Individuals’ behavior in groups is constrained by several factors, including the skills, privileges and responsibilities they enjoy. We call these factors a social role, and explore using the concept of social roles as an analytical tool for studying communities in Usenet newsgroups. Our understanding of what roles are and how they function is derived from sociolinguistics, social psychology, a...

Therapeutic discourse is the talk-in-interaction that represents the social practice between clinician and client. This article invites speech-language pathologists to apply their knowledge of language to analyzing therapy talk and to learn how talking practices shape clinical roles and identities. A range of qualitative research approaches, including ethnography of communication, conversation ...

2 DECLARATION 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5 LIST OF FIGURES 9 LIST OF TABLES 10 ACRONYMS 10 GLOSSARY 10 CHAPTER

This article explores my recent experience of teaching as a visiting faculty member at the Centre for Ethics at a medical University in Mangalore. My teaching and research has emerged through years as a therapist collecting stories. Stories of fact emerge through relationships and are written through experience before being presented as ‘ways of doing, writing and reading research’ From my expe...

The author discusses the application of the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity in ethnographic theory and research, and finds that one kind of subjectivity, that of applying a particular perspective to ethnography, is central and inevitable. Today, we acknowledge that objectivity is relative to a given perspective or preunderstanding, but the applied perspective must compete with other pe...

Thomas David Barton provides an overview of practitioner ethnography, a research approach that provides practitioners with a way of exploring the culture of their workplace. He compares practitioner and traditional ethnography and looks at the pros and cons of the method.