Ethnography In Health And Social Care

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According to the Oxford Dictionary, the study of people and cultures through close observation, reading and interpretation is known as ethnography. Ethnography is used amongst many disciplines such as politics and social studies, education, anthropology, nursing and others.
Before going any further, it is essential to define culture as ethnography is the study of culture. As defined by many ethnographers in broader terms, culture is a patterned behaviour or way of life of a group of people. Common habits, traditions, customs, histories and geographies are some elements of culture that connect the members of the culture and define them.
Ethnography was developed in the biological, social and cultural branches of anthropology. Anthropology is …show more content…

what they do, how they use things, or what they need in their everyday lives (Cruz & Higginbottom, 2013).
Within the healthcare setting, ethnography is valuable for a number of purposes including the research of cultural perceptions of the people affected by illness, and even cultures of health professionals. It is especially advantageous when considering illnesses that are multi-cultural.
Ethnographic methodology promotes a study of the context of people’s health beliefs and practices developed as well as helping identify the cultural components of health and illness. It is essentially an inductive mode of research which may employ various methods of data collection.
Participant monitoring, used in combination with interviewing, is the most frequently used data-gathering technique. Ethnography is involved with the subject of discovery, rather than validation, and leads to narrative descriptions and interpretations of cultural experience. It is a measure for obtaining admittance to the health beliefs and practices of a culture. In nursing, a refined conception of the meaning of a patient’s performance will enhance nursing judgements and nursing

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