This journal article explains what ethnography, also known as field research, is and when it is used. The article goes into further explanations of the strengths and limitations of field research with a section explaining field research in healthcare. This article explains the aim of field research as the ability “to gain insight into the way people, as individuals or groups, go about conducting their activities and tasks naturally in their everyday lives, including activities related to any problems they might be experiencing”. Studying the behaviors of people in their natural everyday activities yields more “natural” results as opposed to studying phenomena in isolation, which occurs in lab studies.
One of the strengths of field research this article explains is “the ability to answer open-ended questions in areas that have not previously been studied”. This allows researchers to gain insight into and discover new variables to research. Another strength of the ethnographic approach “is the freedom from constricting or assumptions built into the original hypothesis, which can allow researchers to focus solely on the discovery of the nature of the phenomenon of interest”. This explanation is really technical and hard to understand for me. What I think they are saying is the ability to focus more on why the phenomenon happened as opposed to being held back by pre-conceived notions of the hypothesis.
The ‘field in healthcare’ section begins by saying there has been a general lack of ethnographic research methodology in healthcare. This could be in part due to the dominant quantitative nature of the research in healthcare. Healthcare is a very complex field and being able to gather qualitative research is an important factor. There are many variables that exist in the complex healthcare field. These variables could be explained by the open-ended approach that field research uses.
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A limitation of field research is that it requires the researcher to by fully emerged into the setting or context that is being researched. Being fully emerged into the society and the setting is also a reason that it is difficult to work with a large sample size. Qualitative methods of field research are quite subjective and require the researcher to maintain high a high standard of objectivity or the research can be tainted.
