Marlot Kuiper

118 Connective Routines I think it might have been problematic that patients often did not exactly know what my role in the team was. Because of the workflows in the surgery department, it was practically impossible to gain (written) consent from all patients without disturbing the social setting I was about to observe. A few things are relevant to consider. First of all, surgery is a field where many actors come for the purpose of observation. In that sense, my presence was not that prominent in the setting. Next, my research focuses on professionals and I did try to interfere with patients as little as possible. Characteristics of patients are not relevant for the research question. I signed a form before commencing in the fieldwork, that I would not share information about patients with others. During the fieldwork, it happened only once that one of the patients asked about my role in the setting. After deliberation, I left the setting after the time-out had been performed for the sake of the patient’s privacy. It shows that balancing roles and the need to observe, write, listen and think all at once make ethnographying a difficult task. I tried to become aware of the difficulties in balancing these tasks, by making reflexive notes to myself. So besides the field notes about performances or artefacts, I wrote down how I felt or how I experienced situations and what my role looked like in these situations in a separate section of my note book. Another way to be reflective, was to have conversations with the gate-keeper about the process and what I had found so far. These conversations helped me to make sense of my findings and clarify for example medical jargon that I had missed out. Besides, these conversations acted as member check. The use of multiple data collection techniques was a way to enhance rigour, but by articulating my findings to someone from the field I could also check whether my findings made sense from a native perspective. 4.7 Conclusion In this chapter, I answered the question: “How can professional standards in performance-oriented medical practice be studied?” I have explained why an ethnographic design best fits the research question, and I discussed the challenges that come with it. I explained how I went about the three main activities in this ethnographic study; headwork, fieldwork and textwork. These are difficult tasks and require the researcher to constantly move between them. Especially in ethnographic studies, the role of the researcher is relevant to consider and