While ethnography tends to be understood as a qualitative method in the social sciences that describes human social phenomena based on fieldwork, autoethnographers are themselves the primary participant/subject of the research in the process of writing personal stories and narratives. Autoethnography "as a form of ethnography", Ellis (2004) writes, is "part auto or self and part ethno or culture" (p. 31) and "something different from both of them, greater than its parts" (p. 32). In other words, as Ellingson and Ellis (2008) put it, "whether we call a work an autoethnography or an ethnography depends as much on the claims made by authors as anything else" (p. 449).