ABSTRACT
The purpose of anthropological ethnography is surely that it takes people seriously: it attempts to reveal complexity, not gratuitously, but because people and the lives they create, and the social and cultural conditions within which they create them, are enormously complex. It works in a health-related sphere; author's experience of multidisciplinarity may resonate with those in other arenas. The Health Services Research Collaboration (HSRC) is a research unit, which is supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and is embedded in the University of Bristol's Department of Social Medicine. The HSRC places great emphasis on multidisciplinary research and methodological innovation, and supports several research programmes. Working in the HSRC I engage to a greater or lesser extent with those who hail from a range of disciplines. These include epidemiology, medicine, statistics, sociology, psychology and economics. It is this engagement that has proved one of the most stimulating aspects of author's research post.
