Abstract
A distinctive feature of New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development is the cultivation of methodological approaches that expand the dimensions of knowing relevant to individual, group, and organizational learning. Important among these contributions has been conscious efforts to recognize and remedy the intrinsic limitations of what Marton (1978) described as “first order” or “from‐the‐outside” research that describes most conventional research on learning. The challenge for researchers in integrating “second order” or “from‐the‐inside” perspective into their work is to know at what moments considerations of self contribute to broader endeavor, and at what moments journeys of self‐exploration are solipsistic self‐inquiries.
Nowhere is this challenge more evident than in auto‐ethnographic and other first‐person reflective inquiries. On the one hand, this might be surprising because these endeavors overcome the inherent contradiction of “first order” research to understand phenomena as experienced by subjects even when the only basis for this is through the experiences of the researcher. By contrast, auto‐ethnic, and other self‐reflective inquiries offer a pure form of “from‐the‐inside” perspective in that it allows the researcher to interpret reality as the researcher experiences it. These first‐person accounts offer an important correction to the essentialist aspects of much social science research, which search for universal qualities of the human experience independent of context.
The pioneering efforts in integrating methods of self‐inquiry carry their own challenges. The concern is that as we seek to understand how our own identities shape our way of knowing we become not only the object of observation, but the subject, as well. Whereas for researchers solipsism may be construed in narrow epistemological terms, i.e. only the self can exist, most take a more pragmatic approach that recognizes there is only one world that is experienced in different ways by human beings (Marton, 1988). This pragmatic approach notwithstanding, there is a concern that absent an explicit effort to speak to a broader community, self‐reflective inquiries might justify the pejorative connotations of solipsism as a refuge the middle class who could afford extreme preoccupation of egoistic self‐absorption.
When does self‐reflective and auto‐ethnographic inquiry transcend the lay understanding of solipsism? To some extent, a case could be made that the only measure is how the work is interpreted by others. In that works of self‐inquiry speak to others, then one could argue that such transcendence has occurred. While this approach might be satisfactory in open publication format, there are clear challenges in using this as a benchmark in a peer‐review process. Another approach would be to embrace the challenge that Stige, Malterud, and Midtgarden (2009) pose in their recent contribution in Qualitative Health Research. In this work they suggest an evaluation agenda that calls for producing rich substantive accounts based on engagement processing, interpretation and self‐critique that also meet the challenge of being, useful, relevant, and ethical.