Qualitative research methodologies: ethnography.

Ethnography is the study of social interactions, behaviours, and perceptions that occur within groups, teams, organisations, and communities. Its roots canbe traced back to anthropological studies of small, rural (andoften remote) societies thatwereundertaken in the early 1900s, when researchers such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown participated in these societies over long periods and documented their social arrangements and belief systems. This approach was later adopted by members of the Chicago School of Sociology (for example, Everett Hughes, Robert Park, Louis Wirth) and applied to a variety of urban settings in their studies of social life. The central aim of ethnography is to provide rich, holistic insights into people’s views and actions, as well as the nature (that is, sights, sounds) of the location they inhabit, through the collection of detailed observations and interviews. As Hammersley states, “The task [of ethnographers] is to document the culture, the perspectives and practices, of the people in these settings.The aim is to ‘get inside’ theway each groupof people sees theworld.” Box 1 outlines the key features of ethnographic research. Examples of ethnographic researchwithin thehealth services literature include Strauss’s study of achieving and maintaining order between managers, clinicians, and patients within psychiatric hospital settings; Taxis and Barber’s exploration of intravenous medication errors in acute care hospitals; Costello’s examination of death and dying in elderly care wards; and Østerlund’s work on doctors’ and nurses’ use of traditional and digital information systems in their clinical communications. Becker and colleagues’ Boys in White, an ethnographic study of medical education in the late 1950s, remains a classic in this field. Newer developments in ethnographic inquiry include auto-ethnography, in which researchers’ own thoughts andperspectives fromtheir social interactions form the central element of a study; meta-ethnography, in which qualitative research texts are analysed and synthesised to empirically create new insights and knowledge; and online (or virtual) ethnography, which extends traditional notions of ethnographic study from situated observation and face to face researcher-participant interaction to technologically mediated interactions in online networks and communities.