Adopter’s Regret
This blog is about my new preprint, Adopter’s Regret: An Autoethnographic Approach to the Post Animal Adoption Period
A few years ago, during the lockdowns, a colleague on Twitter posted a really vulnerable tweet about how stressed she was adopting a new dog. I remembered that stress so well from when I adopted Athena, and I went to take a picture of my diary on that day, DM’ed it to the colleague, and we ended up having a long chat about the difficulties of adjusting to a new family member. I walked away from the conversation feeling like I’d done a good thing, and thinking that this was a perspective I rarely saw in the literature about companion-animal relationships, or acknowledged in the veterinary industry, despite how common I knew it was.
This little thought has stuck with me for the last few years, and when I returned from maternity leave last year, I had a bright idea about how I wanted to play with it.
I have, somehow, carved myself a job where I get to spend most of my time thinking about research methodology, my favourite thing. It is a source of great delight to me that my last blog was about utilising Bayesian statistics and this blog is about being able to use Autoethnography.
Stop, Autoethnography? What’s that then?
Autoethnography is a research method that uses personal experience (“auto”) to describe and interpret (“graphy”) cultural texts, experiences, beliefs, and practices (“ethno”). - Adams, Ellis and Holman-Jones, 2017
In my interpretation of it, an autoethnography is using narratives and personal experience to bring a deeper understanding about a particular phenomenon. I see a lot of parallels with professional/reflective blogging, in fact, in that you use story telling skills to help convince people of your personal perspective on something.
There are some good (at least - to my reading) autoethnographies in veterinary sciences. I particularly like this one about the feminist ethic of care in the veterinary profession which I think uses the narrative component really well.
So how did you use it?
I couldn’t get away from feeling like me and my colleagues all knew that bringing an animal home was hard. We all expected it to be challenging, and counselled each other appropriately. I’ve been known to tell people I consider it in the same vein as bringing home a child - and I’m not lying. The challenges are different, and certainly of different lengths, but there are many similarities. Still, I really struggle to see that perspective reflected in the literature surrounding human-animal relationships, where much of the research and surrounding communications often seem to me to be searching for the ‘right’ way of being a pet owner to maximise pet welfare.
At the same time, I was aware of more of our students at the Dick Vet asking about autoethnography, and I was no longer content to point them towards a few references I knew about. I had a perspective on an issue that I felt was not well represented in the literature, so perhaps I had space to do an autoethnography.
What’s this ‘adopter’s regret’?
Adopter’s Regret is the first phrase I coined when thinking about this autoethnography. I knew that when I adopted Athena I experienced intense feelings of regret and actively considered relinquishing her. Yet, Athena is still here ten years on. I decided I was going to use autoethnography to explore this feeling, and teach myself more about the methodology at the same time.
I want to be very clear that my main motivation for this project was to help me support the research at the R(D)SVS in more ways. I had no previous experience with autoethnography, I didn’t take a course, I simply read the papers and chapters and decided to plough into it. This is typical of my methodology magpie approach, and I know that it annoys some folk who feel methodology should be more sacred and rigid. That you need to pass some kind of test before you’re allowed to adopt a methodology. I have never subscriped to this perspective myself. I think you can try anything if you have a suitable framework with which to do it. You’ll be shocked to learn that I wanted to try this from an open science framework perspective, and partly to help my students see my process, I preregistered this study on OSF in 2023 and then over the next year and a bit, I slowly plugged away at reading my diaries and interrogating my perspective on this ‘adopter’s regret’.
So are you an autoethnography expert now?
Oh my, no. I don’t even think I’ve necessarily done a particularly good autoethnography, but you can read the preprint for yourself here. I do think I learned a lot in the process though, and I’m excited for new research ideas that have sprung up.
I’ve also formalised some of my ideas about how we should support and teach this method to students. I am pretty convinced of the need for ethical approval for autoethnographies, though this is somewhat debated in the literature. Certainly, for student projects, I think there needs to be oversight to judge likelihood of harm. I deliberately chose a provocative topic for my autoethnography, but I still found myself drifting into areas that I realised I was not comfortable talking about at all, such as my experiences with Post Partum Anxiety which I have also blogged about here. And that also highlights the difference between blogging and autoethnography. The kind of reflective detail and evaluation that is, to my mind, required for an academic piece is not the same as writing out a blog in your own safe little corner of the internet.
I had two quite large departures from my original idea while I was doing this. First, I set out to do a sort of thematic analysis of my diary entries, before realising that really wasn’t what autoethnography is about at all. It was hard to step away from this trusty old approach, but while I found my diary entries really useful to help me with this reflection, they actually slightly limited me into thinking they were my primary source of data, rather than my own experiences and reflections. Secondly, when I read over my finished product, I realised that I needed to centre the narrative part of the findings more. I did find Sparkes’ 2020 criteria for autoethnography evaluations useful here, particularly these criteria:
Authentic and Trustworthy Data: Does the autoethnography use authentic and trustworthy data? Accountable Research Process: Does the autoethnography follow a reliable research process and show the process clearly? Ethics Towards Others and Self: Does the autoethnography follow ethical steps to protect the rights of self and others presented and implicated in the autoethnography? Sociocultural Analysis and Interpretation: Does the autoethnography analyse and interpret the sociocultural meaning of the author’s personal experiences? Scholarly Contribution: Does the autoethnography attempt to make a scholarly contribution with its conclusion and engagement of the existing literature?
I am not sure I have done a great or even good autoethnography, but I feel a lot more confident about the process. And I also really appreciate being able to share the process via OSF (the pre-reg and the pre-print) and this blog (background detail).