Doing Human Service Ethnography

Combines the theory with the ‘how to’ of ethnography, has relevance across disciplines - Social Research Methods, Health, Social Work, Management and Organisation Studies, Public Administration.

Human service work is performed in many places - hospitals, shelters, households - and is characterised by a complex mixture of organising principles, relations and rules. Using ethnographic methods, researchers can investigate these site-specific complexities, providing multi-dimensional and compelling analyses.

Bringing together both theoretical and practical perspectives, this book explores how ethnography can be carried out within human service settings. It provides an invaluable guide on how to apply ethnographic creativeness and offers a more humanistic and context-sensitive approach in the field of health and social care to generating valid knowledge about today’s service work.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.