Paper short abstract:

This paper delves into how medical students utilize autoethnography to comprehend immigrant health issues in Taiwan, facilitating moral distress and ethical inquiry. It highlights autoethnography's role in training, fostering self-awareness while navigating identity transitions and vulnerability.

Paper long abstract:

Autoethnography has gained prominence in critical social and anthropological research literature over the last two decades. Taiwan also embraces this research methodology. As defined, autoethnography is ethnographic research conducted on one's "own people" from the inside. It is generally first-person writing based on a synthesis of ethnography and history of life that, through narrative and emotions, reveals multiple layers of self-awareness.

This paper details how healthcare providers and students can benefit from autoethnography as a teaching and learning approach. Autoethnography is a form of meditation that teaches people to sit comfortably with questions without definite answers. It also teaches people to accept themselves with kindness and understanding, regardless of feelings of hurt, anxiety, or insecurity. Autoethnography can facilitate medical students, interns, and doctors' inquiry into moral distress, ethical dilemmas, and complex issues and seek relief during stressful situations, emotional or competency-based setbacks, and identity transitions in the healthcare profession.

This paper examines two cases in which a medical student and junior doctor used autoethnography to understand socio-cultural issues in Taiwan. Based primarily on the author's previous study, it investigates factors influencing Vietnamese immigrant families' health perspectives and beliefs. It further emphasizes the importance of education on anthropological concepts in clinical training and reflects on personal insights as a Vietnamese immigrant child and a medical student. It explores how medical students can utilize autoethnography to understand identity transitions between students and physicians. Moreover, the study probes how they deal with their emotions, particularly when exposed to unspeakable vulnerability.