Jacqueline Choiniere and James Struthers
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- March 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190862268
- eISBN:
- 9780190862299
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190862268.003.0007
- Subject:
- Social Work, Research and Evaluation
In this chapter a nurse/sociologist and an historian discuss how their academic backgrounds and disciplinary perspectives shaped both what they saw and what they overlooked during the process of ...
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In this chapter a nurse/sociologist and an historian discuss how their academic backgrounds and disciplinary perspectives shaped both what they saw and what they overlooked during the process of conducting ethnographic research for this project. For both authors, doing ethnography was a new endeavor, although each had published on long-term residential care within their own disciplines. The chapter highlights how an historical gaze focused one author’s attention toward the significance of location, sense of place, cultural memory, and origin stories in writing fieldnotes on the nursing homes he visited. The nurse/sociologist concentrated on issues surrounding the gendered division of labor, health and safety, workplace accountability, and differing emphases upon social as opposed to medical care. Over time, through conversations with team members and each other, their fieldnotes increasingly incorporated shared perspectives on the significance of location, heritage, workplace practices and tensions between social and medical care.Less
In this chapter a nurse/sociologist and an historian discuss how their academic backgrounds and disciplinary perspectives shaped both what they saw and what they overlooked during the process of conducting ethnographic research for this project. For both authors, doing ethnography was a new endeavor, although each had published on long-term residential care within their own disciplines. The chapter highlights how an historical gaze focused one author’s attention toward the significance of location, sense of place, cultural memory, and origin stories in writing fieldnotes on the nursing homes he visited. The nurse/sociologist concentrated on issues surrounding the gendered division of labor, health and safety, workplace accountability, and differing emphases upon social as opposed to medical care. Over time, through conversations with team members and each other, their fieldnotes increasingly incorporated shared perspectives on the significance of location, heritage, workplace practices and tensions between social and medical care.
