ABSTRACT
Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method that supports nurse researchers to examine issues that arise in the institutional and organizational arrangements of nursing work and patient care. IE is a relatively new sociological method of inquiry that has been under development since the mid1970s. Characterized as a “sociology that talks back” (Campbell & Manicom, 1995), it is designed to support researchers to better understand features of contemporary social organization that create problems for people (Smith, 1987, 1990a, 1990b, 1999, 2005, 2006). The aim of IE is to explore how people’s activities and problems are coordinated. It describes and examines links between people’s local experiences and those things going on at a distance from direct practice, in order to discover how everyday practices and difficulties are put together. IE research “extends people’s ordinary knowledge as practitioners of their everyday lives into realms of power and relations that go well beyond their everyday lives” (Howard, Risman, & Sprague, 2005, p. xi).
