ABSTRACT
Interview research, whether qualitative or quantitative, is merely a recent way of "asking questions", while most observational research is a more or less elaborated way of "hanging out". This chapter looks at these hanging out methods that involve direct and systematic observation of the social processes involved in modern health care. Membership in this family is conferred by the use of "given" data. If the degree of participation is a matter of some negotiation, observation is the inescapable core of the method. Fieldworkers have something of the Recording Angel about them. Their objective is to make as an accurate a record as possible of the events that go on around them, and of their own responses to these. The chapter argues that organizational documents that lie somewhere between observational data and the interview data. It further focuses on three topics: the social construction of organizational statistics, the internal and external representation of organizations, and the interaction between work and documents.
