What is Becoming of Ethnography?

A n interesting phenomenon has begun to emerge in health care, one that wethink needs to be examined a little more closely. It’s a phenomenon that we refer to as the bastardization of research designs. The phenomenon is seen most often in qualitative designs. Some refer to the process as the development or improvement of research designs; others see it as poor science. The major concern here is with the use of a research design developed by anthropology and borrowed by health care disciplines, called ethnography. All research designs were developed through trial and error to arrive at answers (dependable answers that reflected truth or fact) to common questions being asked by scientists. The earliest of the designs, the one with the longest his-tory, is the experimental design. At its heart is the basic concept of “experimen-tation, ” or changing something to see what will happen, in which a variable is selected to be “manipulated ” or changed. If the variable is not manipulated or changed, we do not have an experimental design. It is as simple as that. All research designs have a part of the design and a research process that is the signature to the design. Over time, there have been variations to the design, with