Autoethnography and Theory Testing

One of the problems in construction management research is how to harvest the living experience of people working in the profession. Surveys and interviews are the common methods, but they have obvious problems, not only with defining terminology and targeting the appropriate populations but also with the knowledge of the respondents and their willingness to reflect. Autoethnography, in its conventional form, overcomes most of these problems, but creates a new set of problems, particularly in terms of our ability to generalise and verify the results. What is argued here is that autoethnography can be applied analytically and rigorously so that it can be used for theory testing and theory building. The approach is illustrated by a case study, in which professional experience in the construction industry is integrated into the conventional scientific method.

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