography can be applied analytically and rigorously so that it can be used for theory testing and theory building. In doing so, it opens up an untapped source of data to researchers - their own living experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Database:	Engineering Source

Description
Abstract:	One of the problems in construction management research is how to harvest the living experience of people working in the profession. Surveys and interviews are the common methods, but they have obvious problems, not only with defining terminology and targeting the appropriate populations but also with the knowledge of the respondents and their willingness to reflect. Different forms of ethnography, in their conventional forms overcome most of these problems, but create a new set of problems, particularly in terms of our ability to generalise and verify the results. The purpose of this paper is firstly to advocate that one such approach: autoethnography, which allows researchers to introduce their own lived experience into their research and secondly, to show how this approach can be structured to overcome common - and justified - objections to autoethnography. To do this we use a study involving a recent research project investigating the importance of emotional intelligence (EI) in the management of large projects. The paper shows that autoethnography can be applied analytically and rigorously so that it can be used for theory testing and theory building. In doing so, it opens up an untapped source of data to researchers - their own living experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
ISSN:	22049029
DOI:	10.5130/AJCEB.v18i3.6139