I believe that most research connects to the lives and experiences of the researchers conducting it in some way. I use auto-ethnography as a research methodology because it requires me to connect my life and my experiences to my research. It goes deeper than naming one’s methodology or the way that one is positioned in her research. It requires the researcher to be specific, personal about what brought them to a certain topic, to researching a topic in a certain way, to asking certain questions, to the methods they use to collect and analyze data. This decreases the distance between the person doing research and the “other” people and phenomena the person is researching. It gives both a common point of reference (even if the experiences or people or identities are very different). It makes the research personal.