Here are some of my ideas (all of which somehow tie into the medical field):
-Interaction of healthcare professionals (nurse, doctor, assistant) in a clinical setting
-Do the interactions differ if the institutions are non-profit or for-profit?
-Does gender impact any "hierarchy" that might form?
-Women's health counseling
-Impact of gender/age/race (of the counselor and of the counseled) on substance, tone of discussion
-The health of health professionals
-Does it vary by status?
-How do people who work to heal others' bodies take care of their own?
-If working in a women's health clinic, do employees come to perceive the female body
differently? With greater or less respect?
-Health professionals and health policy
-How do people who work in the healthcare industry perceive of the healthcare bill? What do they know? What do they care about? What controversial issues might affect them?
Honestly, I wonder if I am framing my ideas correctly, in a proper anthropological light. Any suggestions to narrow my choices or my object of study?
Oh my, lots of questions!
ReplyDeleteFirst, yes, logistics are a concern--you want to work with a question that is answerable in the time frame you're working in + should be able to access the site/participants easy and often enough to make this work. Also, there is an issue of scope that you might keep in mind, and you might scale your question in such a way that would account for the scale of your study (can't offer a broad, generalizable answer, but a smaller one, that takes into account the specifics of the study: in this particular clinic, with these particular people, then you can connect it to larger phenomena, "this is part of... or articulates with...").
I might not be making any sense right now :) Anyway, I think you should start with a question that is relevant to *you*, something that you are genuinely curious about, something that you find yourself talking about, reading about, etc. Then, translate that into a research question and context that is suited for this class (and I can help you with that). So far, it looks like you are asking three types of questions:
--questions about social interaction
--questions about policy, responses to policy, etc
--questions that could be construed as cultural-analysis related (how the female body is imagined, understood, talked about; how policy changes are understood, etc).
Of course, there are even more questions you can ask in each of those categories, for example how a new disease is "made" (physicians learn about it, get educated, medication gets sold to them, they re-diagnose patients and "discover" the symptoms etc etc, just to give one example under the third category)
I think you should first look at each of these categories and see which one looks more *interesting* to you, and which has the greatest potential to keep you curious and passionate. If you want, you can think about it long term, as well, and see if you would want to continue the project later, part of your capstone etc.
Also, you should be careful how you phrase your questions (it can make all the difference). Comparative questions are interesting, but they are twice the work. The "how" questions are the most interesting to me, generally, because they are open enough, and tend to focus our attention on *processes*.
Another possibility for you could be to explore how a research project would look like if you were trying to understand X, and use the semester to basically design a better, later project. The research work would be the same (interviews, PO, secondary sources), but you would be asking questions about who the most appropriate participants would be, what terms/concepts would be most relevant, what kinds of questions to ask/data to collect, etc. The final paper would be an extended project proposal based on this preliminary research.
I hope this helps (a little). Let's continue to exchange ideas about this!
Oh, I forgot! The H1N1 seems like a rich topic, too--you could look at it from many, many points of view. I don't know if you're interested in epidemiology, though.
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