Also Vietnamese, but not one of us: Emic–etic perspectives and self-awareness in conducting health studies with Vietnamese-origin older adults and their family caregivers across contexts

Abstract Conducting qualitative social work research with familiar disadvantaged communities is often confusing and challenging. The researchers may encounter the messiness in clarifying their emic–etic perspectives due to their fluid nature. This article adopted the auto-ethnography method to address the role of emic and etic perspectives, as well as self-awareness through reflexivity in qualitative health inquiry with Vietnamese-origin older adults and their family caregivers across contexts. This academic auto-ethnography work draws on my reflection on my experiences of the confusing fluid of emic–etic perspective as a Vietnamese researcher, who was trained in the United States (US), and later conducted studies with older Vietnamese nationals in northern Vietnam and older Vietnamese Americans in the Deep South of the US. Three key themes were reported, including (i) my struggle with conflicts and uncertainty of own identity and positionalities; (ii) the process I went through to learn about the importance of identifying and balancing my emic and etic perspectives in conducting research; and (iii) my lesson learned in reflexivity, which will be highlighted for evolving qualitative researchers with diverse cultural roots and somehow ambivalent identities, as well as hard-to-clarify emic and etic perspectives.