Life-Writing for Victims of Childhood Maltreatment

Autoethnography, as a qualitative research methodology, produces data suitable for meta-analysis when the interest is in gaining insight into the lived experience of childhood victimization and the relevant cultural, social, historical and political context of individual experience. The life-story of childhood victimization as told in The Write to Justice (Fox, 2014) is based on the personal experience of the researcher. The interdisciplinary meta-analysis of the text generates a mapping and creation of an inventory of social, political and cultural influences that create a terrain of contextual stressors that are likely causal to the subsequent violence, maltreatment and harm inflicted on the child who was conceived outside of marriage and born in the 1950s. The researcher/author provides a thick description of embodied experience and meaning-making as an important part of the process of recovery and toward sensitizing the reader. This phenomenological approach to research methodology addresses concerns with researcher subjectivity and bias and agrees that subjective experience is grounded in self-experience (Anderson L., 2006). Nevertheless, autoethnography reaches beyond the subjective experience of self to include the larger social world. Phenomenological research provides information that can be broadly applied to a population that has experienced the phenomenon of interest. A person who has experienced the phenomenon of interest, even when that person is the researcher self, is representative of that population and can be applied to developing nomothetic or "generalized theoretical understandings" of social processes.