Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 2 | Page 12

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Walking a Tightrope: Ethical Tensions and Power Struggles in an Autoethnography of
Childhood Emotional Neglect
Angela Blanchard
(PhD Psychology, Keele University)

Illustration 1: The Tightrope Walker

Keywords: Childhood emotional neglect, sensitive research, autoethnography, voice, power
balance
Introduction
In most quantitative research and much traditional qualitative research, the researcherauthor is absent, invisible, assumed not to have any personal influence on the research.
However, this is not the case for some qualitative research methods, especially those
termed

‘personal

experience’

methods.

Autoethnography,

combining

elements

of

autobiography (me talking about my own story) and elements of ethnography (writing about
a group of people), is one such method. In this kind of research, the researcher-author is
self-consciously present, visible in both the research and the writing. I have therefore
adopted a first person tone for this piece.
It is because I am consciously owning my presence in my research that I am
concerned about issues of power in my research. In such personal experience research,
critical examination of both the research process, through reflexivity, and of the person of the