What is an Ethnographic Interview?
The primary method of cultural data collection for EthnoMed is the ethnographic interview. The researcher interviews an informant, sometimes with the help of an interpreter, who may also be an informant. The ethnographic interview differs from the usual patient-doctor interaction in several ways. Health care providers are accustomed to control in the medical interview. Their questions are driven by an understanding of pathophysiology and a desire to find causal, temporal, and biomedical relationships between pieces of information. In the ethnographic interview, providers must relinquish control to the informant and allow the informant to be the teacher. The challenge is to maintain a friendly conversational tone while keeping track of the information being collected. The first step in the ethnographic interview is to establish a domain for the conversation. This might be a free listing of topics or ideas, e.g. “I am interested in different types of shoes.” The next step is to perform a
