Autoethnography and the standards of the American Educational Research Association

Another worthy piece that has just been published in the Educational Researcher (vol. 41, #6, pp 209-219), if Hughes, Pennington, and Makris'  "Translating autoethnography across the AERA standards:  Toward understanding autoethnographic scholarship as empirical research" 

The authors review the emergence of autoethnography as a form of research, which is a valuable literature review.  Their main task, however, is to conduct a review of autoethnography in regard to the standards of scholarship released by the American Educational Research Association (AERA).  They conclude with a rubric that they think would be workable to use in evaluation autoethnographic research publications to insure they meet AERA standards. 

I have to say that my first response to seeing this was to be worried...I haven't completed reading it, but I think it is definitely important for qualitative researchers to consider the material.  I will have more to say later. 

Grounded Theory Exposed

In the most recent issue of FQS, also known as Forum: Qualitative Social Research, there is a wonderful article by Edward Tolhurst titled "Grounded Theory Method: Sociology's Quest for Exclusive Items of Inquiry".  (volume 13, #3, Art 26, September 2012:  http://www.qualitative-research.net/) 

Tolhurst's piece speaks strongly to an issue that I wrote about earlier in this blog (but much less eloquently) re: what I referred to as the "ism's" of qualitative research. 

I think this article will become the "go to" reference for those of us who want to write our way out of the confines of the earlier generation of research strategies.