Local Worlds of Suffering: An Interpersonal Focus for Ethnographies of Illness Experience

Abstract

Ethnography is advanced as a methodology that links the humanities and social sciences with the health sciences. Ethnography deepens the study of human suffering by refraining the experience of illness as interpersonal processes in a moral context. Because ethnography's validity depends on the skills and training of the ethnographer, medical ethnographers must be effectively prepared to conduct research studies. This will become a serious issue in the development of qualitative research within the health sciences.