Marlot Kuiper

97 On Ethnography ing interventions, education, and scientific research, though these practices are performed on a more low-scale level in St. Sebastian’s. Besides the more substantive reasons, practicalities played their part in the selection of the research sites too. As said, access is crucial in conducting ethnographic research. The gate-keeper that had a great deal in promoting the research project had close contacts at both research sites which smoothened access. Further, because working days in the surgery department are long and start early, the research setting had to be within easy reach from the home location of the researcher. 4.4.3 Selecting research participants At both research sites I started off with purposive sampling to select participants at the research sites. Because of the problem focus of this dissertation, together with a gate-keeper I initially selected participants that held specific knowledge on the research topic (Davies & Crookes, 2004), for example because they were involved in the implementation process of the checklist in the surgical department or had a position in for example a patient safety core team. Through a snowballing technique, the key actors subsequently helped to identify other relevant actors. Individuals were chosen based on the purpose of maximum phenomenon variation (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007; Miles & Huberman, 1994) which means that I explicitly asked to involve actors with both different professional backgrounds and specialties, and for example different attitudes towards standardization and checklists, such that the full range of the phenomenon was represented. Naturally, this method of selecting respondents only led to the inclusion of individuals that were willing to participate. This does not imply that they held the same perspectives towards the research topic. Data saturation dictated the sample size, which means that I kept on recruiting new participants to the point that the generated data did not lead to new interpretations (Guest et al., 2006). 4.4.4 Negotiating access At the start of this chapter, I described that the overarching purpose of this study was to observe, describe and explain the recreation of routines, as it unfolds in context. In order to describe and explain what happens in a setting; how people conduct their work and how they see their own actions, one not only needs 4