ABSTRACT
Stories are integral to culture. They inspire daily deeds and drive decisions. They are one mainstay of what good ethnography collects and analyzes. And so stories provide a fine place to begin the exploration of anthropologically informed health services research's value in theory and practice. Stories have actual endings from which concrete lessons can be learned. Many of the stories follow patterned narrative forms. Some people say that there are two kinds of data: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative data are numerical. Qualitative data are narrative data that consist of words, sentences, or visual images. It includes particular stories, which often are discussed in terms of the more general story they tell. Despite older theories that credited the evolution of language to its denotative uses, new thinking does place causality in its connotative value. Language supports human sociality because it allows them to form groups that extend and endure beyond the here and now.
