ABSTRACT
The implementation of change in health and care services is inherently a social endeavour. Ethnography is a way of designing, carrying out, and writing about implementation research that more directly attends to the social milieu of change processes. As a methodology, ethnography seeks a naturalistic, holistic, and emic understanding of how people make sense of and organize their social life. Its methods typically aim to gather first-hand understanding of social life through “participant observations” where a researcher is the primary instrument of data collection. Ethnographies are often characterized by “rich” or “thick” description, in which social activities are recounted and explained in terms of the underlying meanings, beliefs, and rules. Ethnography, therefore, offers a uniquely detailed descriptive and interpretative understanding of implementation processes.
