Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2026
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hello, I’m Jacqueline Singh, MPP, PhD (she/her), an Executive Evaluation & Program Design Advisor based in Indianapolis, Indiana. With more than 30 years of experience across higher education, government, not-for-profit, and pro-bono settings, my work focuses on helping evaluators and partners slow down their thinking—making space for reflection, lived experience, and discernment within evaluation practice.
There is no single right way to design an evaluation. Most evaluators learn this early in their practice. Instead, we rely on markers of sound design—clarity of purpose, attention to context, ethical care, methodological coherence, and use.
The same, I have come to believe, is true of autoethnography.
When I presented Beyond Objectivity: Exploring Autoethnography as a Tool for Evaluation at the 2025 AEA Conference—building on earlier professional development work, including a roundtable and an online event—my aim was not to introduce a new method, but to explore whether autoethnography might be usefully bridged into evaluation practice, particularly where individual-level experience is central to understanding programs, policies, and systems.
What follows is a lesson learned from that experience—about how evaluators might thoughtfully bridge autoethnographic practice into their work.
In preparing for that session, I reviewed several key autoethnographic texts and examined how authors described their processes. While there is no single way to “do” autoethnography, clear patterns emerged: attention to purpose, positionality, context, reflexivity, ethical decision-making, analysis, and representation. As an evaluator, the logic felt immediately familiar.
This recognition led me to articulate an adaptation of autoethnographic practice for evaluation contexts. I shared it during the session to show where autoethnographic practice and evaluation logic intersect, rather than to offer a finished model.
Table: Traditional Autoethnographic Steps and an Adaptation for Evaluation Use
At a high level, the adaptation emphasizes:
From my vantage point—as someone who has been a program participant, a program implementer, researcher, and evaluator—it is often the individual-level experience that is most difficult to capture meaningfully in evaluation work. We are skilled at documenting outcomes and systems; yet, the lived experience of programs can remain under-theorized, under-analyzed, or treated as anecdotal rather than as situated insight.
Autoethnography offers one possible way to address this gap—not by replacing existing methods, but by complementing them. At the same time, its use in evaluation demands discernment. Questions of ethics, timing, safety, ownership, and appropriateness matter. In some contexts, reflective practice may be a more suitable entry point than evocative storytelling. In others, autoethnographic approaches may open new possibilities for understanding and use.
What I shared at the AEA Conference was not a model to adopt, but a way of making visible how evaluators might thoughtfully integrate autoethnographic sensibilities into their work while remaining grounded in core evaluation values.
What might it look like for evaluators to engage individual-level experience with the same intentionality we bring to design, ethics, and use?
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