Would you blame the Butterfly?:
Interplay of Consequences, Ambiguity and Responsibility
3. Methodology
In choosing to follow the format of autoethnography, it reminded me of a philosophy module I took in my first year. The first question on the first day of class was, “What is experience?” and I remember answering, “Big data.” My answer remains the same today. If my experience is my data, then why not analyse it?
One of the important qualities of being a researcher is maintaining a neutral stance throughout the process, always cautious of bias (UK Statistics Authority, 2022). On the idea of myself becoming the researcher and studying myself, it is reasonable to raise issues like bias (Poole, 2022), such as self-pity or over-justification as a defence mechanism. However, in this case, such concerns are acknowledged but not necessarily problematic. This is because there exists, within the researcher, a strong sense of detachment from the self. Although it’s not ideal to search symptoms online, the closest description to my state is depersonalisation, a psychological state in which an individual feels they’re outside of oneself, as “observers” of their own actions, thoughts and emotions (Hunter, Sierra & David, 2004). It’s not officially diagnosed, but I was able to confirm the similarity from revisiting my prior works, a consistent theme of apathy toward myself.
For preparation, this study took reference from the guide suggested by Cooper and Lilyea (2022). Although autoethnography relatively allows more freedom like storytelling, I still decided to stick to the conventional chapters: Introduction, Literature Review, Methodology, Findings, and Conclusion. This is due to my dissertation experience; I have managed to conduct a questionnaire on 158 participants on epistemological perception of social science. Having completed academically rigorous quantitative research and now working on this project, I found it mesmerising that two fundamentally different focuses—one academic, the other deeply personal—could be contained within the same structural format. This stage presents unconventional subject matter through a conventional academic structure. The remaining two stages are all unconventional in topics and structures. in a conventional style, and the other two stages are about delivering unconventional subjects in unconventional styles. The variety and flexibility of “research” gave me a space to experience and experiment—and I chose to take full advantage of that.
Taking all of the writings I’ve done at Warwick, the sentences that resonated with me were selected as data to discover characteristic patterns. The analysis followed the elements of writing style defined by the literary critic M.H.Abrams (1993): word choice, sentence structure, figurative language, rhythm and rhetorical patterns.