Management of Emotions in Accelerated Medical Relationships
Year: 2012
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis is the result of an ethnographic fieldwork at a major university hospital in\nDenmark that I undertook between June 2009 and January 2011. I was an ‘embedded’\nobserver in a cancer clinic and entirely dependent on the staff – administrative\nand clinical – for access to facilities, people and diseases. That said, I was never\nasked to modify my writings in any way or to show the content of my field notes or\ntape recordings. Neither does the hospital have any formal share in the overall thesis.\nThe responsibility for the final outcome is on my shoulders alone. As an embedded\nobserver I was to handle personally sensitive data, such as specific details in patient\nrecords, with confidentiality. There is no information in my writings which can be\ntraced – directly or indirectly – back to individual patients or relatives at the hospital\nand hence disclose their identity. My observations lasted anywhere from 20 minutes\n(the length of a typical staff meeting) to five working days in a row. During a day of\nobservation, I followed doctors from they arrived in the early mornings; when they\nattended the morning conferences, until they left the hospital in the late afternoon after\nhours of clinical work in the outpatient clinic. I also followed them in their offices\nand in the operation theatres. Many tableaux from the thesis you are reading now\nwere recorded in my notebook and then reconstructed in the later writing. Wherever\npossible, I have used my free access to the hospital to check the accuracy of my writing,\nfor example by procuring typical situations more than once or by going through\nprecarious details with involved staff members. Statements that appear in quotation\nmarks (‘…’) were recorded directly on my tape recorder or in my notebook while the\nperson was speaking, or immediately hereafter. Through the process I have shared\nmy ideas with the staff members involved to make sure that they understood the purpose\nof my work and also in order for them to have a chance to feel comfortable with\nmy presence. Throughout the thesis, I have shortened quotes from documents and\ninterviews in order to make the text more readable. In addition to my fieldwork at the hospital, I have worked with the sociologist\nNanna Mik-Meyer. In her work, Mik-Meyer has focused on general practitioners\nand their preoccupation with patients who attend the consultancy with medically\nunexplained symptoms. Parts of the raw data material from some of her previous\nstudies became the basis of a co-authored article, which is included in this thesis. Utterances\nfrom individuals described in this article are directly quoted from a larger\nquantity of interviews with general practitioners in primary care medicine.
Source: Econstor (Econstor)
Author: Anne Roelsgaard Obling
Institution: Copenhagen Business School
Language: English
Subfield: General Health Professions
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2182097908