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The field worker's fields: ethics, ethnography and medical sociology
Author(s) -
Anspach Renée R.,
Mizrachi Nissim
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
sociology of health and illness
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 97
eISSN - 1467-9566
pISSN - 0141-9889
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9566.2006.00538.x
Subject(s) - field (mathematics) , ethnography , sociology , discipline , face (sociological concept) , perspective (graphical) , confidentiality , forcing (mathematics) , engineering ethics , epistemology , social science , law , political science , anthropology , computer science , philosophy , mathematics , engineering , climatology , artificial intelligence , pure mathematics , geology
Sociologists who do field work in medical settings face an intractable tension between their disciplinary field, which takes a critical perspective toward medicine, and their ethnographic field, which often includes physicians. This paper explores the ethical problems that result from the collision of the two fields. While in the field, ethnographers are forced to choose between sociology and their obligations to host members, as they decide whether to disclose their actual research agendas, whether to ask tough questions or to reveal their concerns, and whether to give advice. The tension persists when field workers leave the field to write, forcing them to choose between competing interpretations and to decide what to reveal or conceal in the interests of confidentiality. Through these moral choices about what to ask, record or present to the reader, ethnographers shape the academic field even as it shapes them.