BMJ 2000;321:1400-1402 ( 2 December )

Education and debate

Ethnography and health care

Jan Savage, senior research fellow. 

Royal College of Nursing, London W1M OAB

Correspondence to: jan.savage@rcn.org.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Development of a culture of evidence based medicine depends on a body of research that draws from both qualitative and quantitative approaches.¹ Recent BMJ articles have usefully questioned a stark polarity between qualitative and quantitative research and helped to demystify qualitative approaches. ^{2 3 4} There has been little mention of ethnography, however, and little argument for its use in health research.

I have examined some of these omissions, giving a broad indication of the nature of ethnography and arguing for its greater use within health care. I have given examples of ethnographic studies to suggest some of the issues that ethnography can help to explore, together with a brief outline of limitations of the approach.

Table Removed (Available Only in the Full Text)

	What is ethnography?

Perhaps one of the reasons for the neglect of ethnography is that there is no standard interpretation of what it is. Ethnography is, confusingly, both a process and a product: the term can apply both to a . . . [Full text of this article]

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