Doing Human Service Ethnography

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Human service work is performed in many places – hospitals, shelters, households, prisons, schools, clinics – and is characterised by a complex mixture of organising principles, relations and rules. Using ethnographic methods, researchers can investigate these site-specific complexities, providing multi-dimensional and compelling analyses. Bringing together both theoretical and practical material, this book shows researchers how ethnography can be carried out within human service settings. It provides an invaluable guide on how to apply ethnographic creativeness and offers a more humanistic and context-sensitive approach in the field of health and social care to generating valid knowledge about today’s service work.

This book shows researchers how ethnography can be carried out within human service settings, providing an invaluable guide on how to apply ethnographic creativeness and offering a more humanistic and context-sensitive approach to generating valid knowledge about today's service work.

Ethnography is now a fundamental feature of design practice, taught in universities worldwide and practiced widely in commerce. Despite its rise to prominence a great many competing perspectives exist and there are few practical texts to support the development of competence. Doing Design Ethnography elaborates the ethnomethodological perspective on ethnography, a distinctive approach that provides canonical 'studies of work' in and for design. It provides an extensive treatment of the approach, with a particular slant on providing a pedagogical text that will support the development of competence for students, career researchers and design practitioners. It is organised around a complementary series of self-contained chapters, each of which address key features of doing the job of ethnography for purposes of system design. The book will be of broad appeal to students and practitioners in HCI, CSCW and software engineering, providing valuable insights as to how to conduct ethnography and relate it to design.

This is a book about a distinctive methodological approach inspired by one of Canada's most respected scholars, Dorothy Smith. Institutional ethnography aims to answer questions about how everyday life is organized. What is conventionally understood as "the relationship of micro to macro processes" is, in institutional ethnography, conceptualized and explored in terms of ruling relations.The authors suggest that institutional ethnographers must adopt a particular research stance, one that recognizes that people's own knowledge and ways of knowing are crucial elements of social action and thus of social analysis. Specific attention to text analysis is integral to the approach as is a sensitive to gender relations. Institutional ethnography is remarkably well suited to the human service curriculum and the training of professionals and activists. Its strategy for learning how to understand problems existing in everyday life appeals to many researchers who are looking for guidance on how to take practical action. At the same time, the highly elaborated theoretical foundation of institutional ethnography is difficult to deal with in the brief time most students are in the classroom. The authors successfully tackle the issue of teaching and applying institutional ethnography. Campbell and Gregor have been testing out instructional methods and materials for many years. MAPPING SOCIAL RELATIONS is the product of that effort.

Doing Sensory Ethnography responds to a recent an explosion of interest in the senses across the social sciences. Sarah Pink suggests re-thinking the ethnographic process through reflexive attention to what she terms the 'sensoriality' of the experience, practice and knowledge of both researchers and those who participate in their research. The book provides an accessible discussion and analysis of the theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of doing sensory ethnography, drawing on examples and case studies from the growing literature on sensory ethnographic studies, and from the author's own work. Doing Sensory Ethnography is the first book to concentrate on outlining a sensory ethnographic methodology. It will be of great interest to researchers and students from all disciplines interested in enriching their ethnographic work through a focus on the senses.

Modern library services can be incredibly complex. Much more so than their forebears, modern librarians must grapple daily with questions of how best to implement innovative new services, while also maintaining and updating the old. The efforts undertaken are immense, but how best to evaluate their success? In this groundbreaking new book from Routledge, library practitioners, anthropologists, and design experts combine to advocate a new focus on User Experience (or ‘UX’) research methods. Through a combination of theoretical discussion and applied case studies, they argue that this ethnographic and human-centred design approach enables library professionals to gather rich evidence-based insights into what is really going on in their libraries, allowing them to look beyond what library users say they do to what they actually do. Edited by the team behind the international UX in Libraries conference, User Experience in Libraries will ignite new interest in a rapidly emerging and game-changing area of research. Clearly written and passionately argued, it is essential reading for all library professionals and students of Library and Information Science. It will also be welcomed by anthropologists and design professionals working in related fields.

The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work presents and illustrates an anthropological model of child and youth care work and explores the associated benefits of such an approach. Author Rivka A. Eisikovits'model enhances workers'on-the-job effectiveness with clients and co-workers and improves intra- and inter-organizational communication with other human service providers. This book prepares child and youth care providers, educators, researchers, administrators, consultants, supervisors, and organizers to become change-sensitive, process-oriented observers, analysts, and co-designers of the systems within which they function and those with which they interact, such as families, communities, and referral agencies. The model presented in The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work offers readers an organic continuum between everyday work experience and conceptual practice, organizing such haphazard events into a systemized body of knowledge. Although providing specific skills, it is more than a technology--it is a humanistic worldview from which a humanistic practice philosophy can be derived. Specific points of this philosophy that child and youth care professionals learn about include: the cultural learning theory ethnographic inquiry and description staff-client relations the sick-role trap microcultural events in residential settings the relationship between treatment and education subsystems a heuristic approach to service delivery family cultural ethnography for cultural sensitizationEisikovits'anthropologic perspective broadens the horizons of child and youth care work and equips practitioners to transcend narrowly drawn organizational boundaries. By presenting caregivers as cultural translators between their clients and various decision-making forums, The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work prepares them to face the challenges of a dynamic emergent profession and helps them perform successfully in a rapidly changing social context that requires constant assessment of needs and evaluation of performance.

Doing Ethnographies is an introductory and applied guide to ethnographic methods. It focuses on those methods - participant observation, interviewing, focus groups, and video/photographic work - that allow us to understand the lived, everyday world. Informed by the authors′ fieldwork experience, the book covers the relation between theory, practice and writing, and demonstrates how methods work in the field, so preparing the first-time ethnographer for the loss of control and direction often experienced.