The Changeable Feelings of a Person with a Disabled Sibling: Generation of a Story and Its Retelling through Autoethnography

Abstract

This study used dialogical autoethnography to clarify the relationship of the author with her sister who has a disability, and explored the author's internal reality as the sibling of a disabled person. Dialogical autoethnography responds to criticisms of autoethnography by introducing dialogue with a co-researcher, with whom analysis and interpretation are carried out collaboratively and repeatedly. While conducting the study the author became aware of her sister as a separate subject who had developed independently from her. She later realized that she had not anticipated her sister's development. In addition, an implicit motivation for the study was the desire to separate from her sister, which conformed to social discourse that assumes separate life paths for siblings. However, the retelling of her life stories revealed a feeling of resistance toward detachment from her sister. The results of the study suggest that siblings of a person with a disability vacillate between social values and their own values and desires, and sometimes suffer as a result.