ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the methodological challenges when entering the lifeworld and institutional structures for people in especially vulnerable and oppressed situations and present some of its results. To deal with the situation of these people is a challenge to institutional ethnography and changes slightly the elements in the research designs. In a residential home for people with mental illness and drug abuse, the professionals were guided to include the residents in every decision. At the residential homes for people with serious cognitive disabilities and challenging behaviours, the guidelines for the professionals emphasized communication, 'low arousal' and a calm, non-threatening attitude and behaviour towards the residents. Institutional ethnography focuses on the way people act, think and relate to the institutional structures, the categories they use and the systems they both produce and support in their way of organizing their everyday activity, commitment and obligation.
