Conducting Analysis in Institutional Ethnography

Conducting ethnography in medical settings.

BACKGROUND Ethnographic research methods have a considerable history of use in medical settings. This paper provides a personal account of conducting ethnography in medical environments and focuses on some of the practical and ethical issues encountered in such settings. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION The paper describes particular issues that arise when undertaking ethnographic work, such as gain...

An institutional ethnography approach to housing studies

In this paper we discuss how institutional ethnography, a feminist materialist method of inquiry, can be use to study the social institution of housing. We begin providing a brief description of institutional ethnography and then recount how we are applying this approach in a study of changes in housing in the United States in the twentieth century. For purposes of illustration, we summarize tw...

Conducting a meta-ethnography of qualitative literature: Lessons learnt

BACKGROUND Qualitative synthesis has become more commonplace in recent years. Meta-ethnography is one of several methods for synthesising qualitative research and is being used increasingly within health care research. However, many aspects of the steps in the process remain ill-defined. DISCUSSION We utilized the seven stages of the synthesis process to synthesise qualitative research on adh...

Institutional Ethnography – towards a Productive Sociology – an Interview with Dorothy

Conducting a team-based multi-sited focused ethnography in primary care

Focused ethnography is an applied and pragmatic form of ethnography that explores a specific social phenomenon as it occurs in everyday life. Based on the literature a problem-focused research question is formulated before the data collection. The data generation process targets key informants and situations so that relevant results on the pre-defined topic can be obtained within a relatively s...