Auto-Interviewing, Auto-Ethnography and Critical Incident Methodology for Eliciting a Self-Conceptualised Worldview

  • Béatrice Boufoy-Bastick University of Guyana
Keywords: auto-interviewing, auto-ethnography, critical incident methodology, 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

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Author Biography

Béatrice Boufoy-Bastick, University of Guyana
Béatrice BOUFOY-BASTICK is a linguist who holds a Master's Degree from the Sorbonne in France, a postgraduate from the University of London and a doctorate from the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. Her main research interests are in the interaction of culture and language education, in second language teaching methodology and in anthropological research methods. She has a wide cross-cultural experience in teaching and researching in Europe, Australia, Asia, the South Pacific and the Caribbean. She currently lectures at the University of Guyana.
Published
2004-01-31
How to Cite
Boufoy-Bastick, B. (2004). Auto-Interviewing, Auto-Ethnography and Critical Incident Methodology for Eliciting a Self-Conceptualised Worldview. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-5.1.651