Ethical Challenges in Participant Observation: A Reflection on Ethnographic Fieldwork

Ethical Challenges in Participant Observation: A Reflection on Ethnographic Fieldwork

In this essay I reflect on the ethical challenges of ethnographic fieldwork I personally experienced in a female gambling study. By assuming a covert research role, I was able to observe natural occurrences of female gambling activities but unable to make peace with disturbing feelings of my research concealment. By making my study overt, I was able to fulfill ethical obligations as a researche...

Ethical and Practical Challenges of Participant Observation in Sensitive Health Research

Participant observation is now increasingly used within qualitative health research and has been found to offer opportunities for the collection and synthesis of rich data about health and illness experience. This method, often used over an extended period, enables the researcher to build an in-depth understanding of the research context and can be the basis for the development of relationships...

Lived experiences and challenges of older surgical patients during hospitalization for cancer: An ethnographic fieldwork

This paper explores the lived experiences of older surgical patients' (aged 74 years and older) experienced challenges during a brief admission to hospital. Age, gender, polypharmacy, and the severity of illness are also factors known to affect the hospitalization process. For an ethnographic study using participant observation and interviews, surgical cancer patients (n = 9, aged 74 years and ...

Challenges of Introducing Participant Observation to Community Health Research

Participant observation elicits unique observation data from both an insider's and an outsider's perspectives. Despite the growing tendency to adopt participant observation strategies in health care research regarding health-related beliefs and types of behavior, the use of participant observation in current research is mostly limited to structured clinical settings rather than community settin...

Emotional work: ethnographic fieldwork in prisons in Ecuador