ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about the ethnographic study conducted and the appropriation of genre-specific writing skills by francophone nurses in an English-medium hospital. It discusses three issues that all researchers involved in this paradigm must grapple with: the emergent design of such studies, the representativeness of data, and the researcher stance and role of theory. One aspect of qualitative research that has been a source of scrutiny and criticism pertains to the degree to which the particular cases or data showcased are representative of the phenomenon being investigated. Although there exist numerous publications that deal with issues related to the epistemological and methodological aspects of conducting qualitative research, the implications of such discussions may not always be clear as the cases dealt with rarely relate to the domain of rhetoric/writing practices. More generally, methodology is viewed as 'local, contingent, malleable, and heuristic and research generating situated knowledge or rather a kind of pragmatic know how kind of knowledge'.
