ABSTRACT
The chapters in this section have been selected because we feel they provide evidence that while the methods and methodologies of self-study are not much different from other research methods, self-study is methodologically unique. Our purpose here is not another challenge in some kind of paradigm war, but instead, an attempt on our part to explain why although participant observation, ethnographic, grounded theory, or statistical methods might be used in any single study, self-study involves a different philosophical and political stance. It is not a need to claim truth but a need to assert certainty that underlies most traditional research methods. Debates about validity, reliability or other appeals for foundational criteria for knowing rest more on a desire to be able to assert with certainty a particular claim of meaning or of relationships among phenomenon than on a desire to understand the meaning of situations or phenomenon.
