NSE 222 Week 6: Ethnography

Ethnography definition

descriptive science studying people or cultural groups

Uses of Ethnography

To explore the cognitive aspect or patterns of behaviour of people within a culture

focuses on ordinary social situations or events or problems within a specific context

Ethnography in Nursing and health care

• Focus on health and illness within a cultural system, examines the complexity of everyday clinical struggles

• verbal and non verbal communication

• uncovering tacit skills, rules, nuances, details e.g (what are the behind the scene activities taking place in operating room)

• encompasses social construction and understanding of health or illness experience

• gives social meaning to the experience of illness

Ethno-nursing

Evolved from ethnography

Rigorous, systematic, and in-depth method for studying multiple cultures and care factors to arrive at the goal of culturally congruent care services ​

Culture

fundamental to ethnographic study

what people say, do , and the relationship between these (Savage, 2006)

Structure of meaning through which people shape their experience

Are constructed, multiple and in continuous evolution

Culture comprises two perspectives:

Behaviour/Materialistic perspective

Cognitive perspective

Behaviour/Materialistic perspective (cultures two perspectives)

Observable patterns of group’s behaviour and customs, its way of life and what it produces

Cognitive perspective (cultures two perspectives)

Consists of the beliefs, knowledge, and ideas that people use as they live

Holistic understanding (Values underpinning ethnography)

• Seek to understand another’s ways of life from the perspective those experiencing it.​

• By uncovering cognitive model or patterns behavior of people within a culture​

• Making the implicit or backstage aspects of culture explicit or visible in addition to what is already known in public ​

• Understanding requires an approach that encompasses beliefs, knowledge, and activities of the group being studied​

Context (Values underpinning Ethnography)

• Where people live, in their natural setting, or where experience occurred e.g hospital, school, village, streets, subway

• Composed of personal, social, and political environment in which a phenomenon of interest occurs ( time, place, cultural beliefs, values, and practice

• Understanding involves intensive interaction over extended period of time or prolonged engagement

Emic (Values underpinning Ethnography)

Insider views of the world

• Familiar has some knowledge of the context

• share identity, language, experiential knowledge of places/events/artifacts and jargons

Advantages of Emic (Values underpinning Ethnography)

• Access and acceptance to the research setting

• trust and openness

• in-depth generation of data

Disadvantages of Emic (Values underpinning Ethnography)

• Blurs understanding due to researcher’s familiarity ​

• Undue influence of the researcher’s perspective​

• Role conflicts ​

Etic (Values underpinning Ethnography)

Outsider View of the world (Unfamiliar with context)

Advantages of Etic (Values underpinning Ethnography)

• Objective understanding

• Access information that the insider may not be privy to

• Able to make the familiar strange

Disadvantages of Etic (Values underpinning Ethnography)

• Difficulty establishing trust and gaining access

• Issues of misrepresentation

• Cultural shock

Critical ethnography (Understanding the different types of ethnography)

• Focuses on beliefs and practice that limit human freedom, justice and democracy ​

• Human thinking and actions is mediated by power relations​

• Document tacit rule or taken for granted assumptions that guide human behaviour and interaction​

• Attentive to systems of oppression and domination of those in marginal positions or those with less power​

• Participants are co-investigators with the research as they explore and identify solution to problems ​

Feminist ethnography (Understanding the different types of ethnography)

• Share similar assumptions of critical ethnography ​

• Focuses on exposing patterns of oppression and power that shapes women’s lives ​

• Attend to intersecting impact of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and other force that produce and sustain oppression​

Ethno-geriatrics (Understanding the different types of ethnography)

• Focus examining issues of health and aging issues as it relates to cultural beliefs, values, and practice among racial groups.​

• Attentive to disparity and inequities facing racialized older adults​

• Aim to develop culturally appropriate interventions for an inclusive health care​

Classical/Conventional (Hamersley and Atkinson, 2004) (Understanding different forms of ethnography)

Focus on describing and providing insight about a group or culture (Hamersley and Atkinson, 2004)

Institutional ethnography (Devault, 2006)​ (Understanding different forms of ethnography)

Focus on people’s everyday lives and how their lives are organised and coordinated by institutional forces

Focused ethnography (Higginbottom, Pillay & Boadu, 2013)​ (Understanding different forms of ethnography)

Focus on cultures and sub-cultures framed within a discrete community or phenomenon or context with specific knowledge about an identified problem

Auto ethnography (Wall, 2006) (Understanding different forms of ethnography)

Focus on personal experience in order to understand cultural experience

Digital ethnography (Murthy,2008) (Understanding different forms of ethnography)

Focus on online community and culture through socially mediated relationship

Identifying the phenomenon

• Varies in scope and ranges from the long-term study of cultures to shorter term study of sub-units or cultures e.g. hospital units, communities​

• Focus on groups or patients experiencing particular phenomenon e. g. breast cancer, COPD, homelessness, substance use​

• Involves the context in which people are situated: cultural, political, economical and institutional and socio-relational dimensions ​

Research questions guiding ethnographic inquiry

• Descriptive or broad open-ended questions

• Followed by in-depth questions that expand and very the unit of analysis

• Contrast questions that clarifies and provide criteria for exclusion

• life ways, pattern of behaviours within culture

• addresses cultural knowledge, norms, values and other contextual variables influencing person health or life experience

^{Researchers perspective}

• Assumes position of an interpreter of an alien world as they attempts to make sense of it from the emic (insider) point of view

• Make explicit their beliefs at the onset of the study and bracket them

• personal biases are set aside during data interpretation as they seek to understand world view of the other

Sample and Data collection

• Selects a cultural group experiencing a phenomenon e.g homelessness

• Using informants and key informants

Gaining Access (Webster & Rice, 2019)

access to the research setting is critical in ethnography

It is negotiated through gate keepers

Ex:

• Hospital - CEO, Directors

• School - Deans, Directors

• Community- Community leaders

Data Gathering

• Observation or immersion in a setting through field work

• Informants interview in a natural setting

• Interpretation of cultural patterns by researcher

• Life histories and collecting of materials and documents reflective of the culture

• Photographs and films of informants in their world

• Triangulation of methods

Data Analysis

• Analysis occurs simultaneously with data collection ​

• Involve several levels and focus on searching for meaning of cultural symbol and representations​

• Searching for domain or symbolic categories​

• Analysis of language for semantic relationship​

• Structural question are formulated to expand and verify data ​

• Analysis is grounded on informant realities​

• Generate propositions about the about a cultural phenomenon​

Description of Findings

• Rich and thorough descriptions of participants experience are the hall of ethnographic research ​

• Technique for presenting findings ​

  • Pulling the reader in ​

  • Recreating experiential mood​

  • Adding surprising observations​

  • Reconstructing ethnographic experience ​

  • Creating closure for the study ​

• Presented in the forms of monographs that are constructed around themes