Theoretically Informed Hospital Ethnography: Reflecting on Method

Abstract

Disciplines anchor themselves using a particular kind of epistemology and ontology to produced it’s knowledge. In healthcare, quantitative research has been dominant were in social sciences, qualitative research was. However, in the last two decades, we have seen a mixing (better said in French with the word métissage) of strategies within those two disciplines. Despite the newfound acceptance of qualitative research within the healthcare field, some criticism about those strategies still exists and still impact the feasibility of conducting qualitative research, especially in hospital setting. More particularly, when it comes to the systematisation of the method, when conducting ethnography. In this paper, I argue that ethnography does remain scientifically rigorous, especially when it is informed by theory and used consistently. This article presents the ways in which I negotiated the uncertainties of doing a hospital ethnography on the use of the ventilator by using concepts from Latour’s (2005) Actor’s Network Theory, of ‘mediators’ and ‘intermediaries’. Staying attuned to various actors in the healthcare setting and taking care to ensure that whatever my research brought into the field maintained an intermediary status enabled me to alter my methods in the field while still respecting the necessity to gather data systematically.