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and techniques of data collection; however, in my experience, they tend to be more difficult to cite than the first genre because there has to be an immediate overlap between the author’s experiences and the researcher’s own in order to make useful sense of them.
In the design of a study, this genre is also less immediately helpful and more impractical to inform technique, because its authors talk in more abstract terms about the development of a theory of methodology and data collection; sometimes they are useful only after the fact, when the researcher is reflecting on a study that has just finished and needs to consider what the next step might be. In this way, I have often treated this genre more as a study of the researchers themselves, one in which the strengths and foibles of the human subject that is both the perpetrator and the subject of research are laid bare. As I began my research, there were many prominent names in this form of reflective work in sociology and ethnography, including Burgess, Atkinson, Hammersley, Griffin, Lincoln, Denzin, Pollard, Simons, Stenhouse, as well Glaser, Strauss, and Corbin. These researchers opened up the environment of investigation in particular and dragged it into the lens of scrutiny, using their own practices as field data and exposing their own faults as well as those of the societies they worked to discover. As topical pieces in themselves, they deserve further study.
The third and rarest genre of literature, the research autobiography, is arguably the one that is most useful to a researcher in planning data collections, yet it is the most unusable as citations in texts on methodology. This form gives insights to the real world of academic study and is distinct from the research monologue which focuses on technique. Like the second genre, the focus of this one is on the person him- or herself, but more so—something that some authors forget when writing, as if their methodology has a separate life of its own—and so in research, scholars are encouraged to talk of themselves in the third person, as ‘the author’.