LAUSR

It is always a pleasure to be asked to review and write a commentary on a methodology you hold dear. I have used ethnographic methods, which include participative and participant observation, open ended formal and informal interviews, documentary analysis, for 26 years and have had the privilege of teaching these methods and supervising students in their use for the last 20. As this paper shows, an ethnographic approach allows the researcher to embed herself in the field and elicit rich qualitative data which illuminates our understanding of human interactions. Of course, there are some limitations to a focused ethnography compared to a traditional ethnography, principally, less time in the field. Nevertheless, in this particular case, the data collection lasted nine months which is a substantial amount of time spent in the insider researcher position. Balanced against a shorter time in the field than in traditional ethnography, is the strength of this study which is that the researcher is a nurse in the field she is researching and therefore is sensitive and open to the nuances of what she is observing and describing. As the first author says ‘she was ideally placed to implement an ethnographic approach’ because of her understanding of the background of the unit and the unique opportunities her role and position gave her. As I know from supervision of nursing and midwifery doctoral students, using an ethnographic approach (White et al., 2011), and from my own experience of data collection using participative observation (Allan, 2001, 2006; Allan et al., 2011), combining a research role with a nursing role offers numerous opportunities to get at the detail of the action that is not possible if interviews alone are used. But it’s not only the richness of the observations and the opportunities which participant observation allows, it’s the relationships which develop between participants and researcher which are another opportunity for data.