Population Health and Social Governance

Abstract

Recently, health care workers (researchers, academics, policy writers, clinicians) have begun to view ethnography as an acceptable research methodology for informing public health work. This corresponds with a change in public health practice toward population health, wherein identifiable groups are examined to identify the group-level and contextual factors that affect their health statuses. Although population health-based methodological and outcomes-focused examinations have already occurred regarding ethnography, no extant literature scrutinizes the incorporation of ethnography into mainstream public and population health work from a sociopolitical viewpoint. Consequently, such an investigation occurs here using Foucault's concepts of discipline and Lupton's advancement of Foucault's ideas about the imperative of health. The outcome of this investigation is the assertion that ethnography is a strategic method for disciplining populations that do not respect the imperative of health. In other words, ethnography helps generate the data that can be used to normalize large groups of people.

Nurses’ Experiences of Managing and Management in a Critical Care Unit

“…Postmodern notions of culture centered on the changing, fragmented, and spontaneous interpretations by organizational members rather than a deep unified truth embedded in a seemingly linear and progressive history. Utilizing critical, feminist, and postmodern ethnographic approaches, we focused on the importance of embedded intertextuality to reveal nuances of discipline and governance (O’Byrne, 2011). …”

“What I Got to Go Through”: Normalization and HIV-Positive Adolescents

“…Although Tyrone’s colleagues were unaware of his HIV status, he interpreted their comments about a healthy weight through a lens of potential difference. The group-level examination leads to an identification of individual-level non-normative practices, which, ideally, are then corrected (O’Byrne 2012). This moment of normalization became a point of tension since Tyrone interpreted his colleagues’ comments as a suggestion that he was somehow unhealthy.…”

The Encounters and Challenges of Ethnography as a Methodology in Health Research

“…In the past three decades, ethnographic studies published in health research have increased, and ethnographic work has become popular among health researchers (O'Byrne, 2012). Cook (2005) has attributed the increased demand of ethnography in health research to the congruency that exists between the two.…”

“…The fact that ethnography has been used by researchers in different disciplines such as medicine, business, public health, and nursing (Hughes, 1992) and has been growing in popularity is a noteworthy factor for the diversification of ethnography as a methodology (Boyle, 1994). In addition, O'Byrne (2012) highlighted that ethnography as methodology produced knowledge that was critical for generating health-related interventions, which were of significant value to researchers from different disciplines; he concluded that ''ethnography becomes a disciplinary and bio-political tool'' (p.866) in public health. Furthermore, the field of ethnographic research is diverse and much divided about important factors such as the length and depth of fieldwork, the epistemological/ontological frame work, and data collection (see Table 1 for a comparison of different forms of ethnography).…”