The concept "cyberethnography" remains undefined in the social sciences while, at the same time, still overlapping too much with the more well-known concept of "virtual ethnography." The aim of our paper is to remedy this situation by underlining new directions in the ethnographic study of computer mediated settings. To do so, we define cyberspace as computer-mediated contexts intrinsically rel...

BACKGROUND Interactions between parents and healthcare professionals are essential when parents of children with chronic conditions are learning to share expertise about clinical care, but limited evidence exists on how they actually interact. This paper discusses the use of focused ethnography in paediatric settings as an effective means of exploring attitudes towards expertise. METHODS The ...

AIM Nurses are increasingly embracing ethnography as a useful research methodology. This paper presents an overview of some of the main characteristics we considered and the challenges encountered when using ethnography to explore the nature of communication between children and health professionals in a children's hospital. BACKGROUND There is no consensual definition or single procedure to ...

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...