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Doing Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy

Student resources, using personal experience as a basis for research: autoethnography.

Autoethnography is quite different from other genres of research, in being based in first-person writing and reflection on personal experience. Carrying out an autoethnographic study not only has the potential to contribute to the research literature – it can also be highly personally meaningful, and provide a distinctive vantage point from which it is possible to see other types of research in a fresh way.

To appreciate what is involved in autoethnographic research it is necessary to try it out on yourself. This set of reflexive writing tasks provide suggestions about how to make a start with this kind of process. It is not necessary to complete all the writing exercises, or to begin with the first one – better to scan through the options and engage with the ones that strike a chord.

Articles on ethical issues in autoethnographic research are available in the Chapter 5 section of these online resources.

Papers on engaging in autoethnographic inquiry

These papers on psychotherapeutic topics illustrate different styles of autoethnographic inquiry, and different writing techniques. When reading them, make notes about those elements of each paper that could be usefully incorporated into your own study, and these elements that would be inappropriate.

Douglass, B.G. & Moustakas, C. (1985) Heuristic inquiry: the internal search to know.  Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 25, 39 – 55. 

Heuristic inquiry was an important precursor of autoethnography – this article highlights aspects of the study of personal experience that are not always given enough emphasis in the contemporary autoethnographic literature

Chang, H. (2016). Autoethnography in health research: growing pains? Qualitative Health Research, 26, 443 – 451. 

A useful discussion of current trends in autoethnography

Harder, R., Nicol, J. J., & Martin, S. L. (2020). " The power of personal experiences": post-publication experiences of researchers using autobiographical data.  The Qualitative Report , 25(1), 238 – 254.

Autoethnographic work is personally highly revealing – this study explores how experienced autoethnographic researchers evaluate the impact this has had on them​  

Wall, S. (2006) An autoethnography on learning about autoethnography.  International Journal of Qualitative Methods,  5, 146 – 160.

Wall, S. (2008) Easier said than done: writing an autoethnography.  International Journal of Qualitative Methods,  7, 38 – 53. 

Many researchers have found these papers – which tell the story of conducting an autoethnographic study – useful in terms of their own development

Exemplar autoethnographic articles

Asfeldt, M., & Beames, S. (2017). Trusting the journey: Embracing the unpredictable and difficult to measure nature of wilderness educational expeditions.  Journal of Experiential Education , 40(1), 72 – 86.

Brooks, C.F. (2011). Social performance and secret ritual: battling against Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.  Qualitative Health Research, 21, 249 – 261.

Fox, R. (2014). Are those germs in your pocket, or am I just crazy to see you? An autoethnographic consideration of obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Qualitative Inquiry , 20(8), 966 – 975.

Matthews, A. (2019). Writing through grief: Using autoethnography to help process grief after the death of a loved one.  Methodological Innovations , 12(3), 1 –10 .

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1 Introduction

How do we know what we know, and how is that knowledge valued? Why is some knowledge deemed more valuable or valid than others? What if a person has multiple degrees, or even a university education? Is their knowledge more valuable? What if a person has not been formally trained on research methodologies? Do the person’s personal lived experiences still have value in their own academic research?

These were questions that arose in class discussions among undergraduates and a graduate student instructor in the context of learning about international justice mechanisms and the admissibility of evidence in international court proceedings, where we discussed hierarchies of truth and knowledge. We were wrestling with questions about the possibility of an objective truth, reliability of eyewitness and survivor testimony, and what justice means and to whom.

Out of these discussions, we realized how limited conventional citation guidelines were in recognizing and validating the full range of knowledge and experience students wanted and needed to bring to their research papers for the class. While academia has a strong tradition of in-depth interviews with “research subjects” in ethnographic research and autoethnography as an autobiographical form of writing and research, we wanted to acknowledge and address the power imbalance in these accepted forms of research. Ethnographic (or qualitative), interpretivist research is often seen as less objective or “valid” in disciplinary debates, whereas quantitative, positivist work is often seen as more objective and “pure.” [1] This hierarchy of knowledge production reinforces colonial practices, and western, white epistemologies.

We wanted to raise up the value and validity of personal interviews which we define as more informal conversations with friends, family, and neighbors, for example: the story that has been told around your dinner table for generations, or stories neighbors and family friends have shared for as long as you can remember. This type of “interview” is really more of a conversation and can be rich with context and cultural meaning, and deeply personal. These interviews are closely aligned with lived experience. The “interviewer” is in a unique position to be able to speak to this rich context in ways that more traditional ethnographic interviews by outsiders are not able to.

Similarly, we wanted to uplift and validate personal experiences beyond the traditional uses in autoethnographic research. This was motivated by Emily’s experience as a teaching assistant. She was grading a student’s paper about Latin America and the student failed to provide a citation for a historical event that was described in the paper. According to the grading rubric and conventional expectations, the student was supposed to lose points on the assignment. However, after speaking with the student, Emily learned that the student had lived through the event themselves. The expectation was that the student find a secondary or other primary source to cite, other than their own lived experience or those of their community. There was no convention for them to cite their own personal knowledge even though they lived through it. External sources were valued higher than the student’s own lived, embodied knowledge.

In order to address these concerns, we the authors created a set of guidelines for students to cite their own personal experience and personal interviews in academic research papers that allows for the inclusions of more diverse forms of knowledge production. While there are still arguably some concerns with the convention of citations in general, we wanted to give students and educators practical tools to adapting existing academic practices and expectations to include these traditionally less-valued forms of knowledge production and acknowledge the value of the lived experiences of students and their communities. We wanted to give students the opportunity to center their own knowledge and experience, as well as that of their community.

The first set of guidelines were used in 2018, created in direct response to student’s needs to cite personal experience and family interviews in their research papers. After the course,  Emily, the instructor, interviewed several of the students who used the citation guidelines for feedback and recruited 2 students (Emma and Jake) who had an interest in continuing to develop the guidelines, forming the team that continued to work for the next 4 years to create additional iterations of the guidelines, conduct interviews with students and professors, and search for additional research on development of citation guidelines. Through encouragement of several professors and research librarians, we decided to create this e-book to share the guidelines open source, providing an important tool for students, as well as a starting point for others to continue building, improving, and drawing from our work through a Creative Commons license. More traditional publishing platforms proved to be too limited, closed, and inflexible to meet our needs.

Our hope is that this guide to citing personal experience and interviews meets our goal of supporting students to produce their own knowledge, as well as honoring the academic value of their lived experience and the experiences of their families and communities. Through the use of a set of guidelines we created for students to cite personal experience and interviews, we found students self-reported increase in engagement and success in academic assignments. We propose this set of guidelines as an important practical tool for critical, feminist, and anti-racist pedagogy, as well as a method for teaching ethical research.

Scholars across disciplines are moving toward challenging the status quo in classrooms, and in research. In recent years, the movement to engage in anti-racist pedagogy has strengthened as the United States wrestles with legacies of colonization and racism which continue to permeate our ways of life in this country. Kyoko Kishimoto writes of the need for the practical application of critical race theory, not simply about what is taught in the classroom, but how it is taught. Kishimoto argues that anti-racist, feminist, and critical pedagogy “critique positivist assumptions of knowledge, of an objective universal truth which fails to acknowledge embedded Eurocentrism and male privilege.” [2]

Alongside the movement for anti-racist pedagogy, Indigenous ways of knowing have always challenged these ideas. It is inherent in Indigenous cultural practices like oral and embodied histories. The Indigenous Studies discipline challenges the traditional, rigid separation of “the researcher” and “research subjects.” Instead of the strict boundaries in research, scholars call for collaborative research that values diverse forms of knowledge production, and partnership. Kimberly TallBear writes about this approach as “standing with.” As TallBear argues, “standing with” seeks to build relationship based out of mutual care and concern. [3]

Broader discussion of citations guidelines for scholars has been actively developing. There are more tools now in 2022 than when we originally started this project back in 2018. Most disciplines encourage and value boundaries and distance between the researcher and the researched. [4] Further, researchers are discouraged from studying issues related to their own community. [5] However, there is a movement within Indigenous Studies and critical theory that values diverse forms of knowledge production. [6] There is a movement in various disciplines to value connections between researchers and communities, and collaborative projects. [7] There is an extensive body of literature that argues for a breakdown of this barrier as a way to decolonize research. [8] Some scholars write about the politics of citation, encouraging more inclusive and diverse conversations in the academe. [9] Scholars in education studies and critical pedagogy write about rethinking-knowledge production and citations as a way to address equity and racism. [10]

These guidelines explain and provide examples of how to cite personal experience, the proper structure of the citation, adapted from Chicago, APA, and MLA citation formats, and additional reading suggestions. This guide also provides information about how to cite personal interviews and conversations, including the importance of obtaining consent from the person you are interviewing. These guidelines are proposed in an effort to move toward decolonizing the classroom in a practical way by making space for diverse forms of knowledge production by people who have lived experiences in the contexts we study, but also to make space for the forms of knowledge production that students–along with their communities and families–create as valuable parts of their research.

Through a collaborative process of implementation and evaluation of the use of the guidelines, four outcomes emerged: students consider their own relationship to their research whether or not they use the guidelines; students think critically about all sources, not just those they cite; students bring their own passion and knowledge into the classroom; and students report increased engagement and success in class. As a result, we hope that the use of these guidelines, which foster student knowledge production and deep engagement with course material, can be an important way to decolonize the classroom, bring a diversity of voices into the classroom, and serve as an important tool for critical, feminist, and anti-racist pedagogy.

In the following sections, we will explain how we developed the guidelines and evaluated their impact on students’ academic research and assignments. We will also discuss our suggestions for using the guidelines based on student feedback, as well as areas for further research.

• Willard, Emily, doctoral dissertation program, class discussions, conversations with professors and classmates. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 2015-2020. ↵
• Kishimoto (2018), p. 541 ↵
• TallBear (2014) ↵
• Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (1995); Gerring (2012) ↵
• Willard, Emily, doctoral dissertation program, class discussions, conversations with professors and classmates. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 2015-2020 ↵
• Kovach (2009); Tuhiwai-Smith (2012); Stoler (2006); Thomas (2015); Strega and Brown (2015) ↵
• Bishop (1998); Moses et al (1984); Baumann (2019). ↵
• Audra Simpson (2007), Stuart Hall (1996) ↵
• Mott and Cockyane (2017); Tuck, Yang, and Gaztambide-Fernández (2015) ↵
• Kindon and Ellwood (2009); Kishimoto (2018); Trott, McMeeking, and Weinberg (2019); Cammarota and Romero (2009) ↵

Our Voices: A Guide to Citing Personal Experience and Interviews in Research Copyright © 2023 by Emily Willard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Personal identity, transformative experiences, and the future self

• Open access
• Published: 18 August 2020
• Volume 20 , pages 299–310, ( 2021 )

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• Katja Crone   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5778-2072 1  

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The article explores the relation between personal identity and life-changing decisions such as the decision for a certain career or the decision to become a parent. According to L.A. Paul (Paul 2014 ), decisions of this kind involve “transformative experiences”, to the effect that - at the time we make a choice - we simply don’t know what it is like for us to experience the future situation. Importantly, she claims that some new experiences may be “personally transformative” by which she means that one may become a “new kind of person” having a different subjective perspective and “identity”. The article discusses this understanding of a transformed future self. It will be argued that different notions of identity can be distinguished with respect to Paul’s claim: the notion of identity in the sense of a (core) personality as well as the notion of numerical identity in the sense of sameness. By distinguishing these two notions it will become more clear how a future experience may indeed qualify as “personally transformative”. Moreover, it will be shown that the notion of a self-understanding of persons helps to further clarify the kind of change at issue.

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1 Introduction

As persons we face major decisions every now and then throughout our lives: should we move to a foreign country to take up a job opportunity or should we rather stay at the place we so far have lived at? Should we move in with our partner we have been in a relationship with for some time? Should we become a parent or rather stay childless? Such decisions may substantially impact one’s life. They may be “life-changing” in the sense that the new situation may be substantially different from the pre-decision situation: the future situation will offer a variety of completely new experiences, and having these new experiences may, in turn, impact the way we value certain things in life. Crucially, this may also change ourselves as persons. In her much discussed book, L.A. Paul calls such life-changing decisions “personally transformative” by which she means that one may become a “new kind of person” having a different subjective perspective (Paul 2014 , 16). But what does this precisely mean? How is the prospect of “becoming a new kind of person” related to the sense of identity, the self-understanding as an individual person and to the awareness of a persisting subject across time? In order to find answers to these questions I will discuss Paul’s understanding of a transformed future self. It will be argued that we can make sense of two different notions of identity with respect to Paul’s claim, which need to be distinguished: the notion of identity in the sense of a (core) personality as well as the notion of numerical identity in the sense of sameness. By distinguishing these two notions it will become more clear how a future experience may qualify as “personally transformative”. Discussing Paul’s approach in light of the notion of personal identity has two objectives: getting a better understanding of Paul’s concept of “personally transformative experiences” on the one hand and rendering the concept of personal identity more precise on the other hand.

My argument will proceed as follows: (2) In the next section, I will outline Paul’s view on experiences that are both epistemically and personally transformative. The primary focus will be Paul’s notion of a transformed future self due to undergoing a transformative experience. (3) I will then suggest a conceptual distinction between two notions of identity that are in my view in need to be held apart to avoid confusion and unwarranted claims. (4) In the last part, I will apply those two concepts to Paul’s argument. This will clarify in what sense some decisions may indeed qualify as “personally transformative”. I will argue that to discuss the approach in light of the metaphysical problem of personal identity, a further independent argument as to what the persistence of persons consists in would have to be provided.

2 The transformed future self according to Paul

In her much-discussed book “Transformative Experience” (Paul 2014 ) L.A. Paul addresses a sort of paradox that arises when making decisions whose outcome is an experience that is radically different from anything one has previously experienced. To start with a simple example, consider you are thinking about trying an exotic fruit for the very first time. Footnote 1 Prior to actually eating the fruit you don’t know what this experience will be like, and, connected to this, whether you will like or dislike the taste of the fruit. Other people who have already tasted the fruit may try to describe the particular taste to you. They may, for instance, explain how it is comparable to tastes of other fruits you have had before. As a result, you may be in position to closely imagine the taste of the exotic fruit. However, according to Paul, this is not enough: unless you haven’t actually tried the fruit yourself you don’t know what it is like to taste it and how to evaluate its taste. Footnote 2 You are lacking a certain experiential knowledge. This echoes Frank Jackson’s famous thought experiment about the super-intelligent scientist Mary who knows everything about the nature of color vision, including all scientific facts, but who has never seen colors herself as she has spent her entire life in a black and white environment (Jackson 1982 ). Now when Mary finally leaves her black and white cave and sees a red object for the very first time, it seems reasonable to say that she will learn something new: she now knows what it is like to have a red color experience. Paul takes this example to illustrate one kind of “transformative experiences” (Paul 2014 , 8 ff.). They are transformative in an epistemic sense as one does not know what they are like unless one undergoes them oneself. As a result, prior to having these new experiences with their own phenomenology one is unable to assign a value to those experiences. It is precisely this sort of ignorance, which, according to Paul, creates a problem for normative decision theory: in order to rationally decide about a future situation, one should evaluate possible outcomes, rate the expected value of each outcome - based on one’s preferences - and their likeliness to occur. According to normative decision theory, one should choose the action with the highest expected value of a possible outcome. Now if, as in the case of transformative experiences, one is unable to assign a subjective value to a possible outcome one cannot choose rationally. Footnote 3 This is the basic line of argument Paul defends in view of epistemically transformative experiences.

Of interest here is however a further kind of transformative experiences Paul takes into focus: some radically new experiences are not only epistemically transformative as in the exotic fruit example but also personally transformative. According to Paul, some experiences are deeply transformative so that they literally change you as a person: they change “what it is like for you to be you”, “your point of view” and “the kind of person you are” (Paul 2014 , 16). Personally transformative experiences and the impact they have on subjects of experiences are in fact central to Paul’s whole argument. It is all the more surprising that Paul leaves it with relatively vague statements as to how such experiences precisely impact persons or more generally personhood. With the following considerations I would therefore like to offer a clarification of Paul’s approach. The main question will be: What kind of person-related changes can reasonably be meant to be an outcome of personally transformative experiences?

As a first approximation it is useful to look at the type of experiences that, according to Paul, may cause a transformation of the person: becoming a biological parent for the first time, Footnote 4 starting a particular profession, having a life-prolonging surgery with severe side effects or (a more exotic example) becoming a vampire. Again, the examples are construed such that - like in the case of tasting a fruit for the first time - prior to actually having the experience in question one profoundly ignores what the experience will be like and whether one will love or hate it. Additionally, however, one does not know how the new experiences, for instance, of becoming a biological parent for the first time, impact the life one currently lives, in what way these experiences may literally be life-changing. Importantly, Paul calls them “personally” transformative and not “life” transformative. In what sense can the experiences in question be said to transform the person involved, that is, the subject of experience?

It is important to note, first, that Paul is dealing with personally transformative experiences - like in the case of tasting an exotic fruit for the first time as described above - from the point of view of decision-making: an agent finds herself in a situation where she decides for or against an action involving a transformative experience. This places the phenomenon in a time-frame that is particularly relevant to the present considerations: the starting point is an agent who makes a decision at a given time (t 1 ) in view of herself in a future scenario (t 2 ). What is at stake is the perspective of an agent at t 1 relating to the perspective of ‘herself’ at t 2 . I will call the latter of the two relata “future self”.

In order to better understand in what sense the future self may be subject to a transformation it is useful to take a closer look at the kind of paradox that, according to Paul, arises when someone makes a decision in which personally transformative experiences play a role. Again, like in the case of decisions involving “only” epistemically transformative experiences - like deciding whether to have an exotic fruit for the first time - decisions of the present kind create a further problem for normative decision theory. As pointed out above, making a decision requires to evaluate possible outcomes based on one’s preferences. That is, one makes a decision at t 1 to do X based on one’s current preferences (call them t 1 -preferences). One chooses a possible outcome at t 2 with the highest expected value and which is most likely to occur. However, due to the personally transformative experience which one undergoes following the decision, one’s preferences at t 2 (t 2 -preferences) may be very different from one’s t 1 -preferences. Thus the case could arise that choosing X is in accordance with t 1 -preferences but turns out to be in discordance with t 2 -preferences. And again, without knowing how one’s preferences evolve due to transformative experiences one is unable to assign a value to a possible outcome of a given decision. Therefore, Paul concludes, it is impossible to decide rationally in situations involving personally transformative experiences (Paul 2014 , 63; 83; 117). It is important to note, however, that Paul offers a solution to this problem. She maintains that, instead of making a choice based on an evaluation of possible outcomes against the backdrop of one’s current (first-order) preferences we can choose to discover how one changes as an outcome of a transformative experience (Paul 2014 , 119). This decision may thus be qualified as a second-order decision. Footnote 5

I will sidestep this problem related to normative decision theory. Rather, I will focus on the perspective of an agent who faces a personally transformative experience and relates to her future self. Footnote 6 How might an agent think about her future self prior to such an experience? What can one expect in view of one’s future self? Someone might object that this question misses the point for it seems to misconceive the very idea of transformative experiences as Paul defines them: the main property of transformative experiences is, according to Paul, precisely that prior to having them one cannot know what they are like and how they impact one’s life or change oneself. Consequently, a subject will be unable to have any precise expectation concerning her future self. This is certainly true. However, it seems that even according to Paul’s definition prior to a transformative experience one can still relate to something concerning the future self: one can expect that - in a generic way - a transformation of oneself is going to happen at t 2 . As Paul points out, one may become a ‘new person’ having a subjective perspective different from before. So it seems that a person can at least expect a change, namely in terms of “what it is like for you to be you”, “your point of view” and “the kind of person you are” as an outcome of transformative experiences (Paul 2014 , 16) even though she won’t know the quality of the change. Footnote 7

This is supported by Paul’s suggestion how to solve the problem outlined above concerning normative decision theory. For Paul holds that we can nevertheless make a rational choice in such situations even though we may be unable to anticipate the way we change. We can yet “choose to discover a new identity” (Paul 2014 , 119). Again, my intention here is not to discuss Paul’s solution to the problem. Rather, I am interested in what Paul has to say about a person’s change as an outcome of a transformative experience and what a person might expect concerning her future self. So the questions I would like to address are: what kind of change of person is at stake? Does Paul want to claim that transformative experiences change a person to the point that she becomes a completely different person? What is the nature and scope of this personal transformation? Footnote 8 It is no coincidence that Paul uses the term “identity” in the context of personally transformative experiences even if not in a systematic manner. For instance, in the case of deciding to become a biological parent for the first time, Paul asks: “Once you have a child, will you care less about your career or your education? Will your professional work still define your identity?” (Paul 2014 , 81) And further down she stresses: “There are obvious personal identity questions in the background for the pre-experience self who is choosing to become the post-experience self” (ibid., footnote 8).

In order to give an answer to the questions above I will in the next section introduce a distinction between two notions of identity. I will show in what way these two notions can be meaningfully related to Paul’s argument and how this helps to clarify the kind of personal change as an outcome of transformative experiences.

3 Different notions of “identity”

The term “personally transformative experiences” implies that a person going through these experiences will - in a future scenario - significantly change, i.e. transform. That is, some defining property of an individual person will alter as a consequence of these experiences. The changes concern the identity of a person, as Paul points out (Paul 2014 , 81, footnote 8). However, the term “identity” in relation to the concept of a person is notoriously unclear. It is nevertheless often used in philosophical or interdisciplinary debates on the nature of persons and their self-understanding, which is, more generally, also the context of Paul’s notion of personally transformative experiences. In such debates it is seldom made explicit how exactly we are to understand the term “identity”. This can have problematic consequences. For the term is sometimes used equivocally, that is, two distinct meanings are not properly or only insufficiently distinguished from one another. I will argue that this distinction also helps to better understand what Paul actually means when she claims that certain experiences transform a person, that is, his or her future self.

(1) P-identity : The first meaning of the term “identity” is the dominant one in everyday speech. Here the expression is typically used to refer to the personality or the core personality of a person: what ‘makes up’ a person, distinguishes them from others, is their “identity”. This identity can be threatened, one can find oneself in an identity crisis, it is possible to lose one’s identity or find it again. This is how we may talk in everyday life. Here the semantic field of “personality” is relevant. If someone says: “Peter is bright and honest” – then they mean that the properties <bright> and < honest> characterize Peter as a person, that in this sense they constitute his “identity”. This meaning of “identity” is relevant to, for instance, certain so-called narrative approaches to personhood, particularly when the respective approaches speak of “narrative identity” or the “constitution of identity”. Footnote 9 It is typically related to certain basic questions: one may, for instance, ask for individual and social conditions of the formation of a personality and emerging cognitive abilities required for an understanding as an individual person (e.g., Nelson 2003 ); one may moreover ask for the role of having and enacting a life story and look for narrative structures of experiences (e.g., MacIntyre 1981 ; Schechtman 1996 ; Ricœur 1992 ); one may look at the interplay of stability and change in one’s life and one’s personality (especially Ricœur 1992 ). It is important to note that “identity” in this sense has the role of a (complex) property. This is apparent in linguistic constructions, such as in predicative attributions of “identity”, for instance, when we say that a person has lost or found his or her identity.

Crucially, this underlying concept of identity has to be distinguished from another entirely different concept of identity.

(2) N-identity : For the expression “identity” also refers to a logical relation between entities, such as those existing between two different points in time. The relevant question here is: are entities at two different points in time one and the same entity – numerically one – or two different ones? If we ask whether Peter, who we run into on the street, is the same – identical – Peter who we went to school with many years ago, then we are using the concept of identity in a different sense that that just described: in the sense of numerical identity (through time). Footnote 10 In this case - unlike in the P-identity case - “identity” does not have the role of a property; rather, it is used as a two-digit-relational term - X is “identical” to Y - in order to correctly capture the meaning of N-identity.

Now it is important to note that precisely this concept of identity (N-identity) underlies metaphysical approaches to personal identity over time (also called “persistence”): these approaches are concerned with the question of what properties are constitutive for person A at t 1 and person B at t 2 to be one and the same person. Is, for instance, the continuity of the living body or rather the continuity of mental properties necessary and sufficient for a person to be the same at different points in time? It is here not the place to discuss the huge amount of respective arguments and theories, for this is not the topic of my paper. Footnote 11 I just want to stress the particular methodological frame connected to the metaphysical question of personal identity in the sense of sameness.

It should be obvious that, generally, the semantic distinction between the two concepts of identity along with the different theoretical functions and methodologies should not be blurred. Concerning the present context, I will argue that keeping the two meanings apart helps to understand in what sense certain experiences may be literally transformative to a person. What kind of change must a person expect concerning her future self prior to a transformative experience? Will the change concern her continued existence? This would mean that the person at t 1 and the person at t 2 with a transformative experience between these two points in time are not one and the same person. Here the underlying concept of identity, by which transformative experiences are analyzed, is N-identity. In contrast, the concept of P-identity is used when it is claimed that transformative experiences lead to a change in personality. In the next section, I will discuss Paul’s argument in light of these two concepts. As mentioned above, my objective is to arrive at a better understanding of the kind of change taking place due to personally transformative experiences.

4 Transformative experiences and identity

At first sight, Paul’s description of personally transformative experiences and their consequences for the future self leaves room for both interpretations. This becomes apparent when we look at certain expressions Paul uses. She holds, for instance, that transformative experiences may “change the kind of person that you are” (Paul 2014 , 16). According to P- and N-identity, this can mean two different things: related to N-identity, it can mean that the psychological continuity between you at t 1 and your future self at t 2 is somehow disrupted. Footnote 12 Being a new kind of person, then, could mean that at t 2 a new person comes into existence. Footnote 13 This interpretation may be supported by Paul’s statement that “personal identity questions” are relevant “for the pre-experience self who is choosing to become the post-experience self” (ibid., footnote 8). Although Paul is here quite clearly alluding to the notion of N-identity, it should be noted that she is not offering an argument for personal N-identity. So the following considerations go beyond Paul’s actual claim. But we can nevertheless ask what further assumptions would be needed to adequately discuss personal change in terms of N-identity. First, one would have to clarify what, in this context, N-identity precisely consists in. To say that person A at t 1 and person B at t 2 are different persons due to transformative experiences would be uninformative, to say the least. An independent account as to what constitutes the identity of persons at different points in time would thus be required. What are necessary and sufficient conditions for A at t 1 and B at t 2 to be one and the same? To say that A and B are numerically distinct persons cannot be explained by transformative experiences A undergoes between t 1 and t 2 . For the concept of transformative experience would then already imply the altering of a person as an outcome of such experience. This explanation would therefore be circular. As said above, Paul is not addressing N-identity explicitly, so it is no surprise that such an independent argument of what constitutes N-identity cannot be found in her book. One can only speculate that the overall alignment of Paul’s thought would be clearly in favor of a psychological criterion of personal identity, which stresses the continuity of beliefs, desires and most notably preferences. According to this criterion, the continuity of beliefs, desires and preferences are necessary and sufficient for persons A at t 1 and B at t 2 to be the same person. But even in the absence of such an argument we can nevertheless ask to what extent it may be appropriate in principle to apply the concept of N-identity to transformative experiences and the future self. So let’s assume for the sake of the argument that the criterion of psychological continuity has been established and that psychological continuity (continuity of beliefs, desire, preferences etc.) has been shown to be necessary and sufficient for the persistence of a person. Is it really plausible that a transformative experience like having a child for the first time causes a clear discontinuity of beliefs, desires and preferences such that a new person comes into existence at t 2 ? I find this conclusion unconvincing. It clearly contradicts everyday intuitions about the persistence of persons. If we imagine a person who at t 2 just went through a strong transformative experience it seems plausible that she would still refer to herself at t 1 in a first-person mode. She would very likely say something along these lines: “Before I gave birth I didn’t know how this experience would change the way I see certain things now.” Relevant here is the multiple mention of “I” by which the speaker refers to herself at different points in time. This reflects the in my view correct intuition that the persistence of persons is not threatened by transformative experiences. So one can conclude from the above reflections that N-identity is not involved in transformative experiences.

Now what about P-identity, which, in the previous section, has been defined as the core personality of a person? How may transformative decisions impact the future self in terms of P-identity? In the remainder of this article I will argue that what is at stake in the context of personally transformative experiences is the particular self-understanding of a person. Even though Paul does not address the self-understanding of persons directly, I will show that it complies nicely with the overall idea of personally transformative experiences. The concept of self-understanding of persons I will make use of captures the notion of P-identity: persons characterize themselves as individuals and thereby ascribe certain character traits to themselves (e.g. the property of being shy or impatient or generous). Often they explain, illustrate or justify these self-ascriptions by recalling to themselves or other persons selected episodes of their lives or generic autobiographical memories (see especially Crone 2020 ). The way persons view themselves and are viewed by others is moreover informed by sets of values they endorse, which are manifest in their behavior. To be clear, the self-understanding is typically not present in the form of a distinctive and explicit self-representation; it is rather a form of background awareness in a dispositional mode, which may become explicit in certain situations. For instance, one would be in a position to give meaningful answers to questions about the kind of person one is and the kind of things that are important to oneself. The self-understanding thus described remains fairly stable across time, nevertheless it is vulnerable to change. So it seems plausible that personally transformative experiences of the kind Paul discusses impact or alter one’s self-understanding in a particular way. Becoming a biological parent for the first time will likely change some of one’s beliefs, desires and what one cares about. Due to this, one may, for instance, change one’s habits: one may no longer go out three times a week, one may work less, one may be more careful about one’s health and care about others in a different way. Everyday choices will be prioritized differently compared to previous childfree times. Such an overall change will gradually become part of a revised self-understanding. One starts to view oneself and will be progressively viewed by others as a person with different kinds of traits. For instance, one is no longer the person one used to be, say, the go-getting person who never makes binding plans but rather a humble, reliable and maybe also a bit boring person. This sort of change over the span of a lifetime is characteristic for persons’ self-understanding. It is well accounted for by, for instance, narrative theories of the self (e.g., MacIntyre 1981 ; Schechtman 1996 ; Bruner 1990 ; Rudd 2012 ). According to these approaches, one gets a sense of the kind of person one is by representing one’s life as a coherent life story, as a so-called self-narrative. Changes like the ones mentioned above may be integrated into such a self-narrative and be considered, if significant, as turning points. Note, however, that the self-understanding cannot be reduced to a self-narrative, that is, it is implausible to assume that it is entirely narrative in structure. For instance, to stick with the example above, to be able to conceive of changes in one’s life - even of significant ones - one has to have an implicit awareness of persisting as one agent across time. Footnote 14 Otherwise one wouldn’t be able to ascribe different experiences and properties to oneself at different points in time. This suggests that the self-understanding is grounded in more basic and non-narrative forms of self-awareness, which may be characterized as a minimal awareness of self-identity over time (Crone 2020 ).

That the self-understanding is at issue in personally transformative experiences is supported by Paul’s claims by which she emphasizes the relation of a person’s point of view and her preferences. According to Paul, a transformative experience may “change you enough to substantially change your point of view, thus substantially revising your core preferences” (Paul 2014 , 16). The revision of core preferences means, as far as I understand it, that, as a result of a transformative experience, a person changes what she most cares about, that is, what she believes to be important and what she desires. “Your preferences will change. The way you live your life will change. What and who you care about will change.” (Paul 2014 , 81) This will shape your everyday decisions, it will inform your practical reasons and allow you to prioritize your decisions. The alleged substantial change of the point of view connects the revision of core preferences to the self-understanding as described above. The point of view in question is a mental relation not only to the world but also to oneself. Revising one’s point of view, then, also means revising the way one views oneself as a person and “revising how you experience being yourself” (Paul 2014 , 16). Changing one’s preferences, which over time repeatedly express themselves in one’s behavior, impacts the way we understand ourselves - as well as how others understand us. Footnote 15 We may notice at some point that we have become a different person - in the sense of P-identity and not N-identity. This change may coherently be explained by a transformative experience one has gone through. Importantly, the analysis offered here can also make a case for what someone needs to be prepared for when facing a transformative experience; and this connects well with Paul’s solution to the problem of rational choice outlined above: a person not only has to be prepared to more or less gradually alter her self-understanding in the described way. She can also actively choose to alter her self-understanding, or in Paul’s terms: to become a new kind of person. More generally, I hope to have shown that linking personally transformative experiences to the self-understanding of persons allows to better understand in what sense personally transformative experiences are, in accordance with Paul’s argument, indeed transformative.

It is important to note, however, that in my analysis I have used the words “change”, “altering” and “transformation” (of the self-understanding of persons) somewhat interchangeably. This is of course open to criticism. To say that someone’s self-understanding is subject to a transformation may be a stronger claim than to say that it is subject to change . For example, the experience of having a child might change me in certain respects: as pointed out before, I may care less for certain things than I used to and more for others I to date was indifferent to. But in other important respects nothing may have changed for me: for instance, I still hold the same political and moral beliefs. In my view we would be careful to call this a “transformation”. The reason is that our self-understanding is sensitive to these kinds of changes and we are able to integrate them more or less well. Without going into details, however, it seems therefore likely that “transformation”, as a consequence of a transformative experience, applies to far less cases than Paul assumes. Her own fictitious example of becoming a vampire seems yet to be one clear candidate. A further example is probably a radical change due to, for example, a gender transition. Footnote 16

Overall, the above considerations suggest that we need more fine grained semantic tools in order to make further interesting distinctions and, for example, to account for outcomes that are transformative in a strong sense, but also for those with more or less changing effects.

5 Conclusion

The central concern of this article was to analyze the relation between transformative experiences and personal identity. Paul’s notion of personally transformative experiences raised the question in what sense a person may indeed be subject to a substantial change. An answer to this question, as was argued, has far reaching consequences. What can an agent, before undergoing a transformative experience, expect to happen concerning herself as a person in a future situation - even when she chooses to become a new kind of person, as Paul suggests? Will the continuity between the pre-experience and the post-experience self be preserved? Or will some of her core traits be subject to a change - and if so to what extent? Two different notions of “identity” were distinguished (N- and P-identity) and applied to Paul’s argument. It was argued that, for conceptual reasons, personally transformative experiences do not impact the persistence of persons in the sense of N-identity. They do however affect and alter the self-understanding of persons in the sense of P-identity. The concept of a self-understanding of persons was introduced in order to shed some light on the kind of change persons are subject to due to personally transformative experiences. As Paul remains rather vague on this issue, the overall conclusion for discussions on transformative experiences is that a fine-grained and structural account of the way how persons conceive of themselves helps to understand what actually is at issue: in what way persons change as an outcome of life decisions in which personally transformative experiences are involved.

This example is discussed by Paul (see Paul 2014 , 35 ff.).

This conclusion is criticized by, for example, Amy Kind ( 2020 ). She objects that Paul underestimates the effectiveness of imagination and argues that imagination is indeed capable of teaching fundamentally new experiences.

Paul claims that in such cases one cannot in principle make a rational choice (e.g., Paul 2014 , 20). This strong claim has been criticized on various grounds (e.g., by Dougherty et al. 2015 ; Arvan 2015 ; Kind 2020 , see previous footnote). I mostly agree with these objections and arguments and also think that Paul’s conclusion in view of normative decision theory is too strong.

“Biological” refers to the procedure of physically producing a child, of growing a child inside one’s body and as parents being subject to a hormonal change etc. (Paul 2014 , 77–78).

This so-called “revelation approach” is criticized by, for instance, McQueen ( 2017 ) for being incomplete. He presents a further account of rational deliberation that focuses on what he calls “practical identity” - in order to do justice to the ethical dimension: in making a transformative decision one should take into account what kind of person one is, i.e. one should reflect upon one’s endorsed values, preferences and commitments regardless of how one will change. This enables one to justify one’s decision towards others, which seems to be all the more important since important decisions often also affect others and not only oneself.

This way of phrasing the issue may be considered problematic for it does not seem to remain neutral on the question of how a pre-decision self relates to a post-decision self. It seems to already presuppose that a person persists through transformative experiences. It would therefore be more precise to say: at issue is the perspective of an agent who faces a personally transformative experience and relates to a future person who may or may not be herself.

For the sake of the argument I am assuming here that Paul’s strong definition and the epistemic ignorance implied in the concept of transformative experiences is correct. As will become more clear, this helps to get a grip on the kind of personal change meant by Paul.

Note that the term “transformative” is ambiguous for it leaves open whether the thing that is subject to a transformation becomes an entirely different thing or rather only changes significantly while remaining the same.

The meaning of identity just outlined seems to echo what Ricœur means by “ ipse -identity”: the term refers to “selfhood” and is linked to the question “Who am I?” (Ricœur 1992 , 121–122).

This corresponds to Ricœur’s notion of “ idem -identity”, by which he means something that stays the same through time, which resists change and can be identified and reidentified at different times (Ricœur 1992 , 121–122); this suggests that Ricœur is also dealing with the metaphysical question of persistence. He moreover assumes a dialectic between ipse - and idem -identity which is mediated by self-narrative.

For an early overview of standard arguments, which are still prevalent in more recent debates, see Noonan 1989 . It is important to note that metaphysical approaches only rarely address the problem of sameness in phenomenological first-personal terms. Some exceptions are, for instance, Dainton and Bayne ( 2005 ) and Fuchs ( 2016 ).

The possibility that personal transformative experiences may affect the persistence of a person may seem odd and counterintuitive right from the start. It should yet be noted that conclusions of this kind can indeed be found in metaphysical debates on the persistence of persons. Marya Schechtman, for instance, argues that persons are not continuous if they are unable to find an empathic access to their former lives (Schechtman 2001 ). Another example is Galen Strawson’s quite radical view of selves, according to which persons as selves only exist in the form of short-lived transient episodes of experiencing (Strawson 2009 ).

Note that the present considerations are metaphysical ones. They need to be separated from epistemological considerations concerning the question of how we recognize a person at t 2 as being the same as at t 1 .

Note that this description doesn’t commit one to any metaphysical claim about the persistence of persons (in the sense of N-identity). Identifying certain structural features of a mode of consciousness (as in the present case) has to be distinguished from establishing certain features as criteria for the persistence.

Surprisingly the role the social environment plays for the way persons experience or understand themselves, is not addressed by Paul. An account of how the perspective of other persons is constitutive for the self-understanding can be found in some narrative approaches to the self (e.g., MacIntyre 1981 ; Schechtman 1996 ).

See McKinnon ( 2015 ) for a detailed and interesting discussion of gender transition as a transformative experience. I think it is important to note, however, that the term “transformation” may be rejected by a person who has undergone gender transition herself. The experience of gender transition may instead be more correctly described as an experience of disclosure (rather than a transformative experience) - given that it uncovers what already was there (the other gender).

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I would like to thank Sophie Loidolt and Jakub Čapek, the two guest-editors of this special issue, Jens Eder and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Academic writing refers to a style of expression that researchers use to define the intellectual boundaries of their disciplines and specific areas of expertise. Characteristics of academic writing include a formal tone, use of the third-person rather than first-person perspective (usually), a clear focus on the research problem under investigation, and precise word choice. Like specialist languages adopted in other professions, such as, law or medicine, academic writing is designed to convey agreed meaning about complex ideas or concepts within a community of scholarly experts and practitioners.

Academic Writing. Writing Center. Colorado Technical College; Hartley, James. Academic Writing and Publishing: A Practical Guide . New York: Routledge, 2008; Ezza, El-Sadig Y. and Touria Drid. T eaching Academic Writing as a Discipline-Specific Skill in Higher Education . Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2020.

Importance of Good Academic Writing

The accepted form of academic writing in the social sciences can vary considerable depending on the methodological framework and the intended audience. However, most college-level research papers require careful attention to the following stylistic elements:

I.  The Big Picture Unlike creative or journalistic writing, the overall structure of academic writing is formal and logical. It must be cohesive and possess a logically organized flow of ideas; this means that the various parts are connected to form a unified whole. There should be narrative links between sentences and paragraphs so that the reader is able to follow your argument. The introduction should include a description of how the rest of the paper is organized and all sources are properly cited throughout the paper.

II.  Tone The overall tone refers to the attitude conveyed in a piece of writing. Throughout your paper, it is important that you present the arguments of others fairly and with an appropriate narrative tone. When presenting a position or argument that you disagree with, describe this argument accurately and without loaded or biased language. In academic writing, the author is expected to investigate the research problem from an authoritative point of view. You should, therefore, state the strengths of your arguments confidently, using language that is neutral, not confrontational or dismissive.

III.  Diction Diction refers to the choice of words you use. Awareness of the words you use is important because words that have almost the same denotation [dictionary definition] can have very different connotations [implied meanings]. This is particularly true in academic writing because words and terminology can evolve a nuanced meaning that describes a particular idea, concept, or phenomenon derived from the epistemological culture of that discipline [e.g., the concept of rational choice in political science]. Therefore, use concrete words [not general] that convey a specific meaning. If this cannot be done without confusing the reader, then you need to explain what you mean within the context of how that word or phrase is used within a discipline.

IV.  Language The investigation of research problems in the social sciences is often complex and multi- dimensional . Therefore, it is important that you use unambiguous language. Well-structured paragraphs and clear topic sentences enable a reader to follow your line of thinking without difficulty. Your language should be concise, formal, and express precisely what you want it to mean. Do not use vague expressions that are not specific or precise enough for the reader to derive exact meaning ["they," "we," "people," "the organization," etc.], abbreviations like 'i.e.'  ["in other words"], 'e.g.' ["for example"], or 'a.k.a.' ["also known as"], and the use of unspecific determinate words ["super," "very," "incredible," "huge," etc.].

V.  Punctuation Scholars rely on precise words and language to establish the narrative tone of their work and, therefore, punctuation marks are used very deliberately. For example, exclamation points are rarely used to express a heightened tone because it can come across as unsophisticated or over-excited. Dashes should be limited to the insertion of an explanatory comment in a sentence, while hyphens should be limited to connecting prefixes to words [e.g., multi-disciplinary] or when forming compound phrases [e.g., commander-in-chief]. Finally, understand that semi-colons represent a pause that is longer than a comma, but shorter than a period in a sentence. In general, there are four grammatical uses of semi-colons: when a second clause expands or explains the first clause; to describe a sequence of actions or different aspects of the same topic; placed before clauses which begin with "nevertheless", "therefore", "even so," and "for instance”; and, to mark off a series of phrases or clauses which contain commas. If you are not confident about when to use semi-colons [and most of the time, they are not required for proper punctuation], rewrite using shorter sentences or revise the paragraph.

VI.  Academic Conventions Among the most important rules and principles of academic engagement of a writing is citing sources in the body of your paper and providing a list of references as either footnotes or endnotes. The academic convention of citing sources facilitates processes of intellectual discovery, critical thinking, and applying a deliberate method of navigating through the scholarly landscape by tracking how cited works are propagated by scholars over time . Aside from citing sources, other academic conventions to follow include the appropriate use of headings and subheadings, properly spelling out acronyms when first used in the text, avoiding slang or colloquial language, avoiding emotive language or unsupported declarative statements, avoiding contractions [e.g., isn't], and using first person and second person pronouns only when necessary.

VII.  Evidence-Based Reasoning Assignments often ask you to express your own point of view about the research problem. However, what is valued in academic writing is that statements are based on evidence-based reasoning. This refers to possessing a clear understanding of the pertinent body of knowledge and academic debates that exist within, and often external to, your discipline concerning the topic. You need to support your arguments with evidence from scholarly [i.e., academic or peer-reviewed] sources. It should be an objective stance presented as a logical argument; the quality of the evidence you cite will determine the strength of your argument. The objective is to convince the reader of the validity of your thoughts through a well-documented, coherent, and logically structured piece of writing. This is particularly important when proposing solutions to problems or delineating recommended courses of action.

VIII.  Thesis-Driven Academic writing is “thesis-driven,” meaning that the starting point is a particular perspective, idea, or position applied to the chosen topic of investigation, such as, establishing, proving, or disproving solutions to the questions applied to investigating the research problem. Note that a problem statement without the research questions does not qualify as academic writing because simply identifying the research problem does not establish for the reader how you will contribute to solving the problem, what aspects you believe are most critical, or suggest a method for gathering information or data to better understand the problem.

IX.  Complexity and Higher-Order Thinking Academic writing addresses complex issues that require higher-order thinking skills applied to understanding the research problem [e.g., critical, reflective, logical, and creative thinking as opposed to, for example, descriptive or prescriptive thinking]. Higher-order thinking skills include cognitive processes that are used to comprehend, solve problems, and express concepts or that describe abstract ideas that cannot be easily acted out, pointed to, or shown with images. Think of your writing this way: One of the most important attributes of a good teacher is the ability to explain complexity in a way that is understandable and relatable to the topic being presented during class. This is also one of the main functions of academic writing--examining and explaining the significance of complex ideas as clearly as possible.  As a writer, you must adopt the role of a good teacher by summarizing complex information into a well-organized synthesis of ideas, concepts, and recommendations that contribute to a better understanding of the research problem.

Academic Writing. Writing Center. Colorado Technical College; Hartley, James. Academic Writing and Publishing: A Practical Guide . New York: Routledge, 2008; Murray, Rowena  and Sarah Moore. The Handbook of Academic Writing: A Fresh Approach . New York: Open University Press, 2006; Johnson, Roy. Improve Your Writing Skills . Manchester, UK: Clifton Press, 1995; Nygaard, Lynn P. Writing for Scholars: A Practical Guide to Making Sense and Being Heard . Second edition. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2015; Silvia, Paul J. How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007; Style, Diction, Tone, and Voice. Writing Center, Wheaton College; Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Strategies for...

Understanding Academic Writing and Its Jargon

The very definition of research jargon is language specific to a particular community of practitioner-researchers . Therefore, in modern university life, jargon represents the specific language and meaning assigned to words and phrases specific to a discipline or area of study. For example, the idea of being rational may hold the same general meaning in both political science and psychology, but its application to understanding and explaining phenomena within the research domain of a each discipline may have subtle differences based upon how scholars in that discipline apply the concept to the theories and practice of their work.

Given this, it is important that specialist terminology [i.e., jargon] must be used accurately and applied under the appropriate conditions . Subject-specific dictionaries are the best places to confirm the meaning of terms within the context of a specific discipline. These can be found by either searching in the USC Libraries catalog by entering the disciplinary and the word dictionary [e.g., sociology and dictionary] or using a database such as Credo Reference [a curated collection of subject encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, guides from highly regarded publishers] . It is appropriate for you to use specialist language within your field of study, but you should avoid using such language when writing for non-academic or general audiences.

Problems with Opaque Writing

A common criticism of scholars is that they can utilize needlessly complex syntax or overly expansive vocabulary that is impenetrable or not well-defined. When writing, avoid problems associated with opaque writing by keeping in mind the following:

1.   Excessive use of specialized terminology . Yes, it is appropriate for you to use specialist language and a formal style of expression in academic writing, but it does not mean using "big words" just for the sake of doing so. Overuse of complex or obscure words or writing complicated sentence constructions gives readers the impression that your paper is more about style than substance; it leads the reader to question if you really know what you are talking about. Focus on creating clear, concise, and elegant prose that minimizes reliance on specialized terminology.

2.   Inappropriate use of specialized terminology . Because you are dealing with concepts, research, and data within your discipline, you need to use the technical language appropriate to that area of study. However, nothing will undermine the validity of your study quicker than the inappropriate application of a term or concept. Avoid using terms whose meaning you are unsure of--do not just guess or assume! Consult the meaning of terms in specialized, discipline-specific dictionaries by searching the USC Libraries catalog or the Credo Reference database [see above].

Additional Problems to Avoid

In addition to understanding the use of specialized language, there are other aspects of academic writing in the social sciences that you should be aware of. These problems include:

• Personal nouns . Excessive use of personal nouns [e.g., I, me, you, us] may lead the reader to believe the study was overly subjective. These words can be interpreted as being used only to avoid presenting empirical evidence about the research problem. Limit the use of personal nouns to descriptions of things you actually did [e.g., "I interviewed ten teachers about classroom management techniques..."]. Note that personal nouns are generally found in the discussion section of a paper because this is where you as the author/researcher interpret and describe your work.
• Directives . Avoid directives that demand the reader to "do this" or "do that." Directives should be framed as evidence-based recommendations or goals leading to specific outcomes. Note that an exception to this can be found in various forms of action research that involve evidence-based advocacy for social justice or transformative change. Within this area of the social sciences, authors may offer directives for action in a declarative tone of urgency.
• Informal, conversational tone using slang and idioms . Academic writing relies on excellent grammar and precise word structure. Your narrative should not include regional dialects or slang terms because they can be open to interpretation. Your writing should be direct and concise using standard English.
• Wordiness. Focus on being concise, straightforward, and developing a narrative that does not have confusing language . By doing so, you  help eliminate the possibility of the reader misinterpreting the design and purpose of your study.
• Vague expressions (e.g., "they," "we," "people," "the company," "that area," etc.). Being concise in your writing also includes avoiding vague references to persons, places, or things. While proofreading your paper, be sure to look for and edit any vague or imprecise statements that lack context or specificity.
• Numbered lists and bulleted items . The use of bulleted items or lists should be used only if the narrative dictates a need for clarity. For example, it is fine to state, "The four main problems with hedge funds are:" and then list them as 1, 2, 3, 4. However, in academic writing, this must then be followed by detailed explanation and analysis of each item. Given this, the question you should ask yourself while proofreading is: why begin with a list in the first place rather than just starting with systematic analysis of each item arranged in separate paragraphs? Also, be careful using numbers because they can imply a ranked order of priority or importance. If none exists, use bullets and avoid checkmarks or other symbols.
• Descriptive writing . Describing a research problem is an important means of contextualizing a study. In fact, some description or background information may be needed because you can not assume the reader knows the key aspects of the topic. However, the content of your paper should focus on methodology, the analysis and interpretation of findings, and their implications as they apply to the research problem rather than background information and descriptions of tangential issues.
• Personal experience. Drawing upon personal experience [e.g., traveling abroad; caring for someone with Alzheimer's disease] can be an effective way of introducing the research problem or engaging your readers in understanding its significance. Use personal experience only as an example, though, because academic writing relies on evidence-based research. To do otherwise is simply story-telling.

NOTE:   Rules concerning excellent grammar and precise word structure do not apply when quoting someone.  A quote should be inserted in the text of your paper exactly as it was stated. If the quote is especially vague or hard to understand, consider paraphrasing it or using a different quote to convey the same meaning. Consider inserting the term "sic" in brackets after the quoted text to indicate that the quotation has been transcribed exactly as found in the original source, but the source had grammar, spelling, or other errors. The adverb sic informs the reader that the errors are not yours.

Academic Writing. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Academic Writing Style. First-Year Seminar Handbook. Mercer University; Bem, Daryl J. Writing the Empirical Journal Article. Cornell University; College Writing. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Murray, Rowena  and Sarah Moore. The Handbook of Academic Writing: A Fresh Approach . New York: Open University Press, 2006; Johnson, Eileen S. “Action Research.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education . Edited by George W. Noblit and Joseph R. Neikirk. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Oppenheimer, Daniel M. "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly." Applied Cognitive Psychology 20 (2006): 139-156; Ezza, El-Sadig Y. and Touria Drid. T eaching Academic Writing as a Discipline-Specific Skill in Higher Education . Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2020; Pernawan, Ari. Common Flaws in Students' Research Proposals. English Education Department. Yogyakarta State University; Style. College Writing. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Invention: Five Qualities of Good Writing. The Reading/Writing Center. Hunter College; Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012; What Is an Academic Paper? Institute for Writing Rhetoric. Dartmouth College.

Structure and Writing Style

I. Improving Academic Writing

To improve your academic writing skills, you should focus your efforts on three key areas: 1.   Clear Writing . The act of thinking about precedes the process of writing about. Good writers spend sufficient time distilling information and reviewing major points from the literature they have reviewed before creating their work. Writing detailed outlines can help you clearly organize your thoughts. Effective academic writing begins with solid planning, so manage your time carefully. 2.  Excellent Grammar . Needless to say, English grammar can be difficult and complex; even the best scholars take many years before they have a command of the major points of good grammar. Take the time to learn the major and minor points of good grammar. Spend time practicing writing and seek detailed feedback from professors. Take advantage of the Writing Center on campus if you need help. Proper punctuation and good proofreading skills can significantly improve academic writing [see sub-tab for proofreading you paper ].

Refer to these three basic resources to help your grammar and writing skills:

• A good writing reference book, such as, Strunk and White’s book, The Elements of Style or the St. Martin's Handbook ;
• A college-level dictionary, such as, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary ;
• The latest edition of Roget's Thesaurus in Dictionary Form .

3.  Consistent Stylistic Approach . Whether your professor expresses a preference to use MLA, APA or the Chicago Manual of Style or not, choose one style manual and stick to it. Each of these style manuals provide rules on how to write out numbers, references, citations, footnotes, and lists. Consistent adherence to a style of writing helps with the narrative flow of your paper and improves its readability. Note that some disciplines require a particular style [e.g., education uses APA] so as you write more papers within your major, your familiarity with it will improve.

II. Evaluating Quality of Writing

A useful approach for evaluating the quality of your academic writing is to consider the following issues from the perspective of the reader. While proofreading your final draft, critically assess the following elements in your writing.

• It is shaped around one clear research problem, and it explains what that problem is from the outset.
• Your paper tells the reader why the problem is important and why people should know about it.
• You have accurately and thoroughly informed the reader what has already been published about this problem or others related to it and noted important gaps in the research.
• You have provided evidence to support your argument that the reader finds convincing.
• The paper includes a description of how and why particular evidence was collected and analyzed, and why specific theoretical arguments or concepts were used.
• The paper is made up of paragraphs, each containing only one controlling idea.
• You indicate how each section of the paper addresses the research problem.
• You have considered counter-arguments or counter-examples where they are relevant.
• Arguments, evidence, and their significance have been presented in the conclusion.
• Limitations of your research have been explained as evidence of the potential need for further study.
• The narrative flows in a clear, accurate, and well-organized way.

Boscoloa, Pietro, Barbara Arféb, and Mara Quarisaa. “Improving the Quality of Students' Academic Writing: An Intervention Study.” Studies in Higher Education 32 (August 2007): 419-438; Academic Writing. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Academic Writing Style. First-Year Seminar Handbook. Mercer University; Bem, Daryl J. Writing the Empirical Journal Article. Cornell University; Candlin, Christopher. Academic Writing Step-By-Step: A Research-based Approach . Bristol, CT: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2016; College Writing. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Style . College Writing. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Invention: Five Qualities of Good Writing. The Reading/Writing Center. Hunter College; Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012; What Is an Academic Paper? Institute for Writing Rhetoric. Dartmouth College.

Writing Tip

Considering the Passive Voice in Academic Writing

In the English language, we are able to construct sentences in the following way: 1.  "The policies of Congress caused the economic crisis." 2.  "The economic crisis was caused by the policies of Congress."

The decision about which sentence to use is governed by whether you want to focus on “Congress” and what they did, or on “the economic crisis” and what caused it. This choice in focus is achieved with the use of either the active or the passive voice. When you want your readers to focus on the "doer" of an action, you can make the "doer"' the subject of the sentence and use the active form of the verb. When you want readers to focus on the person, place, or thing affected by the action, or the action itself, you can make the effect or the action the subject of the sentence by using the passive form of the verb.

Often in academic writing, scholars don't want to focus on who is doing an action, but on who is receiving or experiencing the consequences of that action. The passive voice is useful in academic writing because it allows writers to highlight the most important participants or events within sentences by placing them at the beginning of the sentence.

Use the passive voice when:

• You want to focus on the person, place, or thing affected by the action, or the action itself;
• It is not important who or what did the action;
• You want to be impersonal or more formal.

Form the passive voice by:

• Turning the object of the active sentence into the subject of the passive sentence.
• Changing the verb to a passive form by adding the appropriate form of the verb "to be" and the past participle of the main verb.

NOTE: Consult with your professor about using the passive voice before submitting your research paper. Some strongly discourage its use!

Active and Passive Voice. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Diefenbach, Paul. Future of Digital Media Syllabus. Drexel University; Passive Voice. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina.  

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BASIL CAHUSAC DE CAUX

Forever Learning

• Mar 30, 2023

Combining research and storytelling: Using personal experiences as research data

I find it quite amusing that I would be writing this blog post to advocate for a research methodology as emotional and subjective as autoethnography. For over a decade, I was trained to conduct scientific research where objective answers were sought to solve problems. My research focused on examining a gene activated in athletes’ hearts to see if it could be a potential treatment for patients with heart failure. In this scientific lab-based environment, I had to ensure objectivity in my research so that I could help find a cure for heart failure. After completing my PhD, however, I ventured into humanities and social sciences and found that the research approach I had previously used would not work. In my new research space, I was interested in understanding people’s experiences, which meant embracing subjectivity.

Through my journey into qualitative research, I discovered the value of stories . As I have recently noted , I now believe that stories matter and that individual experiences should be valued. I also now advocate for researchers to allow individuals to tell their own stories, as they are the experts in their own experiences.

Researching personal experiences is becoming increasingly important as individuals’ stories are recognised as important sources of knowledge. Personal experiences can provide unique insights into social, cultural, and historical contexts and highlight the complexities of human experience. By researching personal experiences, we can uncover previously ignored or marginalised perspectives, challenge dominant narratives, and gain a deeper understanding of individual and collective identities. By valuing personal experiences as sources of knowledge, we can build more inclusive and diverse understandings of the world around us.

As I started researching personal experiences, I discovered a qualitative research method called autoethnography and soon realised its power . I now regularly recommend autoethnography to researchers. In particular, I often recommend it to PhD students to help them establish their research motivation and positionality in their thesis and more effectively engage in reflexivity during their research project. A well-written autoethnography can also be published, which helps these early career researchers by giving them the opportunity to build their publication record.

The rest of this blog post will explore autoethnography as a methodology. The information in this blog comes from my recently published book chapter, “ A Harmony of Voices ”. This book chapter was the methodology for our book Research and Teaching in a Pandemic World , where we used a form of autoethnography to allow PhD students, early career researchers, and more established researchers to tell the stories of their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using this methodology helped us show that the pandemic significantly affected the academic identity development of students and staff in higher education.

There are five main reasons why I think autoethnography is such a powerful qualitative research methodology.

1. Autoethnography requires researchers to purposely explore personal experiences to understand a particular culture or society. For example, I was recently able to use autoethnography to delve into a doctoral student’s journey as she discovered she was mentally unwell and link this with my experiences as a doctoral educator. By valuing the student’s knowledge of her mental illness and my understanding of the doctoral education system as a cultural insider, I was able to show how the culture of academia can contribute to the academic mental health crisis . Consequently, using autoethnography helped me demonstrate how educators can create more welcoming environments that help foster doctoral students’ wellbeing.

2. Autoethnography allows researchers to use personal experiences as data sources, narrating evocative stories and interpreting their significance. Researchers are also participants in their own studies, thereby valuing insider knowledge. The stories which are told often explore transformative experiences for the researcher, frequently taking the form of epiphanies that significantly influenced the author’s worldview. I believe that this allows researchers to provide more meaningful insights into complex phenomena compared with more traditional objective research methods. For example, I recently used Zoom to have a conversation with myself as I reflected on my past experiences (see Figure 1). During this reflexive Zoom conversation, I was able to delve into my personal experiences throughout my PhD , analyse my emotions and thoughts during that period, reflect on them presently, and determine how my previous experiences have impacted my current teaching philosophy and practice.

Figure 1. Screen capture of me having a conversation with myself on Zoom to collect data about my past experiences and how these influenced my current teaching philosophy and practice.

3. Autoethnography allows the researcher to use writing as a form of therapy for themselves and society more broadly. Researchers can give others hope and insight by engaging in this form of therapeutic writing. This can be seen, for example, in our book Wellbeing in Doctoral Education . In this book, several individuals used autoethnography to tell their stories of mental illness during their doctoral journey. Through their explorations of their own journeys, they were able to provide strategies for future students to maintain their wellbeing during their PhD.

4. Autoethnography empowers researchers as it allows them to embrace emotionality and uncertainty and highlight topics that may be considered hidden or taboo. Autoethnography allows researchers to connect with their own emotions and experiences and, in doing so, find their voice. It allows them to challenge the dominant narratives that often dominate research and to tell their own stories in their own words. It also allows them to connect with their research participants more authentically and meaningfully. By sharing their own experiences, they can create a space for others to share theirs, fostering a more equitable and inclusive research process. In this way, autoethnographers can advocate for social change to address perceived societal wrongs.

5. Autoethnography is a more accessible type of research for those outside of academia because it is written from personal experience in easy-to-understand language. The autoethnographer also does not merely narrate an experience for their audience. Instead, they try to engage the audience in the conversation so that the audience can understand experiences which may be different from their own.

Autoethnography, however, is not without its challenges. Some researchers critique it as a methodology because it is not scientific enough, while others say it is not artistic enough. I believe, however, that these critiques fail to see the value of combining both science and art when exploring complex phenomena. Autoethnography has allowed me to combine my scientific understanding of the research process with the ability to tell stories – both my own stories and those of my participants. In this way, I now see research writing as a way of communicating my findings to better understand myself and change the society in which I reside.

In conclusion, autoethnography has become an increasingly popular research methodology, particularly within the humanities and social sciences. Its emphasis on personal experiences, reflexivity, and storytelling allows for a deeper exploration of complex experiences and societies. While it may be a departure from more traditional scientific research methods, autoethnography allows researchers to learn about broader cultural and societal issues by exploring their personal experiences. As a researcher who was initially trained in a scientific environment, I can attest to the value of this approach, particularly when seeking to understand individuals’ experiences. Ultimately, by embracing the methodology of autoethnography, researchers can gain a deeper appreciation for the lived experiences of the individuals they are studying, leading to more nuanced and insightful research findings.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Dr Jennifer Cutri for introducing me to autoethnography as a research methodology. I would also like to acknowledge Open AI , which I used to generate the initial structure of this blog post.

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12 Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing

Marjorie Stewart

Marjorie Stewart’s essay “Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing” comes from the book Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 3 . Stewart uses the metaphor of weaving to demonstrate one way of using personal and narrative writing within academic essays. Rather than debate whether narrative is appropriate for academic writing, it addresses the question of when is it appropriate and how it can be done effectively, focusing on helping writers decide when the use of personal experience is appropriate for their purpose, how to make personal experience and narrative pull its weight in the essay, and how the ability to incorporate personal experience can translate into the ability to incorporate research.

The essay is structured as an example of the use of personal experience as well as a how-to guide. It contains a discussion of three students who incorporated narrative in their essays in three ways: as a structural frame, as an example when the research topic and personal experience overlap, and as a tool for discovery. Students will benefit from the peer-written examples as well as the use of the personal in the essay itself.

This reading is available below and as a PDF .

“Warp and Weft” uses the metaphor of weaving to demonstrate one way of using personal and narrative writing within academic essays. Rather than debate whether narrative is appropriate for academic writing, it addresses the question of when is it appropriate and how it can be done effectively, focusing on helping writers decide when the use of personal experience is appropriate for their purpose, how to make personal experience and narrative pull its weight in the essay, and how the ability to incorporate personal experience can translate into the ability to incorporate research. The essay is structured as an example of the use of personal experience as well as a how-to guide. “Warp and Weft” contains a discussion of three students who incorporated narrative in their essays in three ways: as a structural frame, as an example when the research topic and personal experience overlap, and as a tool for discovery. Students will benefit from the peer-written examples as well as the use of the personal in the essay itself.

Like many students, I worked my way through college with a retail job. I was luckier than many of my classmates: I found a job at a hip little boutique called Rebecca: A Gallery of Wearable Art in the trendy part of town. We carried many styles of hand-made clothing, jewelry, and accessories, but our most important merchandise was that made by Rebecca herself. Rebecca was a weaver who made hand-woven clothing and scarves. Her loom took up half of the back room and she wove while I waited on customers. When one fabric came off the loom, Anne, the seamstress, would begin to cut and sew while Rebecca set up the loom for the next design. She created her patterns then transferred them into a computer program that told her how to thread the yarn onto the loom to produce the pattern. She threaded the warp, the yarn that runs lengthwise, onto the loom. The weft (formerly known as woof) was placed on bobbins that fed the shuttle. The act of weaving was moving the shuttle with the weft through the warp to create the weave.

     So what, you might well ask. So what does this have to do with writing?

     Many of you have been taught not to use the word “I” in your academic writing; not to include anything that does not directly relate to that mysterious thing called a “thesis statement;” and not to include anything personal in your writing. The opening of this essay has broken all of those so-called rules – it contains a personal story, told in the first person, that at first glance seems unrelated to the topic of writing. However, in this essay, I – yes, “I” – am here to help you step away from those rules and to use personal stories effectively in your academic writing.

     The first consideration is whether using personal narrative is appropriate for your project. My story of working in Rebecca’s shop is useful here – it is intended to attract the attention of the readers and to establish and explain the extended metaphor of weaving. However, if I were writing an essay for my art history class about the evolution of weaving techniques and equipment, my story would seem out of place, as I only have experience with one step in that evolution, and that experience is of an observer rather than a participant.

     Your composition professor will likely talk to you about the rhetorical situation of any piece of writing. Stated simply (perhaps too simply), the rhetorical situation – the writer, the audience, and the purpose of the writing – affects the way the message is presented. In my hypothetical art history essay, the narrative would confuse the reader as to the purpose of the project and distract from the actual message of the paper. Often in writing classes it seems that your audience is specifically your professor and secondarily, perhaps, your classmates. Given the essays you will read about in this chapter, imagine the larger audiences that the student writers might have been addressing. Consider carefully whether personal narrative belongs in papers you are writing for history, biology, or business classes.

     In addition to your specific rhetorical situation, of course, you should always comply with your professors’ guidelines for each assignment. “No first-person narratives” is a clear statement that personal stories are not appropriate in that classroom.

     However, once you have established that your narrative is appropriate for your purpose and audience, what next? It is my purpose to help you incorporate narrative effectively, and to do that, I will use examples from three of my students in a first-year course, a course designed to help writers bridge the gap between high school and college writing. I am also using the example of this essay itself. Consider my story about Rebecca. I am using her weaving, her design of warp and weft, as a metaphor for the kind of writing this essay is going to talk about. I will also use the story as a frame – talking about weaving in the introduction, the conclusion, and perhaps in the transitions.

Personal Story As Frame

Using a personal story as a frame for your essay can be an effective way to draw your reader into your ideas and then to help them reinterpret those ideas in the end. Perhaps, like me, you’re working in a retail job. Perhaps it’s in a big box store instead of my artsy boutique, and you’re wondering if you’d be happier somewhere else, or you’re thinking, please, hand-woven clothing? You sell electronics, important, functional electronics.

     Just as I began with the story of my time at Rebecca, Lynn Z. Bloom began a conference presentation with a story from her classroom, and then commented, “Such stories, even brief ones, make us want to hear more, and to tell our own right back. They get us where they live. All writing is personal, whether it sounds that way or not, if the writer has a stake in the work” (1). One of my goals in telling the story of Rebecca is to make you want to hear more, and to make you want to tell your own. The human mind is a giant filing cabinet of stories, and when you hear one, you go to the appropriate file drawer – in this case R for Retail Employment – and pull out your own.

     There are many stories in that drawer, however, and it’s important that you choose the right ones. Because my metaphor of writing as weaving is central to my topic, I haven’t included lots of other great stories that came out of my time at Rebecca. I didn’t talk about the great gyros we used to get from Mike and Tony’s across the street, or about how the changing nature of the neighborhood made Rebecca worry whether she had chosen the right location for the store, or about the great artists who came in for trunk shows of their work. I focused on the loom, the weaving. And as the framework for this essay, I consider the story of the loom to be the warp, the yarn threaded on the loom in advance. I will thread my shuttle with the examples of my students’ writing and weave them through.

     The first example, Callie Harding’s “The Life of a Choir Director’s Child,” does the opposite. Her topic – the need for better education about religion in America – is the warp, and her childhood stories are woven though to show the reader how this topic became so important to her. Her stories give the readers context and help them connect with her.

Personal Story as Context

Telling a personal story can help your reader understand why you are writing about the topic you have chosen, and why you have come to care so deeply about it. Callie’s childhood experience of travelling from church to church where her parents worked as choir directors gave her an understanding of many religions, and she uses those stories to show how that has helped her be a more compassionate, thoughtful, and sensitive person.

     Her paper starts this way:

When I was a child, I didn’t spend much time on playgrounds or with the backyard swing set. I didn’t look forward to dance class or soccer practice every week. Instead, most of my time was spent in the pews of a church with a My Little Pony figure that was weaving its way through a jungle of hymnals and pew Bibles. My playground was a cathedral with the somewhat harmonious voices from the volunteer choir echoing off the stone floor over the magnificent pipe organ. At the front of the choir was either my mother or father . . . Yes, I was the child of choir directors. (Harding 1)

     Callie goes on to explain that her family moved from a non-denominational Christian church to a Jewish synagogue; the First Church of Christ, Scientist; a Catholic Church, and finally, a small Lutheran church. “What religion are we?” she asks. This is how she tries to answer her question:

My mother spent a while with the Hindu faith before marrying my father and converting to Mormonism. We are also deeply into our Native American background and practice their cultural and religious ceremonies. Add the fact that we had many friends from many religions and cultures and you can tell that I had one of the most openly religious households on the block. (Harding 1-2)

     Callie then moves very nicely into her research on how to encourage religious tolerance through education. She contrasts her experience in a fundamentalist Christian high school to a school district in Modesto, California where all ninth graders take a semester-long world religion course. She writes about the importance of helping all children understand and celebrate diversity of religion and points to her own experiences as an example of the positive effect this has on them. As part of her research, Callie interviewed her mother about her diverse upbringing. While her mother called it a “happy accident,” she also explained to Callie how she stood up to her very Mormon father to make sure Callie and her sister were free to find their own beliefs.

     As I was studying Callie’s essay, I took three highlighters and circled each paragraph: pink for Callie’s personal story; yellow for Callie’s presentation and discussion of her research, and green for the information from her interview with her mother. This is the result:

• Paragraphs 1-3 – Callie’s personal story
• Paragraphs 4-6 – discussion of research
• Paragraph 7 – Callie’s story
• Paragraphs 8-9 – discussion of research
• Paragraph 10 – Callie’s interview with her mother
• Paragraph 11 – Callie’s story
• Paragraph 12 – Callie’s interview with her mother
• Paragraphs 13-14 – Callie’s personal story

     It wasn’t until I did that exercise with the markers that I realized how smoothly Callie had incorporated the three elements of her writing. As I’ve done in this essay, Callie framed her story with the personal. She also used it within the essay to focus and reflect on her research findings. Marking your essay the same way can help you see if you have the right balance between the personal and the more traditionally academic portions of your paper.

     While Callie used her personal stories to provide context to the issue of religion in education, she also used her own background to show herself as an example of someone for whom a broad religious education proved beneficial. In “A Life Lost,” student Melynda Goodfellow used her personal story as an example.

Personal Story as Example

Melynda chose to write about teen suicide, certainly an important topic, but one that far too often leads to a patchwork of statistics and distant narratives, more a report than an essay with heart. Sadly, Melynda had reason to care deeply about her topic: her cousin Jared killed himself with an overdose of prescription pain medication.

     Melynda started her essay with a simple story of a typical Friday night, getting ready to go the high school football game, where her brother would be playing in the band. This night, however, was special, because her cousin had just moved into town and her boyfriend would be meeting him for the first time. Choosing to open with a typical activity – going to the football game – but giving it special meaning was particularly effective for Melynda. I encourage writers to ask themselves the first Passover question: Why is this night different from all other nights? This is the question asked by the youngest child at the beginning of the Seder to start telling the story of the Passover. It also serves the beginning writer well: If this night, this football game, isn’t special in any way, then it isn’t the story to use in your essay. Melynda’s football game is different from all others because her cousin will be there to meet her boyfriend.

     Although the atmosphere is festive, Melynda shows us with foreshadowing that this is not a typical Friday night lights story. She writes that Jared moved because “he wanted to get away from the lifestyle that he was living back home. He wanted a kind of fresh start.” She connects herself to the characters of her brother and her cousin through the band: she had been in band, her brother is performing with the band at the football game, and her cousin is excited about returning to school and joining the band himself. Throughout the narrative part of her essay, Melynda shows Jared as sad and desperate, yet looking forward to his fresh start.

     Melynda tells the story in a straightforward, chronological way from the evening of the football game through her cousin’s death and funeral. Her use of personal experience is different from mine and Callie’s because the majority of her paper is that narrative. The structure of her paper is very different: where Callie went back and forth between the story and the research, Melynda began with the story and introduced the research at the end. The first three pages of Melynda’s six-page essay are the story of her friendship with Jared that fall, and how she becomes his confidant. Pages four and five are the story of how she heard of his death. It is only at the end of her essay that she introduces the statistics that show that suicide is “the third leading cause of death in people ages 15 to 24” (Goodfellow 6). Her conclusion, shortly after that statistic, reads:

I never in a million years would have thought something like this would happen in my family. I knew that mental health problems run in the family, but I believed everyone knew where to get help. We knew that suicide wasn’t an option and that we had each other if nothing else. As tragic as it may sound, this event brought our whole family back together. Any quarrels or grudges anyone had seemed to dissipate that day. Ironically, one of the things that Jared wanted the most was for the family to just forget their differences and get along. (Goodfellow 9)

     This ending refocuses Melynda’s readers on the personal meaning of the impersonal statistic.

     In his book Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making , Gian Pagnucci writes, “I think, actually, that stories can help us get at the truth even if there isn’t a firm truth to be had.” (51) And in Writing to Change the World , Mary Phipher says:

Research shows that storytelling not only engages all of the senses, it triggers activity on both the left and the right sides of the brain . . . . People attend, remember, and are transformed by stories which are meaning-filled units of ideas, the verbal equivalent of mother’s milk. (11)

     Melynda works at getting at the true story of her cousin’s death, making meaning of it, even though there is no firm truth or solid meaning to be had there. The truth she arrives at, however, is more powerful than the “just the facts” approach because the story lingers with her readers in a way statistics can’t.

     Another thing Melynda does that makes her essay different from mine, and Callie’s, is her inclusion of dialogue. I think she makes especially good use of it in her essay, something that is often difficult for writers at all levels. Here she shows us how she learned of Jared’s death:

“What is it?” I said when I picked the phone up. “It’s about time you answered your phone! I’ve been calling you for over an hour,” my mom said. “Well?” “It’s Jared. He’s in the hospital. He overdosed.” “Oh, my God . . . Is he okay? I’ll be right there. I’m leaving work now.” “No. Don’t come here. There’s nothing you can do. He’s dead.” (Goodfellow 4)

     Recreating dialogue can be challenging – a year after her cousin’s death, can Melynda be certain that these were the exact words that she and her mother spoke? Probably not, but she can show her readers the tension in the moment – her mother’s anger that she didn’t pick up, her desire to be with Jared, and her mother’s postponing of the awful news. Dialogue also can be used to pick up the pace of the story – the light look of it on the page helps readers’ eyes move over it quickly, getting a lot of information from a few carefully-chosen words.

     There are significant structural differences between Melynda’s essay and Callie’s. Callie’s is split almost evenly between personal experience and research; Melynda’s is about 85% personal story. The third student, Ethelin Ekwa, uses personal story in an even larger portion of her essay, which is entitled “Ethelin Ekwa: An Autobiography.” Although the title might lead you to believe that the essay is only, or just, or simply, personal narrative, Ethelin uses the story of her life to explore her ethnic heritage, her life as a single mother, and her determination to make the most of her artistic and musical talents. She tells the story of her life as a way of understanding her place in the world at the time of the writing.

Personal Story as Discovery

Ethelin’s essay can be seen as an example of Donald M. Murray’ beliefs about writing: “We write to think – to be surprised by what appears on the page; to explore our world with language; to discover meaning that teaches us and may be worth sharing with others …. . . we write to know what we want to say.” (3). Although my students always write multiple drafts of all of their essays, Ethelin wrote more than usual – at least four significant revisions before the final draft that she submitted in her portfolio. She was a frequent visitor at our writers’ center as she worked through the paper. Somewhere in an intermediate draft, she found her frame: a quotation from Ani Difranco’s song “Out of Habit:” “Art is why I get up in the morning.” That idea led her Ethelin to her conclusion: “I cannot imagine a day without the ability to create in unconventional ways” (Ekwa 9). In the eight and a half pages in between, she tells the story of her life.

     In Callie and Melynda’s essays, there is a very clear separation between personal experience, research material, and the writers’ commentary on those elements. The weaving, to continue the metaphor, is done in larger blocks of color. Ethelin’s essay has a more subtle pattern. Every paragraph contains some detail of her life – where she was born, who her parents were, where she lived – but also has a reference to her life-long desire to be an artist. She talks about her work as a writer and poet; as a singer and musician; and as a photographer and visual artist.

     Ethelin’s background is intriguing – her parents moved from Cameroon, West Africa to France and then to Texas, where she was born, the youngest of five children. She has lived in Europe and Africa, and she went to school in France and Cameroon. Here is how she introduces herself in the second paragraph:

My birth name is Ethelin Ekwa. I am also known as Obsolete by my artist friends and as Krysty by my close personal friends. I am an artist, a mother, a photographer and a lover of all things. I am an American-born citizen with Cameroonian and French origins. I am 30 years old and I currently reside in North Braddock. (Ekwa 1)

     Ethelin’s identity is tied to her arts from the very beginning, and every story from her life is wrapped around those arts. When, at 22, she becomes a single mother, her priorities change, but she never gives up: “When I got pregnant, I put singing, painting, and drawing on hold . . . I had more pressing matters to take care of and there just was not time for art” (Ekwa 3). Soon, though, she tells us that she made a new friend who introduced her to digital photography, and by the time her daughter was two years old, she had her own photography business up and running.

     While Melynda chose one special night to tell about at the start of her essay, Ethelin chose many events from her life, all of them important, life-changing events. Reading Ethelin’s essay, I can almost see Rebecca’s shuttle flying back and forth across the loom, the turn at each side another event that pulls Ethelin back into the world of art. When the weaver turns the shuttle at the edge of the warp, the weft creates a finished edge that prevents the fabric from fraying or unraveling called a selvage. The turns in Ethelin’s story create a sense that her life, which is sometimes unplanned and chaotic, still has something that keeps it from unraveling, and that something is her artistic nature.

Tying Up Loose Ends

The examples from my students’ essays can help you understand how to use personal experience in your academic writing. But how do you know when to use it? When is it acceptable and appropriate? Gian Pagnucci asserts, “Narrative ideology is built on a trust in confusion, a letting go of certainty and clarity that can ultimately lead to understanding” (53); that stories have a “piercing clarity” (17), and that “the drive to narrate experience is, if not instinctive, then at the very least quintessentially human” (41). He also warns that the academic world is not always welcoming of personal experience. I know many of my colleagues are not willing to trust in confusion – their entire careers, and even their lives, have been built on the quest for knowledge and certainty.

     If your composition professor has asked you to read this chapter, it’s a pretty safe bet that you may use personal experiences in your writing for that class. Even in that setting, however, there are times when it is more effective than others. Using the examples of the essays I’ve quoted from and the guidelines given in the beginning of this chapter, here are some tips on when to use your personal experience in your essays:

• When, like Callie and Melynda, your experiences have inspired a passionate opinion on your topic
• When, like Ethelin, your personal experiences constantly point back to your central idea
• When, like me, your personal experiences provide a strong and ex- tended metaphor for your subject
• When, like all of the writers, your personal experience provides a structure or framework for your essay

The expression “tying up the loose ends” comes from weaving and other fabric arts. When the yarn in the shuttle is changed, the new yarn is tied to the old at the selvage. Those threads are later woven into the fabric so that they don’t show, and so that the connection is tight. When your rough draft is done, it’s time to take the fabric off the loom and make sure your weave is tight. At that point, ask yourself these questions to be sure you are using your experience appropriately and effectively in your essay:

• What percentage of your essay is personal experience, and how does that match up with the nature of the assignment? Callie’s essay was written in response to an assignment that required more research than the one Ethelin was responding to, so it included less personal writing.
• Have you included only the personal stories that directly relate to your topic, your attitude towards your topic, or your controlling idea?
• Are your selvages tight? Do the moves you make between personal story and research and analysis make sense, or is the fabric of your essay likely to unravel?
• Is the resulting pattern appropriate to your project? Are you working in large blocks of color, like Callie and Melynda, or the subtler tweed of Ethelin’s essay?

I started this essay in Rebecca’s shop and tried to weave the metaphor inspired there through this essay. In the process, I realized another advantage to using personal stories in academic writing: I hadn’t thought about Rebecca and Anne, about Mike and Tony’s gyros, about the bright creative atmosphere in the gallery and in the neighborhood for a long time. Accessing those stories from the filing cabinet in my brain was inspirational. My stories from Rebecca are mostly fun or funny. Your stories, like mine and the writers quoted here, are a mix of light and dark, funny and serious. I encourage you to open the file cabinet and find the stories that will make your readers remember similar times.

Works Cited

Bloom, Lynn Z. “That Way Be Monsters: Myths and Bugaboos about Teaching Personal Writing.” CCCC 51st Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, MN, Apr. 2000.

DiFranco, Ani. “Out of Habit.” Ani DiFranco , Righteous Babe Records, 1990. Ekwa, Ethelin. “Ethelin Ekwa: An Autobiography.” 3 Aug. 2009. Composition and Language I, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, student paper.

Goodfellow, Melynda. “A Life Lost.” 3 Aug. 2009. Composition and Language I, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, student paper.

Harding, Callie. “The Life of a Choir Director’s Child.” 3 Aug. 2009. Composi tion and Language I, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, student paper.

Murray, Donald M. A Writer Teaches Writing . Rev. 2nd ed. Cengage, 2003.

Pagnucci, Gian. Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making. Heinemann, 2004.

Pipher, Mary. Writing to Change the World . Riverhead Books, 2006.

the broader context in which communication is taking place

The Muse: Misunderstandings and Their Remedies Copyright © by Marjorie Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Using Evidence: Common Knowledge & Personal Experience

Common knowledge & personal experience.

Scholarly writing primarily relies on academic research as evidence. However, all writers bring previous knowledge to their writing, and Walden writers in particular might have years of experience in their field that they bring to their classroom writing. How to incorporate common knowledge and professional experience can cause confusion, since incorporating them inappropriately can create unintentional plagiarism .

• Writing About Common Knowledge & Personal Experience (video transcript)

Common Knowledge

Common knowledge is information or ideas that are widely known, accepted, and found in multiple places. Common knowledge is context dependent, meaning that something might be common knowledge to one audience but not another audience. If you are paraphrasing common knowledge , you do not need to cite that statement.

Let us look at a few statements and consider their context to see when they might be considered common knowledge:

Always consider your context and the audience you are writing for when determining whether a statement is common knowledge. Accidentally including a statement without a citation because you think it might be common knowledge can result in unintentional plagiarism . Ask your faculty if you are not sure, as your faculty can help guide you on what your audience is for an assignment and whether a statement is common knowledge for that audience.

Professional Experience

Many Walden students come with years of experience in their field, and you may find yourself writing about and researching topics you have engaged with in the past. The passion for and experience with the topics you are studying is one great advantage Walden students have.

Professional experience can cause a problem when students rely too heavily on their experience with a topic in their scholarly writing. Scholarly writing is meant to be informed by and supported by academic research, and so professional experience should not be the primary evidence you use for your ideas in your scholarly writing.

In fact, relying on professional experience too much or not clarifying when you are using professional experience in your scholarly writing can lead to questions about plagiarism. If you are writing a paper about handwashing practices for nurses, and throughout your paper you do not cite any sources, your faculty my interpret this lack of citations as passive plagiarism : Your faculty may think that you’re using evidence from sources but you just didn’t cite those sources. Although you know these ideas are based on your professional experience, your faculty may not, leading to confusion and possible misunderstandings.

We know that how and when to incorporate professional experience can be confusing if you are new to academic writing, and often students do not realize their approach could cause confusion. To avoid these issues and possible misunderstandings around plagiarism, we recommend three strategies:

• Use and Cite Evidence : Ensure you are adequately supporting your scholarly writing with academic evidence that is cited.
• Contextualize Professional Experience: If you do use professional experience to support your ideas, make it clear from context that you are doing so. Use phrasing like, “In my experience as a teacher…” or “I have found in my 10 years at my organization…” . These signal phrases help the reader know that the ideas that follow are based on your professional experience.
• Contact Your Faculty: Contact your faculty if you are not sure if professional experience is appropriate to use in your assignment or how to do so. Professional experience is more appropriate in some assignments more than others (e.g., a reflection paper versus a literature review). Your faculty can best guide you on how and when to include professional experience.

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• BMC Psychiatry

Lived experience research as a resource for recovery: a mixed methods study

1 School of Health Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW Australia

Katherine M. Boydell

2 Black Dog Institute, Sydney, NSW Australia

Francesca Coniglio

3 Mental Health Drug & Alcohol, Northern Sydney Local Health District, Sydney, NSW Australia

Trang Thuy Do

Leonie dunn.

4 St George and Sutherland Mental Health Services, South Eastern Sydney Local Health District, Sydney, NSW Australia

Katherine Gill

5 Consumer-Led Research Network, Sydney, NSW Australia

Helen Glover

6 Enlightened Consultants, Brisbane, Qld Australia

Monique Hines

Justin newton scanlan, barbara tooth.

7 Upfront Leadership, Sydney, NSW Australia

Associated Data

The dataset for the qualitative interviews analysed during the current study are not publicly available as they consist of audio files and transcripts from in-depth interviews which, even with pseudonyms, might potentially allow individual participants to be identified. Deidentified data from the quantitative analysis are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Lived experience research is conducted by people who have experience of mental health issues and is therefore better placed than more traditional research to illuminate participants’ experiences. Findings that focus on identifying enablers of recovery from a lived experience perspective have the potential to assist people in their recovery process. However, this lived experience research is often difficult to find, access and interpret. We co-produced user-friendly and engaging resources to disseminate findings from six lived experience research studies. This paper seeks to answer the research questions: a) Did exposure to lived experience research increase hopefulness for participants?; and b) How else did interacting with lived experience research resources influence participants’ lives?

Thirty-eight participants were introduced to four resources of their choosing by peer workers over a four-week period. The helpfulness of resources was evaluated using mixed methods, including a quasi-experimental analysis of change in hope, an anonymous survey and in-depth interviews.

Findings indicated that the resources promoted hope, but that increases in hopefulness may not be seen immediately. Other impacts include that the resources: encouraged helpful activities; provided a positive experience; increased valued knowledge; encouraged people to reflect on their journey and think constructively about mental health issues; helped people to feel less alone; and assisted people to explain their situation to others.

Conclusions

The research suggests the potential usefulness of lived experience research resources, presented in user-friendly formats, in the lives of people who experience mental health issues and implies a need to nurture this type of research.

Lived experience research in mental health is research that illuminates the perspectives and experiences of people who live with mental health issues and is conducted either by researchers with their own lived experience or in collaborative research teams that include people with lived experience [ 1 , 2 ]. This paper investigates the usefulness of lived experience research in the lives of people living with mental health issues.

The importance of lived experience research in mental health is increasingly recognised and usually conceptualised in terms of three major benefits. First, consumer rights activists, using the slogan of “nothing about us without us” have argued that inclusion in research is a human right and a social justice issue [ 3 ]. Second, it can produce better quality research by enhancing methodological sensitivity, data accuracy, validity of results, and overall relevance to service users e.g., [ 4 – 6 ]. Third, people with lived experience have reported deriving benefits from doing research such as satisfaction, skill development, empowerment, and hope [ 4 , 6 ]. Lived experience researchers are increasingly adopting leading roles in conceptualising and conducting research in mental health.

Findings from lived experience research have the potential to be helpful to people in their recovery journeys. Numerous studies have reported the benefits of learning from the wisdom, strategies, challenges and successes of others e.g., [ 7 ]. Hope, a critical component of recovery [ 8 ], is also a major benefit of being exposed to the stories and experiences of others in similar situations. A recent study examined the types of experiences that people living with mental health issues described as igniting and maintaining hope [ 9 ]. Two sources of hope were particularly relevant to lived experience research. First, hearing positive stories of others’ experiences was important. As one participant stated: “the consumers’ voice was hope and healing”. Second, hope was promoted by learning gained from others with lived experience, such as “the key tips and strategies that other peers discussed.”

Observing peers who are living well and reading or listening to individual narratives of recovery are important ways in which people learn from each other and derive hope. However, lived experience research has the potential to bring together the stories of a variety of different people to provide a range of ideas and a bigger picture on particular issues, thus contributing to an individual’s store of resources for recovery.

While the researchers were unable to locate research about the direct use of lived experience research by people living with mental health issues, our collective experience has indicated that many who are not themselves involved in user-led or collaborative research, do not even know that it exists, let alone how to access the findings. Little is known, therefore, about how useful people might find lived experience research in their daily lives.

Our research team, consisting of researchers with and without lived experience of mental health issues, set out to address this issue. As research is rarely presented for a lay readership, we developed a range of user-friendly formats to disseminate lived experience research findings to people living with mental health issues.

This paper seeks to answer the following research questions:

a) Did exposure to lived experience research increase hopefulness for participants?

b) How else did interacting with lived experience research resources influence participants’ lives?

Study design

We collaborated with peer workers and final year design students to develop a suite of six lived experience research resources. These were introduced to consumers by peer workers, and the intervention was evaluated using a mixed methods approach. A mixed methods approach enabled the research questions to be addressed from different perspectives, providing a fuller picture than could be gained using a single method [ 10 , 11 ]. A quasi-experimental evaluation of hope sought to provide relatively objective evidence of the impact of the intervention; an anonymous survey provided comparable participant ratings of the intervention’s impact in expected areas; and qualitative interviews enabled inductive identification of experiences of most importance to participants. Ethical approval was obtained from the LHD’s Human Research Ethics Committee. Reporting adheres to guidelines for Good Reporting of A Mixed Methods Study (GRAMMS) in health service research [ 12 , 13 ].

We reviewed the literature to identify lived experience research papers in which the findings were directly relevant to the daily lives of people living with mental health issues. We consulted with peer workers and others with lived experience to identify topics most likely to be of interest to users. Through these processes, we identified six research studies to develop into user-friendly resources. Translating these began with a conference workshop [ 14 ] and a full day design lab focused on design thinking [ 15 ]. These were attended by service users, peer workers, researchers, clinicians and final year design students from the University of Technology Sydney. After the design lab, the ideas and prototypes were taken up by the design students for further development. They designed and produced the resources with regular input on content and format from the research team and peer workers. The resources are summarised in Table  1 . Detailed descriptions and photographs are provided in the supplementary materials.

Intervention

During peer worker training, each of the finalised resources was examined by peer workers and the research team, who together reached consensus on how each resource would be introduced to consumers. This was flexible however, enabling peer workers to adapt their explanations and activities to be most appropriate to the needs of individual participants. The agreed upon protocols were developed into a peer worker manual.

In recognition that different content is relevant to different people, participants were asked to select four of the six resources. Peer workers introduced participants to one resource per week for 4 weeks. For most resources, the peer workers showed each participant the resource, went through some of it in detail, explained how it was designed to be used, then gave it to the participant to keep and use in whatever way they preferred.

Sampling and recruitment

The project was carried out in one Local Health District (LHD) in Sydney, Australia. The LHD employs 18 peer workers over three inpatient and four community sites. The project employed five of these peer workers to recruit and provide the intervention to clients of these services. Contacts between peer workers and participants took place wherever peer workers normally met with their clients, for example on an inpatient unit, at a community mental health service, or in a community venue such as a coffee shop.

Eligible participants were: clients of the LHD; able to speak and read English; and able to provide informed consent. Clients were excluded if they were considered by their peer worker or primary clinician to be unable to fully understand the procedures, risks and benefits of participation due to acute illness. We planned to recruit 30–40 participants as previous research indicated that this sample size was sufficient to show change [ 21 ].

Recruitment

Peer workers explained the study to all eligible clients that they saw in the course of their work. If a client was interested, the peer worker gave them written project materials (flyer, participant information sheet and consent form), offered to read through the forms with them, and answered any questions. Clients were given several days to read and think about the project and were invited to call the Chief Investigator to discuss the project further if they wished. In several days, the peer worker recontacted the client and, if they wished to participate, obtained written informed consent. Peer workers emphasised that the research was voluntary, participants could withdraw at any time, and participation or refusal would have no impact on their other interactions with peer workers or health service. Consent was considered not as a one-off event, but an ongoing negotiation between peer workers and participants [ 22 ], where the primary concern was participants’ well-being. Therefore, at each research-related interaction, peer workers obtained verbal confirmation that the client was happy to continue taking part. Participants were given a $50 gift voucher after study completion to thank them for their time.

Allocation to groups

After providing informed consent, participants were allocated to group A or group B to determine when they would receive the intervention. In most cases this was done using a coin toss, however, the staggered timing of recruitment and other peer worker commitments made it necessary for 13 participants to be allocated based on logistical issues. This also meant that the groups were uneven, with 25 participants allocated to group A and 13 participants allocated to group B.

Data collection

Hopefulness was measured using the Herth Hope Index (HHI). The HHI is a 12-item scale that was developed for clinical populations, takes just a few minutes to do, has good psychometric properties [ 23 ] and has been used with a variety of different clinical groups in at least seven languages e.g., [ 24 ]. It includes three factors of: temporality and future ; positive readiness and expectancy ; and interconnectedness . Participants completed the HHI at three timepoints. Group A received the intervention between T1 and T2; group B received the intervention between T2 and T3.

Participants were asked to complete an anonymous online evaluation survey once only, after they had received their four resources (at T2 for group A and T3 for group B). This consisted of a series of fixed-choice questions about each resource including its impact on various aspects of participants’ lives and their overall experience of the project.

Semi-structured interviews [ 25 ] were conducted after participants had received the resources and completed T2 (group A) or T3 (group B). They were conducted by Author 8, who had not been involved in the intervention. An interview guide was used containing open ended questions. The interview guide was used flexibly, allowing for conversational flow and follow-up questions to gather detail about issues that were of importance to participants [ 25 ]. Participants were asked for feedback on the individual resources and about the impact of the resources on them. Questions included: ‘Do you think you got any benefits out of being a participant in this study?’ ‘Was there anything that you didn’t like about being in the study?’ and ‘Did anything change for you as a result of engaging with the resources?’

Interviews were conducted in person in a private room in the health service or, where the participant preferred, over the phone. Interviews lasted between 7 and 30 min, averaging 17 min. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim for detailed analysis. Participants were provided with both a copy of their transcript and a summary of findings and invited to comment, however, no participants provided additional feedback.

Data analysis

Herth hope index.

Total scores were calculated for each factor ( temporality and future ; positive readiness and expectancy ; and interconnectedness ) and the overall total score. To examine change over time, paired t -tests were completed between Time 1 and Time 2; Time 2 and Time 3 and Time 1 and Time 3 for all participants as well as for Group A and Group B participants separately. Statistical analysis was conducted using SPSS.

Anonymous survey

Frequencies were calculated and presented in visual format to understand the range of responses.

Qualitative interviews

Data from participant interviews were analysed using interpretative content analysis (ICA). This hybrid method combines qualitative and quantitative techniques [ 26 , 27 ], enabling inductive identification of themes as well and reporting of the frequency of those themes [ 26 , 28 ].

The first step in ICA is inductive coding. Constant comparative analysis (CCA) was employed, as it is a systematic, rigorous, and well-established coding technique which minimises the risk of omission of data (Charmaz, 2014). Segments of data, such as phrases or sentences were examined and allocated one or more code names to reflect the underlying concepts they represented. Each new segment of data was compared to others to identify underlying similarities. For example, the data segments ‘just because you are unwell at times doesn’t mean staying unwell all the time’ and ‘Hope changed for me, it gave me a different angle of hope’ were found to represent the same concept: gaining hope. New data were also compared to existing codes and either added to these, or new codes were developed. Codes were compared to each other and refined by merging similar codes or grouping codes into higher level categories. NVivo computer software [ 29 ] was used to manage the data. Authors 1 and 4 independently coded the first three interviews, then met to discuss coding decisions and reach consensus. Thereafter, the authors met regularly to discuss and review coding decisions. These discussions were aimed at enhancing interpretive rigour, ensuring participants’ viewpoints were faithfully represented. When all interviews had been coded, and the coding list finalised, the transcripts were re-examined to ensure comprehensive coding [ 26 ]. NVivo was then used to identify the number of participants who discussed each theme.

Integration

When data from each component of the study had been analysed, the findings were compared to each other. Authors responsible for analysing different sections (primarily authors 1, 4 and 9) presented findings to the other authors and, through close discussion, questioning, and returning repeatedly to the data, derived an integrated interpretation of the results.

Participants

Sixty-four people were invited to be part of the study and 43 agreed to participate. Five participants (2 from group A and 3 from group B) withdrew from the study after the first assessment and did not receive any of the resources. No participants withdrew between receiving the first resource and the post intervention assessment. Participants were not required to provide explanation for not participating or withdrawing but reasons mentioned included: “limited time/too busy”; “not interested”; “couldn’t be bothered”; “school commitments”; “mental health is okay”; and “anxious”. Thirty-four completed all three assessments, while four participants completed only the pre and post intervention assessments. Thirty participants completed the anonymous survey and 33 participated in the qualitative interviews. Table  2 presents the characteristics of people who participated in the study ( n  = 38).

Characteristics of participants

a 13 participants reported 2 or 3 diagnoses

While our intention was to recruit participants from inpatient and community settings, 36 of the 38 participants were living in the community. This was due to logistical and staff issues rather than potential inpatient participants declining.

The findings are presented below for each of the two research questions. During analysis, the impact of the research context emerged as a factor to be considered in the interpretation of the other findings. Therefore, findings around this issue are also presented.

Does exposure to lived experience research increase hopefulness?

Data about the impact on hopefulness of engaging with the resources comes from all three data sources: the HHI, anonymous survey, and qualitative interviews.

Participant responses to the HHI are summarised in Fig. ​ Fig.1. There 1 . There were no significant differences between Time 1 and Time 2 for Group A. However, significant improvements were seen in temporality and future (t = 3.4; p  = 0.003), interconnectedness (t = 2.7; p  = 0.013) and HHI Total Scores (t = 3.1; p  = 0.006) from Time 2 to Time 3 and in temporality and future (t = 2.3; p  = 0.030) and HHI total (t = 2.6; p  = 0.019) from Time 1 to Time 3. There were no significant differences between time points for Group B. For the combined data set, significant improvements were seen in temporality and future (t = 3.1; p  = 0.004), interconnectedness (t = 2.5; p  = 0.018) and HHI Total Scores (t = 3.1; p =  0.004) from Time 2 to Time 3 and in temporality and future (t = 2.8; p  = 0.008), interconnectedness (t = 2.2; p  = 0.035) and HHI total (t = 2.4; p  = 0.023) from Time 1 to Time 3 (Fig. ​ (Fig.1 1 ).

Change in Herth Hope Index over time: all participants and by group allocation

In the anonymous survey, between 80 and 91% of participants who chose each resource reported that it had caused some improvement in their beliefs about their future or recovery, indicating an increase in hope. Responses for each resource are shown in Fig.  2 .

Has accessing the resource made a difference in your life in terms of your beliefs about your future or recovery?

In the qualitative interviews, more than half of the participants (17/33) described how interacting with the resources made them feel more hopeful, positive and empowered. For example, P13 stated, regarding the meaningful activities magazine, that “I just had a little bit of a light bulb moment saying, ‘Well, these things help these people feel better and all these ideas’, so it gave me a bit of understanding and hope for my future.” Similarly, P12, commenting generally about the resources, said that “Seeing other people’s experiences, and that’s really helped to know ‘I can do that too’.” It should be noted that participants were not asked about hope specifically; the theme of hope emerged in response to general questions about the impact of the resources.

How else did interacting with lived experience research resources influence participants’ lives?

It can be seen from Fig.  3 that an overwhelming majority of participants in the anonymous survey found each of the resources helpful, with between 46 and 75% of people finding each resource ‘very helpful’ or ‘extremely helpful’. Further, between 85 and 100% of people, depending on the resource, said that they would recommend it to other people.

Participant perceptions of resources

Participants also indicated that they perceived a positive impact of the resources on the specific aspects of their lives that were measured. For each resource, 60 to 80% of participants reported it had made a small improvement or a big improvement in their lives. Results are summarised in Fig.  4 .

Has accessing the resource made a difference in your life in terms of

The in-depth interviews allowed participants to state their perspectives on the impact of the resources that mattered to them. Overall, 30/33 participants stated, when asked specifically, that they had benefited from being part of the study. Of the remaining three, two answers were unclear and one was not sure if they had benefited. This participant, P31, also reported that nothing had changed for them as a result of the study. With the exception of P31, all other participants described some positive impact from interacting with the resources in subsequent discussion.

The positive impacts people described fell into a number of broad categories, described and exemplified in Table  3 . Counts are the total number of people who mentioned experiencing this impact. As noted above, these impacts emerged as responses to open questions, so a participant not mentioning an impact does not guarantee that they did not experience it.

Self-perceived positive impact of resources

Negative impacts

While most of the impacts participants described were, as seen above, very positive, a few participants reported negative impacts. In the anonymous survey, three people reported that accessing a specific resource had a negative impact in one or two of the specified areas, as seen in Fig. ​ Fig.4. 4 . To contextualise these responses, they were considered alongside each participant’s responses to other questions and are reported in Table  4 .

Participants reporting negative impacts in the anonymous survey

The qualitative interviews also revealed some negative impacts of the resources and provided more detailed information. Three participants reported experiencing some distress from interacting with the resources. It is not possible to tell whether these are the same participants who reported the negative impacts in the anonymous survey. Two participants, while reporting a positive overall experience with the project, said that they had found the content of specific resources distressing because of their past experiences and life circumstances.

P26: Just some of the recommendations [from the hope box] felt like a stab in the gut. Something that I couldn't do in my own life … the one about spending time with friends because I felt that I'd lost friends during my hospital stay .

P19: Personal medicine was, I didn't want to use at all. I just didn't anticipate it. I just, I actually had an upset because I'm an astrologer. I have my own personal way of looking at life … I don't want to have more psychology stuff .

P13: Some of what the participants were experiencing, I experienced those symptoms and I thought it is upsetting. But with what they've set their hope in things to do, it also made me think, well, then I can still feel hopeful about the future .

Impact of the research context

Participants in the qualitative interviews reported that they enjoyed being part of the research project. Findings from the anonymous survey supported this; in response to the question “Overall, how would you describe your experience of participating in the study?”, 18 participants (60%) reported a very positive experience, 10 (33%) gave a ‘quite positive’ response, and two (7%) were neutral. No participants reported a negative experience.

These positive experiences may not, however, have been about the resources alone. Ten people specifically mentioned that they had found being part of the research process a valuable and affirming experience. They appreciated being asked for their opinions about the resources and valued being able to contribute to a piece of research that they saw as worthwhile. Some reported being pleased to know that people with lived experience were doing research and found this hope inspiring.

P25: I really valued being able to, like, participate and do something worthwhile .

P15: I felt stronger because of it, like there's people that care and people that are making an effort to try and help and improve the lives of others .

P26: I think it's helped a lot with my recovery. Engaging with the materials and trying to make them the best that they can be .

The responses of fourteen additional participants to a question about what had motivated them to be in the study, also suggested positive feelings about the research process. Six of these reported that they had agreed to participate in the project because of a desire to make a positive contribution to their community and to the mental health system, saying things like “I felt that maybe I can make a difference for other people like me” (P28). A further six were attracted to it as a piece of research. P29, for example “was interested in the type of research”, while for P27 it was “because I believe in research”. Two more participants wanted their voice to be heard, saying, for example: “I thought it would be good to sort of have my own opinion put out there” (P20).

Four participants spontaneously expressed the hope that the project would continue into the future.

P14: I just hope something, you guys are able to elaborate on, give more of it, the research, to people. I think it's really good, because it could save someone's life. So, I just think, just keep going with it .

This study is the first to examine the potential impacts of accessing lived experience research for people living with mental health issues. Overall, the findings suggest that lived experience research, presented in accessible formats, can result in positive experiences and outcomes.

Initially, the results obtained from the HHI appeared counter-intuitive. The original hypothesis was that participants would demonstrate improved hope between times 1 and 2, for group A and between times 2 and 3 for group B (i.e., that hope scores would increase immediately after engaging with the resource). This was not the case. Yet results from both the anonymous survey and the qualitative interviews indicated that many participants did find engaging with the resources to be hope inspiring. The significantly increased HHI scores between post-intervention and follow-up for group A could suggest that more time is required before the impact of the resources is seen in relation to hopefulness, possibly to integrate learnings from the resources into everyday life. Perhaps if group B had completed the HHI a month following engaging with the resources (i.e., 1 month after Time 3), then significant changes may have been observed. The idea that changes in hope may not be immediate is supported by findings from a recent systematic review of self-management interventions for people living with severe mental illness [ 30 ]. This review found no significant difference in change in hope scores between treatment and control groups at the end of treatment (2 studies, n  = 389, p  = 0.07) but a significant difference favouring the intervention group at follow-up (3 studies, n  = 967, p  = 0.03).

It is also possible that the hope scores for Time 1 were artificially inflated through the process of recruitment and consent relating to the research project. Previous research has found that two experiences that contribute to hope are: feeling respected, listened to and believed; and contributing or helping others [ 9 ]. Our qualitative data suggests that people may have derived hope from finding out about lived experience research and being asked to take part in the research project. People felt that their views and experiences were being valued and could see that by participating in the project they were contributing to something that may help others in the future. It may well be that levels of hope, if measured before the project was explained to participants (a hypothetical possibility only) may have been lower, suggesting that the change between Time 1 and Time 2 that relates to the resources may be underestimated. Given that hope is an overall feeling about life, which is influenced by many factors, the finding that hopefulness increased overall within the short timeframe of our small study suggests a potential benefit of lived experience research that should be further investigated.

While participants’ reports of the impact of the lived experience resources on their lives were very positive, there were a couple of instances where a participant reported a negative impact. This was despite the involvement of peer workers and other people with lived experience in resource development and our efforts to present positive and empowering perspectives. In each case, the negative experience did appear to be within the context of a wider positive experience with the resources. However, given that every individual’s situation and history is unique, it may be impossible to ensure that a resource will never cause distress. Further, short term discomfort may sometimes be ultimately productive. Shifts in perspectives and understandings can often involve tension and conflict as people grapple with new ways of thinking and what these might mean for their previously held stories e.g., [ 31 ]. The findings suggest the importance of involving, in dissemination of such resources, peer workers or others who have a relationship with the person and are experienced in dealing with these kinds of issues, and potential distress. For people who are vulnerable, it may be advisable for peer workers to go through the resource with them, rather than presenting it as a stand-alone resource, while for others it may be advisable to check in with people about their reactions. This issue and the role of peer workers is discussed in detail elsewhere [Authors, in preparation].

When searching for research to use for this study, it was more difficult than anticipated to find appropriate studies. This was for two main reasons. First, there are no standard keywords to identify lived experience research and authors do not always declare their lived experience status. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the latter may be a reflection of stigma and potential discrimination in publishing. Second, we found that only a small minority of lived experience research suggested implications that could be used directly in people’s daily lives. Rather, most was aimed at increasing the understanding or changing the behaviour of health professionals and policy makers [ 32 ]. This type of research is clearly important. However, the current study highlights the potential usefulness of lived experience research focused on facilitating positive knowledge, attitudes and strategies for services users. It suggests the need for funding bodies and publishers to support lived experience research that will produce findings that can be used directly in people’s daily lives. The current study contributes to knowledge translation by highlighting a strategy that addresses the problem of accessing the evidence base and rendering that evidence base user friendly [ 33 ].

This study has several limitations. As with any study relying on volunteers, it is possible that participants were, at the outset, more positively inclined toward lived experience research than those who declined to participate. Peer workers may also have inadvertently differentially approached people they thought would enjoy or benefit from the resources. The sample size was quite small so, for the analysis of change in hope, it is possible that some real differences may not have been identified. A further limitation of the study is that 36 of the 38 participants were living in the community. While peer workers believed that many of the resources would be useful in inpatient settings, logistical and staff issues meant that recruitment was primarily from the community. Future research is needed to confirm the findings of this study with a wider sample, including people in a variety of mental health settings.

It should be acknowledged that this study did not compare resources developed from lived experience research to similar resources developed from other research that was designed to illuminate lived experience perspectives but was not conducted by researchers with their own lived experience. Therefore, while a number of participants expressed positive feelings about the research being done by people with lived experience, it is still unclear to what extent the lived experience authorship was critical to participants’ engagement with the resources.

It is also important to recognise that participants engaged with the resources, not simply as part of their everyday interactions with their peer workers, but in the context of a research project. Participants’ positive experiences with being part of the research project may have affected their overall reactions to the resources. It was impossible to disentangle participants’ experiences of the resources themselves from their experiences of being a participant whose opinions and experiences were being sought for a research study which ultimately aimed to help improve the lives of other people who experience mental health issues. The authors are currently designing a project to investigate the use of the resources in peer workers’ routine practice. By offering resources and training to a large sample of peer workers, then allowing them to use the resources where they feel it is appropriate, we will get a clearer sense of the usefulness of these resources in everyday practice.

Many benefits have been acknowledged in recent years of mental health research being conducted by or in collaborations including researchers with lived experience, for both the researchers and the research itself e.g., [ 1 , 6 ]. The current research indicates that lived experience research, when brought to their attention and presented in user-friendly formats, also has the potential to provide direct benefits to people living with mental health issues. By advocating for lived experience research and sharing the findings in accessible ways, researchers, peer workers and others can support people living with mental health issues to develop new knowledge that they can use for their self-empowerment, recovery and wellbeing.

Supplementary information

Acknowledgments.

We acknowledge the University of Technology Sydney students who provided their design skills for the resource development: Angus Armstrong, Emily Choi, Imogen Karp, Max Mamo, Bailey Tinta and Lilliah Woodham. We are indebted to our amazing research assistants, the peer workers from SESLHD who helped develop the resources and delivered the intervention: Alise Blayney, Nathan Clissold, Candice Fuller, Darren Wagner and Cheryl Wittingslow. Thanks also to the other peer workers and people with lived experience who provided helpful input and feedback about the project and resources as they developed. Finally, we sincerely thank our research participants, who gave up their time to be part of the study and provided us with their insightful feedback.

Abbreviations

Authors’ contributions

Study conception: AH,KB,KG,HG,BT; Study design: AH,KB,FC,KG,HG,BT,JNS; Site access, ethics and governance management and research assistant support: FC,LD; Research assistant supervision and research management: MH, AH; Data collection: MH + research assistants; Data analysis and interpretation: AH, TD, MH, JNS. Manuscript preparation: AH; critical revision: KB, FC, KG, HG, MH, JNS, BT. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

This research was funded by One Door Mental Health, through their Research Trust Fund. The funder was not involved with study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or publication.

Availability of data and materials

Ethics approval and consent to participate.

Ethical approval was obtained from the South Eastern Sydney Local Health District Human Research Ethics Committee (Approval #18/144). Participants provided written informed consent to participate.

Consent for publication

Competing interests.

The authors declare they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information accompanies this paper at 10.1186/s12888-020-02861-0.

Princeton Correspondents on Undergraduate Research

Tips for Writing about Your Research Experience (Even if You Don’t Think You Have Any)

If you’re someone who hasn’t yet done formal research in a university setting, one of the most intimidating parts of the process can be simply getting your foot in the door. Just like the way your options can seem very limited when applying for your first job, asking for a research position when you have no “experience” can seem discouraging — maybe even to the point of causing you to question whether you should apply in the first place. With that being said, there are some simple tips you can employ when applying for research positions to highlight the link between your existing interests and the work of the position for which you are applying.

First things first: tailor not just your cover letter (for applications that ask for it) but your resume to the position for which you are applying. Even if you’re just sending a casual email to a professor to ask about the research that they’re doing, as a rule, it never hurts to attach your resume. I also like to think that submitting a resume even without being asked to shows that you’re serious about doing research, and have taken the time to put together a thoughtful inquiry into a position. If you’ve never written a cover letter or resume before, don’t fret. The Center for Career Development has some great online resources to help you create one from scratch. If you are looking for more individualized help, you can also schedule an appointment to get one-on-one feedback on your application at any stage in the writing process.

One of the things that I’ve found, however, is that the single-page format of a resume often isn’t enough space to include all of the information about every single thing you’ve ever done. Rather than trying to jam as many impressive accomplishments as you can onto a page, your goal should be to create a resume that gives a cumulative sense of your interests and experiences as they relate to the position for which you are applying. One of my favorite ways to do this is to create a “Research” section. “But Kate, what if I don’t have any research experience?,” you ask. Remember that paper you wrote about a painting by Monet in your favorite class last semester? Write the title down, or even a sentence or two that summarizes your main argument. The art museum you’re hoping to do research at will love knowing that your interest in their current exhibition on Impressionism is rooted in classes you’ve taken and the projects you’ve done in them, no matter how new you may be to a topic. Your interest in a specific research position has to come from somewhere, and your resume is an important part of demonstrating this to others.

What I would like to reassure you of is that it’s normal to be an undergraduate with very little research experience. The people reading your application —whether it be for an official program or even if it’s just a friendly email with a few questions— know that you are a student and will probably be excited to offer you guidance on how to get involved with more specific research projects even if all you have to offer at this point is enthusiasm for the topic. Working in a lab or with a professor on a research project is an opportunity designed to help you learn above all else, so it’s ok if you don’t know what you’re doing! It goes without saying that having little experience will make the final result of your research experience all the more worthwhile because of the potential to gain knowledge in ways you haven’t even imagined.

— Kate Weseley-Jones, Humanities Correspondent

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How can I use my own personal experiences as a reference in my research paper?

It is very tempting to want to use things that we know based on our own personal experiences in a research paper. However, unless we are considered to be recognized experts on the subject, it is unwise to use our personal experiences as evidence in a research paper. It is better to find outside evidence to support what we know to be true or have personally experienced.

If it is not possible to find outside evidence, then you will have to construct your paper in such a way as to show your reader that you are an expert on the topic. You would need to lay out your credentials for the reader so that the reader will be able to trust the undocumented evidence that you are providing. This can be risky and is not recommended for research based papers. But even if you do use your own experiences, you would not add yourself to your References page.

Sometimes you will be assigned to write a paper that is based on your experiences or on your reaction to a piece of writing, in these instances it would be appropriate to write about yourself and your personal knowledge. However, you would still never cite yourself as a source on your References page. 

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Is it okay to discuss personal experiences or observations in literature review?

Is it okay to discuss personal experiences or observations in literature review as long as they are relevant and contribute to the presentation of the summary of literature?

In other words, I am not intending to reference or cite any of my experiences as a source, but rather, I am seeking to use my experiences to essentially add to the research story.

For instance,

The Blah Blah theory by Smith (2010) suggests A, B, and C. I experienced event M and I observed event N, which may potentially be manifestations of the phenomenon described in the Blah Blah theory, with event M being a possible example of A and event N being an example of C.

Something to this extent.

Many of the papers I have read primarily use examples from their studies or hypothetical scenarios to explain models/theories, but I have only ran across personal experience examples in textbooks and not in academic review papers or theses.

• writing-style
• literature-review

• Maybe its just a matter of taste, but I prefer to read articles/thesis that are "streamlined" and not the story with personal experience. (Don't get me wrong, I also enjoy to read stories about research and failed attempts, but not as articles or thesis, but, e.g. as blog post or in popular science books.) –  Dirk Commented Mar 28, 2017 at 7:04
• Can you put the personal anecdote in as a footnote or endnote? –  trikeprof Commented Mar 29, 2017 at 13:21

Although you didn't quite ask it this way, I see two parts to your question, and I will offer answers accordingly: "Is it okay to discuss personal experiences or observations in academic writing ?" and "Is there any difference when it comes to literature reviews?"

Is it okay to discuss personal experiences or observations in academic writing ?

Although it is controversial (some people will tell you never to include personal experiences), I think there is a place for personal experiences. But first, you need to understand why this is generally frowned on.

Everyone has personal experiences and everyone has different ways to interpret them. Anyone can write a magazine or blog article sharing their personal experiences. That's just their opinion, which the reader could take as good or bad. What separates an academic article from such opinions is that academic writing is usually expected to be fairly objective (tries to take a disinterested third-party perspective) and critical (takes nothing at face value, but tries to dig under the surface to understand what is really going on from multiple non-obvious perspectives). (One notable exception to this is critical social theory, which does not necessarily try to be objective, but nonetheless strongly emphasizes being critical.)

So, where do personal experiences fit in here? Most of the time, they are not objective (by definition) and all too often, they are insufficiently critical. This is why they are often frowned on. However, I believe they could be helpful and acceptable if the writer considers their own personal experiences this way: "What makes my personal experience more outstanding than other random personal experiences related to this phenomenon?" If there is nothing particularly outstanding about it (e.g. it merely serves to illustrate the point, as do other people's experiences), then it is best not to mention it, since such a mention would weaken an otherwise strong academic argument. But if it is unique or original (e.g., the entire study is propelled by the fact that the writer's personal experiences contradict the dominant scholarly discourse), then it is definitely worth mentioning. However, in such cases, the writer should try to describe their experience as objectively as possible and should be critical in not accepting their own interpretations of their experience at face value. When presented properly, such personal experiences can strengthen the credibility of the writer.

Is there any difference when it comes to literature reviews?

I believe the principle I laid out for academic writing in general also applies to literature reviews. However, there are two levels or two aspects to a literature review that you need to distinguish in this case:

Including your personal experiences as part of the "literature" being reviewed: NO. Your personal experiences are not "literature". "Literature" means published works (by "published" I include grey literature such as working papers; I also include non-scholarly practitioner publications). It does not include unpublished, unwritten anecdotes. That is at best to be considered primary research, which is never part of "literature" being reviewed in a literature review. (Don't misunderstand me; you are certainly free to supplement a literature review with original primary research if you want to, but you just have to clearly distinguish that from the "review" part of the article or chapter.)

Including your personal experiences as part of the introduction or discussion of your literature review: In this case, since you are clearly not presenting your own experiences as part of the "literature" being reviewed, then my comments above apply. I see no problem with this if it is done properly. But again, this is controversial; "controversial" means that your supervisor or journal editor might disagree, and so you might have to drop it regardless.

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Methodology

• What Is Qualitative Research? | Methods & Examples

What Is Qualitative Research? | Methods & Examples

Published on June 19, 2020 by Pritha Bhandari . Revised on June 22, 2023.

Qualitative research involves collecting and analyzing non-numerical data (e.g., text, video, or audio) to understand concepts, opinions, or experiences. It can be used to gather in-depth insights into a problem or generate new ideas for research.

Qualitative research is the opposite of quantitative research , which involves collecting and analyzing numerical data for statistical analysis.

Qualitative research is commonly used in the humanities and social sciences, in subjects such as anthropology, sociology, education, health sciences, history, etc.

• How does social media shape body image in teenagers?
• How do children and adults interpret healthy eating in the UK?
• What factors influence employee retention in a large organization?
• How is anxiety experienced around the world?
• How can teachers integrate social issues into science curriculums?

Table of contents

Approaches to qualitative research, qualitative research methods, qualitative data analysis, advantages of qualitative research, disadvantages of qualitative research, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about qualitative research.

Qualitative research is used to understand how people experience the world. While there are many approaches to qualitative research, they tend to be flexible and focus on retaining rich meaning when interpreting data.

Common approaches include grounded theory, ethnography , action research , phenomenological research, and narrative research. They share some similarities, but emphasize different aims and perspectives.

Note that qualitative research is at risk for certain research biases including the Hawthorne effect , observer bias , recall bias , and social desirability bias . While not always totally avoidable, awareness of potential biases as you collect and analyze your data can prevent them from impacting your work too much.

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Each of the research approaches involve using one or more data collection methods . These are some of the most common qualitative methods:

• Observations: recording what you have seen, heard, or encountered in detailed field notes.
• Interviews:  personally asking people questions in one-on-one conversations.
• Focus groups: asking questions and generating discussion among a group of people.
• Surveys : distributing questionnaires with open-ended questions.
• Secondary research: collecting existing data in the form of texts, images, audio or video recordings, etc.
• You take field notes with observations and reflect on your own experiences of the company culture.
• You distribute open-ended surveys to employees across all the company’s offices by email to find out if the culture varies across locations.
• You conduct in-depth interviews with employees in your office to learn about their experiences and perspectives in greater detail.

Qualitative researchers often consider themselves “instruments” in research because all observations, interpretations and analyses are filtered through their own personal lens.

For this reason, when writing up your methodology for qualitative research, it’s important to reflect on your approach and to thoroughly explain the choices you made in collecting and analyzing the data.

Qualitative data can take the form of texts, photos, videos and audio. For example, you might be working with interview transcripts, survey responses, fieldnotes, or recordings from natural settings.

Most types of qualitative data analysis share the same five steps:

• Prepare and organize your data. This may mean transcribing interviews or typing up fieldnotes.
• Review and explore your data. Examine the data for patterns or repeated ideas that emerge.
• Develop a data coding system. Based on your initial ideas, establish a set of codes that you can apply to categorize your data.
• Assign codes to the data. For example, in qualitative survey analysis, this may mean going through each participant’s responses and tagging them with codes in a spreadsheet. As you go through your data, you can create new codes to add to your system if necessary.
• Identify recurring themes. Link codes together into cohesive, overarching themes.

There are several specific approaches to analyzing qualitative data. Although these methods share similar processes, they emphasize different concepts.

Qualitative research often tries to preserve the voice and perspective of participants and can be adjusted as new research questions arise. Qualitative research is good for:

• Flexibility

The data collection and analysis process can be adapted as new ideas or patterns emerge. They are not rigidly decided beforehand.

• Natural settings

Data collection occurs in real-world contexts or in naturalistic ways.

• Meaningful insights

Detailed descriptions of people’s experiences, feelings and perceptions can be used in designing, testing or improving systems or products.

• Generation of new ideas

Open-ended responses mean that researchers can uncover novel problems or opportunities that they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

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Researchers must consider practical and theoretical limitations in analyzing and interpreting their data. Qualitative research suffers from:

• Unreliability

The real-world setting often makes qualitative research unreliable because of uncontrolled factors that affect the data.

• Subjectivity

Due to the researcher’s primary role in analyzing and interpreting data, qualitative research cannot be replicated . The researcher decides what is important and what is irrelevant in data analysis, so interpretations of the same data can vary greatly.

• Limited generalizability

Small samples are often used to gather detailed data about specific contexts. Despite rigorous analysis procedures, it is difficult to draw generalizable conclusions because the data may be biased and unrepresentative of the wider population .

• Labor-intensive

Although software can be used to manage and record large amounts of text, data analysis often has to be checked or performed manually.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Chi square goodness of fit test
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

Quantitative research deals with numbers and statistics, while qualitative research deals with words and meanings.

Quantitative methods allow you to systematically measure variables and test hypotheses . Qualitative methods allow you to explore concepts and experiences in more detail.

There are five common approaches to qualitative research :

• Grounded theory involves collecting data in order to develop new theories.
• Ethnography involves immersing yourself in a group or organization to understand its culture.
• Narrative research involves interpreting stories to understand how people make sense of their experiences and perceptions.
• Phenomenological research involves investigating phenomena through people’s lived experiences.
• Action research links theory and practice in several cycles to drive innovative changes.

Data collection is the systematic process by which observations or measurements are gathered in research. It is used in many different contexts by academics, governments, businesses, and other organizations.

There are various approaches to qualitative data analysis , but they all share five steps in common:

• Prepare and organize your data.
• Review and explore your data.
• Develop a data coding system.
• Assign codes to the data.
• Identify recurring themes.

The specifics of each step depend on the focus of the analysis. Some common approaches include textual analysis , thematic analysis , and discourse analysis .

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Office of Undergraduate Research

My first research experience: being open to the unexpected, by claire fresher, peer research ambassador.

Many things surprised me when I started my first research opportunity. I didn’t know what to expect. I had heard a few things from upperclassmen about their own experiences and had attended a couple presentations from OUR, which is what got me interested in research in the first place, but I had no idea what my personal research experience was going to be like.

Something I hadn’t expected was how many people there are in a research group to support you and how willing people are to help. When I started my research position, I was introduced to a graduate student that worked in the lab station right next to mine. She showed me around the lab space and set me up on my computer. She was always there to ask quick questions or help me with any problems I encountered, as were the other people using the lab space, even if they weren’t in my specific lab group.

After a few weeks, I was given a partner who was also an undergraduate and I was introduced to the other undergraduates in the lab who I met at our weekly lab meetings where I got to hear what everyone was working on. I personally loved having a partner who could help me on the specific project I was assigned since I didn’t want to interrupt the other people in the lab with every question I had when they had other similar projects they were working on.

There was definitely a learning curve when I first started since I had never seen anything like this before. I started with basic literature research and began getting a better look into the broad topic which made it easier to really dive into the specific project that I was working on. In the beginning the work seemed a little intimidating but once I got comfortable in the lab space and knew I had people that could help me it was a lot easier to really get going and get into the really interesting parts, which is actually discovering new and exciting things!

I think the most important thing that I went into research with was being open to anything, and not being set on one way of learning or doing things. This was beneficial since it allowed me to be able to learn something completely new and be open to doing things differently than I had done before.

Throughout the course of my research experience, I know that I have changed in many ways. I learned how to work independently, how to be more analytical in my work, and how to ask the important questions that led to new discoveries. Research really has taught me to be open to the unexpected, and even welcome it, since being open has made me into a better researcher and student.

Claire is a junior majoring in Mechanical Engineering and minoring in Mathematics. Click here to learn more about Claire.

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11 Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing

Marjorie Stewart

“Warp and Weft” uses the metaphor of weaving to demonstrate one way of using personal and narrative writing within academic essays. Rather than debate whether narrative is appropriate for academic writing, it addresses the question of when is it appropriate and how it can be done effectively, focusing on helping writers decide when the use of personal experience is appropriate for their purpose, how to make personal experience and narrative pull its weight in the essay, and how the ability to incorporate personal experience can translate into the ability to incorporate research.

The essay is structured as an example of the use of personal experience as well as a how-to guide. “Warp and Weft” contains a discussion of three students who incorporated narrative in their essays in three ways: as a structural frame, as an example when the research topic and personal experience overlap, and as a tool for discovery. Students will benefit from the peer-written examples as well as the use of the personal in the essay itself.

Like many students, I worked my way through college with a retail job. [1] I was luckier than many of my classmates: I found a job at a hip little boutique called Rebecca: A Gallery of Wearable Art in the trendy part of town. We carried many styles of hand-made clothing, jewelry, and accessories, but our most important merchandise was that made by Rebecca herself. Rebecca was a weaver who made hand-woven clothing and scarves. Her loom took up half of the back room and she wove while I waited on customers. When one fabric came off the loom, Anne, the seamstress, would begin to cut and sew while Rebecca set up the loom for the next design. She created her patterns then transferred them into a computer program that told her how to thread the yarn onto the loom to produce the pattern. She threaded the warp, the yarn that runs lengthwise, onto the loom. The weft (formerly known as woof) was placed on bobbins that fed the shuttle. The act of weaving was moving the shuttle with the weft through the warp to create the weave.

So what, you might well ask. So what does this have to do with writing?

Many of you have been taught not to use the word “I” in your academic writing; not to include anything that does not directly relate to that mysterious thing called a “thesis statement;” and not to include anything personal in your writing. The opening of this essay has broken all of those so-called rules – it contains a personal story, told in the first person, that at first glance seems unrelated to the topic of writing. However, in this essay, I – yes, “I” – am here to help you step away from those rules and to use personal stories effectively in your academic writing.

The first consideration is whether using personal narrative is appropriate for your project. My story of working in Rebecca’s shop is useful here – it is intended to attract the attention of the readers and to establish and explain the extended metaphor of weaving. However, if I were writing an essay for my art history class about the evolution of weaving techniques and equipment, my story would seem out of place, as I only have experience with one step in that evolution, and that experience is of an observer rather than a participant.

Your composition professor will likely talk to you about the rhetorical situation of any piece of writing. Stated simply (perhaps too simply), the rhetorical situation – the writer, the audience, and the purpose of the writing – affects the way the message is presented. In my hypothetical art history essay, the narrative would confuse the reader as to the purpose of the project and distract from the actual message of the paper. Often in writing classes it seems that your audience is specifically your professor and secondarily, perhaps, your classmates. Given the essays you will read about in this chapter, imagine the larger audiences that the student writers might have been addressing. Consider carefully whether personal narrative belongs in papers you are writing for history, biology, or business classes.

In addition to your specific rhetorical situation, of course, you should always comply with your professors’ guidelines for each assignment. “No first-person narratives” is a clear statement that personal stories are not appropriate in that classroom.

However, once you have established that your narrative is appropriate for your purpose and audience, what next? It is my purpose to help you incorporate narrative effectively, and to do that, I will use examples from three of my students in a first-year course, a course designed to help writers bridge the gap between high school and college writing. I am also using the example of this essay itself. Consider my story about Rebecca. I am using her weaving, her design of warp and weft, as a metaphor for the kind of writing this essay is going to talk about. I will also use the story as a frame – talking about weaving in the introduction, the conclusion, and perhaps in the transitions.

Personal Story As Frame

Using a personal story as a frame for your essay can be an effective way to draw your reader into your ideas and then to help them reinterpret those ideas in the end. Perhaps, like me, you’re working in a retail job. Perhaps it’s in a big box store instead of my artsy boutique, and you’re wondering if you’d be happier somewhere else, or you’re thinking, please, hand-woven clothing? You sell electronics, important, functional electronics.

Just as I began with the story of my time at Rebecca, Lynn Z. Bloom began a conference presentation with a story from her classroom, and then commented, “Such stories, even brief ones, make us want to hear more, and to tell our own right back. They get us where they live. All writing is personal, whether it sounds that way or not, if the writer has a stake in the work” (1). One of my goals in telling the story of Rebecca is to make you want to hear more, and to make you want to tell your own. The human mind is a giant filing cabinet of stories, and when you hear one, you go to the appropriate file drawer – in this case R for Retail Employment – and pull out your own.

There are many stories in that drawer, however, and it’s important that you choose the right ones. Because my metaphor of writing as weaving is central to my topic, I haven’t included lots of other great stories that came out of my time at Rebecca. I didn’t talk about the great gyros we used to get from Mike and Tony’s across the street, or about how the changing nature of the neighborhood made Rebecca worry whether she had chosen the right location for the store, or about the great artists who came in for trunk shows of their work. I focused on the loom, the weaving. And as the framework for this essay, I consider the story of the loom to be the warp, the yarn threaded on the loom in advance. I will thread my shuttle with the examples of my students’ writing and weave them through.

The first example, Callie Harding’s “The Life of a Choir Director’s Child,” does the opposite. Her topic – the need for better education about religion in America – is the warp, and her childhood stories are woven though to show the reader how this topic became so important to her. Her stories give the readers context and help them connect with her.

Personal Story as Context

Telling a personal story can help your reader understand why you are writing about the topic you have chosen, and why you have come to care so deeply about it. Callie’s childhood experience of travelling from church to church where her parents worked as choir directors gave her an understanding of many religions, and she uses those stories to show how that has helped her be a more compassionate, thoughtful, and sensitive person.

Her paper starts this way:

When I was a child, I didn’t spend much time on playgrounds or with the backyard swing set. I didn’t look forward to dance class or soccer practice every week. Instead, most of my time was spent in the pews of a church with a My Little Pony figure that was weaving its way through a jungle of hymnals and pew Bibles. My playground was a cathedral with the somewhat harmonious voices from the volunteer choir echoing off the stone floor over the magnificent pipe organ. At the front of the choir was either my mother or father . . . Yes, I was the child of choir directors. (Harding 1)

Callie goes on to explain that her family moved from a non-denominational Christian church to a Jewish synagogue; the First Church of Christ, Scientist; a Catholic Church, and finally, a small Lutheran church. “What religion are we?” she asks. This is how she tries to answer her question:

My mother spent a while with the Hindu faith before marrying my father and converting to Mormonism. We are also deeply into our Native American background and practice their cultural and religious ceremonies. Add the fact that we had many friends from many religions and cultures and you can tell that I had one of the most openly religious households on the block. (Harding 1-2)

Callie then moves very nicely into her research on how to encourage religious tolerance through education. She contrasts her experience in a fundamentalist Christian high school to a school district in Modesto, California where all ninth graders take a semester-long world religion course. She writes about the importance of helping all children understand and celebrate diversity of religion and points to her own experiences as an example of the positive effect this has on them. As part of her research, Callie interviewed her mother about her diverse upbringing. While her mother called it a “happy accident,” she also explained to Callie how she stood up to her very Mormon father to make sure Callie and her sister were free to find their own beliefs.

As I was studying Callie’s essay, I took three highlighters and circled each paragraph: pink for Callie’s personal story; yellow for Callie’s presentation and discussion of her research, and green for the information from her interview with her mother. This is the result:

• Paragraphs 1-3 – Callie’s personal story
• Paragraphs 4-6 – discussion of research
• Paragraph 7 – Callie’s story
• Paragraphs 8-9 – discussion of research
• Paragraph 10 – Callie’s interview with her mother
• Paragraph 11 – Callie’s story
• Paragraph 12 – Callie’s interview with her mother
• Paragraphs 13-14 – Callie’s personal story

It wasn’t until I did that exercise with the markers that I realized how smoothly Callie had incorporated the three elements of her writing. As I’ve done in this essay, Callie framed her story with the personal. She also used it within the essay to focus and reflect on her research findings. Marking your essay the same way can help you see if you have the right balance between the personal and the more traditionally academic portions of your paper.

While Callie used her personal stories to provide context to the issue of religion in education, she also used her own background to show herself as an example of someone for whom a broad religious education proved beneficial. In “A Life Lost,” student Melynda Goodfellow used her personal story as an example.

Personal Story as Example

Melynda chose to write about teen suicide, certainly an important topic, but one that far too often leads to a patchwork of statistics and distant narratives, more a report than an essay with heart. Sadly, Melynda had reason to care deeply about her topic: her cousin Jared killed himself with an overdose of prescription pain medication.

Melynda started her essay with a simple story of a typical Friday night, getting ready to go the high school football game, where her brother would be playing in the band. This night, however, was special, because her cousin had just moved into town and her boyfriend would be meeting him for the first time. Choosing to open with a typical activity – going to the football game – but giving it special meaning was particularly effective for Melynda. I encourage writers to ask themselves the first Passover question: Why is this night different from all other nights? This is the question asked by the youngest child at the beginning of the Seder to start telling the story of the Passover. It also serves the beginning writer well: If this night, this football game, isn’t special in any way, then it isn’t the story to use in your essay. Melynda’s football game is different from all others because her cousin will be there to meet her boyfriend.

Although the atmosphere is festive, Melynda shows us with foreshadowing that this is not a typical Friday night lights story. She writes that Jared moved because “he wanted to get away from the lifestyle that he was living back home. He wanted a kind of fresh start.” She connects herself to the characters of her brother and her cousin through the band: she had been in band, her brother is performing with the band at the football game, and her cousin is excited about returning to school and joining the band himself. Throughout the narrative part of her essay, Melynda shows Jared as sad and desperate, yet looking forward to his fresh start.

Melynda tells the story in a straightforward, chronological way from the evening of the football game through her cousin’s death and funeral. Her use of personal experience is different from mine and Callie’s because the majority of her paper is that narrative. The structure of her paper is very different: where Callie went back and forth between the story and the research, Melynda began with the story and introduced the research at the end. The first three pages of Melynda’s six-page essay are the story of her friendship with Jared that fall, and how she becomes his confidant. Pages four and five are the story of how she heard of his death. It is only at the end of her essay that she introduces the statistics that show that suicide is “the third leading cause of death in people ages 15 to 24” (Goodfellow 6). Her conclusion, shortly after that statistic, reads:

I never in a million years would have thought something like this would happen in my family. I knew that mental health problems run in the family, but I believed everyone knew where to get help. We knew that suicide wasn’t an option and that we had each other if nothing else. As tragic as it may sound, this event brought our whole family back together. Any quarrels or grudges anyone had seemed to dissipate that day. Ironically, one of the things that Jared wanted the most was for the family to just forget their differences and get along. (Goodfellow 9)

This ending refocuses Melynda’s readers on the personal meaning of the impersonal statistic.

In his book Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making , Gian Pagnucci writes, “I think, actually, that stories can help us get at the truth even if there isn’t a firm truth to be had.” (51) And in Writing to Change the World , Mary Phipher says:

Research shows that storytelling not only engages all of the senses, it triggers activity on both the left and the right sides of the brain . . . . People attend, remember, and are transformed by stories which are meaning-filled units of ideas, the verbal equivalent of mother’s milk. (11)

Melynda works at getting at the true story of her cousin’s death, making meaning of it, even though there is no firm truth or solid meaning to be had there. The truth she arrives at, however, is more powerful than the “just the facts” approach because the story lingers with her readers in a way statistics can’t.

Another thing Melynda does that makes her essay different from mine, and Callie’s, is her inclusion of dialogue. I think she makes especially good use of it in her essay, something that is often difficult for writers at all levels. Here she shows us how she learned of Jared’s death:

“What is it?” I said when I picked the phone up. “It’s about time you answered your phone! I’ve been calling you for over an hour,” my mom said. “Well?” “It’s Jared. He’s in the hospital. He overdosed.” “Oh, my God . . . Is he okay? I’ll be right there. I’m leaving work now.” “No. Don’t come here. There’s nothing you can do. He’s dead.” (Goodfellow 4)

Recreating dialogue can be challenging – a year after her cousin’s death, can Melynda be certain that these were the exact words that she and her mother spoke? Probably not, but she can show her readers the tension in the moment – her mother’s anger that she didn’t pick up, her desire to be with Jared, and her mother’s postponing of the awful news. Dialogue also can be used to pick up the pace of the story – the light look of it on the page helps readers’ eyes move over it quickly, getting a lot of information from a few carefully-chosen words.

There are significant structural differences between Melynda’s essay and Callie’s. Callie’s is split almost evenly between personal experience and research; Melynda’s is about 85% personal story. The third student, Ethelin Ekwa, uses personal story in an even larger portion of her essay, which is entitled “Ethelin Ekwa: An Autobiography.” Although the title might lead you to believe that the essay is only, or just, or simply, personal narrative, Ethelin uses the story of her life to explore her ethnic heritage, her life as a single mother, and her determination to make the most of her artistic and musical talents. She tells the story of her life as a way of understanding her place in the world at the time of the writing.

Personal Story as Discovery

Ethelin’s essay can be seen as an example of Donald M. Murray’ beliefs about writing: “We write to think – to be surprised by what appears on the page; to explore our world with language; to discover meaning that teaches us and may be worth sharing with others …. . . we write to know what we want to say.” (3). Although my students always write multiple drafts of all of their essays, Ethelin wrote more than usual – at least four significant revisions before the final draft that she submitted in her portfolio. She was a frequent visitor at our writers’ center as she worked through the paper. Somewhere in an intermediate draft, she found her frame: a quotation from Ani Difranco’s song “Out of Habit:” “Art is why I get up in the morning.” That idea led her Ethelin to her conclusion: “I cannot imagine a day without the ability to create in unconventional ways” (Ekwa 9). In the eight and a half pages in between, she tells the story of her life.

In Callie and Melynda’s essays, there is a very clear separation between personal experience, research material, and the writers’ commentary on those elements. The weaving, to continue the metaphor, is done in larger blocks of color. Ethelin’s essay has a more subtle pattern. Every paragraph contains some detail of her life – where she was born, who her parents were, where she lived – but also has a reference to her life-long desire to be an artist. She talks about her work as a writer and poet; as a singer and musician; and as a photographer and visual artist.

Ethelin’s background is intriguing – her parents moved from Cameroon, West Africa to France and then to Texas, where she was born, the youngest of five children. She has lived in Europe and Africa, and she went to school in France and Cameroon. Here is how she introduces herself in the second paragraph:

My birth name is Ethelin Ekwa. I am also known as Obsolete by my artist friends and as Krysty by my close personal friends. I am an artist, a mother, a photographer and a lover of all things. I am an American-born citizen with Cameroonian and French origins. I am 30 years old and I currently reside in North Braddock. (Ekwa 1)

Ethelin’s identity is tied to her arts from the very beginning, and every story from her life is wrapped around those arts. When, at 22, she becomes a single mother, her priorities change, but she never gives up: “When I got pregnant, I put singing, painting, and drawing on hold . . . I had more pressing matters to take care of and there just was not time for art” (Ekwa 3). Soon, though, she tells us that she made a new friend who introduced her to digital photography, and by the time her daughter was two years old, she had her own photography business up and running.

While Melynda chose one special night to tell about at the start of her essay, Ethelin chose many events from her life, all of them important, life-changing events. Reading Ethelin’s essay, I can almost see Rebecca’s shuttle flying back and forth across the loom, the turn at each side another event that pulls Ethelin back into the world of art. When the weaver turns the shuttle at the edge of the warp, the weft creates a finished edge that prevents the fabric from fraying or unraveling called a selvage. The turns in Ethelin’s story create a sense that her life, which is sometimes unplanned and chaotic, still has something that keeps it from unraveling, and that something is her artistic nature.

Tying Up Loose Ends

The examples from my students’ essays can help you understand how to use personal experience in your academic writing. But how do you know when to use it? When is it acceptable and appropriate? Gian Pagnucci asserts, “Narrative ideology is built on a trust in confusion, a letting go of certainty and clarity that can ultimately lead to understanding” (53); that stories have a “piercing clarity” (17), and that “the drive to narrate experience is, if not instinctive, then at the very least quintessentially human” (41). He also warns that the academic world is not always welcoming of personal experience. I know many of my colleagues are not willing to trust in confusion – their entire careers, and even their lives, have been built on the quest for knowledge and certainty.

If your composition professor has asked you to read this chapter, it’s a pretty safe bet that you may use personal experiences in your writing for that class. Even in that setting, however, there are times when it is more effective than others. Using the examples of the essays I’ve quoted from and the guidelines given in the beginning of this chapter, here are some tips on when to use your personal experience in your essays:

• When, like Callie and Melynda, your experiences have inspired a passionate opinion on your topic
• When, like Ethelin, your personal experiences constantly point back to your central idea
• When, like me, your personal experiences provide a strong and extended metaphor for your subject
• When, like all of the writers, your personal experience provides a structure or framework for your essay

The expression “tying up the loose ends” comes from weaving and other fabric arts. When the yarn in the shuttle is changed, the new yarn is tied to the old at the selvage. Those threads are later woven into the fabric so that they don’t show, and so that the connection is tight. When your rough draft is done, it’s time to take the fabric off the loom and make sure your weave is tight. At that point, ask yourself these questions to be sure you are using your experience appropriately and effectively in your essay:

• What percentage of your essay is personal experience, and how does that match up with the nature of the assignment? Callie’s essay was written in response to an assignment that required more research than the one Ethelin was responding to, so it included less personal writing.
• Have you included only the personal stories that directly relate to your topic, your attitude towards your topic, or your controlling idea?
• Are your selvages tight? Do the moves you make between personal story and research and analysis make sense, or is the fabric of your essay likely to unravel?
• Is the resulting pattern appropriate to your project? Are you working in large blocks of color, like Callie and Melynda, or the subtler tweed of Ethelin’s essay?

I started this essay in Rebecca’s shop and tried to weave the metaphor inspired there through this essay. In the process, I realized another advantage to using personal stories in academic writing: I hadn’t thought about Rebecca and Anne, about Mike and Tony’s gyros, about the bright creative atmosphere in the gallery and in the neighborhood for a long time. Accessing those stories from the filing cabinet in my brain was inspirational. My stories from Rebecca are mostly fun or funny. Your stories, like mine and the writers quoted here, are a mix of light and dark, funny and serious. I encourage you to open the file cabinet and find the stories that will make your readers remember similar times.

Works Cited

Bloom, Lynn Z. “That Way Be Monsters: Myths and Bugaboos about Teaching Personal Writing.” CCCC 51st Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, MN, Apr. 2000.

DiFranco, Ani. “Out of Habit.” Ani DiFranco , Righteous Babe Records, 1990. Ekwa, Ethelin. “Ethelin Ekwa: An Autobiography.” 3 Aug. 2009. Composition and Language I, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, student paper.

Goodfellow, Melynda. “A Life Lost.” 3 Aug. 2009. Composition and Language I, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, student paper.

Harding, Callie. “The Life of a Choir Director’s Child.” 3 Aug. 2009. Composition and Language I, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, student paper.

Murray, Donald M. A Writer Teaches Writing . Rev. 2nd ed. Cengage, 2003.

Pagnucci, Gian. Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making . Heinemann, 2004.

Pipher, Mary. Writing to Change the World . Riverhead Books, 2006.

Teacher Resources for Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing by Marjorie Stewart

Overview and teaching strategies.

This essay is useful for faculty teaching the research-based essays that are frequently the concentration in a second semester composition course in a two-term first year writing sequence. Instructors who encourage a personal connection to the research topic will find this essay helpful in guiding students as to when and how they might use their personal narratives in their academic research essays.

The questions below are designed to stimulate discussion and to move students from thinking academically about this genre to delving into their own lives for experiences they are inspired to research and learn more.

Often the attitude towards personal narrative, held by teachers and students alike, is that it is a beginning genre and an ice breaker that is designed as a stepping stone to real or more important ways of writing. This essay instead subscribes to the theory that personal narrative is, as Gian Pagnucci says, “if not instinctive, then at the very least quintessentially human” (41). My experience working with students on this kind of essay is that they are eager to both tell their own stories and to research the issues that inform those stories.

• Marjorie Stewart claims that our minds are filing cabinets of stories. Do her stories, or the stories of her students, remind you of stories of your own? How does this chain of stories help us make sense of our experiences?
• Has there ever been a time when you wanted to include personal experience in a writing project but were discouraged or forbidden to by an instructor? Why did you feel the story was important? What might have motivated the instructor?
• Are their personal stories you are eager to include in an essay? What about stories that you would be uneasy revealing? How do you, and how do other writers, decide which stories they wish to share?
• Work with an essay, either assigned in class or one you are familiar with in which the author uses personal experience. Compare it to an article on the same topic with no personal writing. Which do your respond to more, and why? Does the personal writing help you understand the writer, or does it get in the way of your intellectual understanding of the topic?

Essay Resources

If you have a favorite example of a well-mixed narrative research essay, by all means, use it. If you are using a book with good examples, you might assign one as companion reading to “Warp and Weft.” I also recommend many essays published as creative nonfiction, especially those from The Creative Nonfiction Foundation, at creativenonfiction.org. One of my favorites is “Rachel at Work: Enclosed, A Mother’s Report” by Jane Bernstein, published in Creative Nonfiction and anthologized in their collection True Stories, Well Told .

• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and are subject to the Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ , email [email protected] , or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.org/terms-of-use . ↵

Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing Copyright © 2020 by Marjorie Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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How to Use Personal Experience in Research Paper or Essay

Personal Experience In Research Writing

Personal experience in academic writing involves using things that you know based on your personal encounter to write your research paper.

One should avoid using personal experience to write an academic paper unless instructed to do so. Suppose you do so, then you should never cite yourself on the reference page.

Some instructions may prompt you to write an essay based on personal experience. Such instances may compel you to write from your personal knowledge as an account for your past encounters over the same topic.

Can you Use Personal Experience in an Essay?

In most of the essays and papers that people write, it is highly recommended that one avoids the use of first-person language. In our guide to writing good essays , we explained that the third person is preferred for academic work.

However, it can be used when doing personal stories or experiences. But can is it possible?

In practice, you can use personal experience in an essay if it is a personal narrative essay or it adds value to the paper by supporting the arguments.

Also, you can use your personal experience to write your academic paper as long as you are writing anything that is relevant to your research.

The only harm about such an essay is that your experience might sound biased because you will be only covering one side of the story based on your perception of the subject.

Students can use the personal story well through a catchy introduction.

Inquire from the instructor to offer you more directions about the topic. However, write something that you can remember as long as you have rich facts about it.

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How to Use Personal Experience in a Research Paper

When you are crafting your easy using your personal experience,   ensure you use the first-person narrative. Such a story includes the experiences you had with books, situations, and people.

For you to write such a story well, you should find a great topic. That includes thinking of the events in your life encounters that can make a great story.

Furthermore, you should think of an event that ever happened to you. Besides, you can think of special experiences you had with friends, and how the encounter changed your relationship with that specific person.

The right personal experience essay uses emotions to connect with the reader. Such an approach provokes the empathic response. Most significantly, you can use sensory details when describing scenes to connect with your readers well.

Even better, use vivid details and imagery to promote specificity and enhance the picture of the story you are narrating.

Structure of the Essay

Before you begin to write, brainstorm and jot down a few notes. Develop an outline to create the direction of the essay story.

Like other essays, you should use the introduction, the body, and a conclusion. Let your introduction paragraph capture the reader’s attention.

In other words, it should be dramatic. Your essay should allow the audience to know the essence of your point of view.

Let the body of this essay inform the reader with clear pictures of what occurred and how you felt about it.

Let the story flow chronologically or group the facts according to their importance. Use the final paragraph to wrap up and state the key highlights of the story.  

Make it Engaging

The right narrative needs one to use interesting information engagingly. Record yourself narrating the story to assist you in organizing the story engagingly. Furthermore, you are free to use dialogue or anecdotes. For that reason, think about what other people within your story said.

Moreover, you should use transition words for better sentence connections. Again, you should vary the sentence structures to make them more interesting. Make the words as lively and as descriptive as possible.

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The Value of Personal Experience

We use personal experience to connect your artwork with your readers since they are human and they would prefer real stories. You will become more realistic when you describe emotions, feelings, and events that happened to you.

Your wealth of personal experience in a specific field will offer you a great advantage when you want to connect all the facts into a useful story.

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Reinforcing your Writing Skills

Some students may have brilliant ideas and fail to capture them on paper properly. Some seek to write personal issues but also want to remove first-person language from their writing. This is not good.

However, you can sharpen your writing skills in this aspect. One can use the following tips to make your personal research paper readable and more appealing:

1. Sharpen grammar

The readability and clarity of your content will rely on grammar.

For that reason, you should polish your spelling, grammar skills, and punctuation daily.

Moreover, you should practice regularly and make the essay more appealing.

2. Expand Vocabulary

It can be helpful if you expand your vocabulary to describe your events successfully. Using better word choice enable the writer to connect with the topic well.

3. Have a Diary

Having a personal diary helps you by boosting your memory about past memorable events. That ensures that you do not lose hold of something important that happened in your past encounter.

4. Systematize it

Make your narration appear systematic to improve the flow. For example, you can divide your experiences in particular importance, emotions, events, people, and so on.

5. Interpret your feelings

It is not a walkover for one to remember every feeling he or she encountered when particular events happened. One should try to analyze and interpret them for better and more effective delivery when writing about personal experiences.

Can you Cite yourself or Personal Experience?

You cannot cite yourself or reference your personal experience because it is your own narration and not data, facts, or external information. Ideally, one does not need to cite personal experiences when using any writing style whether APA or MLA.

It will be unprofessional if you cite yourself in your research paper.  Such an experience is your voice which you are bringing to the paper.

Choose the relevant essay based on your essay.

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Instances when to use Personal Experience in a Research Paper

There are many instances when you have to apply personal narrations in an essay. In these instances, the use of first language is important. Let us explore them.

1. Personal essays

You can use personal essays in academic writing to engage readers.  It makes your writing to be credible and authentic because you will be engaging readers with your writing voice. Some stories are better told when given from personal encounters.

The secret lies in choosing the most relevant topic that is exciting and triggers the right emotions and keeps your audience glued to it. You can include some dialogue to make it more engaging and interesting.

2. Required by the instructions

Some situations may prompt your professor to offer students instructions that compel them to write a research paper based on a personal encounter. Here, you have to follow the instructions to the latter for you to deliver and earn a good score well.

One way of winning the heart of your professor is to stick to the given instructions. You should relate your past events with the topic at hand and use it to connect with your readers in an engaging manner.

3. Personal Research Report

When you are doing research that involves your personal encounter, you will have to capture those events that can reveal the theme of your topic well.

Of course, it is an account of your perception concerning what you went through to shape your new understanding of the event.

A personal research report cannot be about someone’s also experience. It states the details of what you encountered while handling the most memorable situations.

4. Ethnography Reports

Such a report is qualitative research where you will immerse yourself in the organization or community and observe their interactions and behavior. The narrator of the story must use his perception to account for particular issues that he may be tackling in the essay.

Ethnography helps the author to give first-hand information about the interactions and behavior of the people in a specific culture.

When you immerse yourself in a particular social environment, you will have more access to the right and authentic information you may fail to get by simply asking.

We use ethnography as a flexible and open method to offer a rich narrative and account for a specific culture. As a researcher, you have to look for facts in that particular community in various settings.

When not handling complex essays and academic writing tasks, Josh is busy advising students on how to pass assignments. In spare time, he loves playing football or walking with his dog around the park.

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