Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

All Outputs (18)

Hidden voices and deep meaning: An ethnography to reveal and render explicit health care assistants, porters and domestics experience and role in the social organisation of end of life care (2025)
Thesis

Encounters with patients who are approaching end of life or dying can affect all staff. Yet health care support staff are rarely mentioned or included in service evaluation or research studies, with their roles often not easily visible, largely happe... Read More about Hidden voices and deep meaning: An ethnography to reveal and render explicit health care assistants, porters and domestics experience and role in the social organisation of end of life care.

Reflexive ethnography (2022)
Book Chapter

Reflexivity refers to the fact that the perspectives and methods of the social sciences construct the phenomena that are studied. Reflexivity is not a matter of choice nor is it a researcher virtue. Ethnographic research needs to take account of the... Read More about Reflexive ethnography.

Hope : the dream we carry (2021) (2021)
Journal Article
Featherstone, K., & Whitaker, E. (2021). Hope : the dream we carry (2021). Sociology of Health and Illness, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13416

Book review of De Nora, Tia, 'Hope : the dream we carry', Palgrave Macmillan. 1st ed. 2021 edition (22 April 2021); ISBN-10: 3030698696; ISBN-13: 978–3030698690

Reflexivity (2019)
Book Chapter

Central to reflexivity is an awareness that the researcher and the object of study exist in a mutual relationship with one another. Thus, reflexivity calls for attention to how thinking comes to be, how it is shaped by preexisting knowledge, and how... Read More about Reflexivity.

Authenticity and the interview : a positive response to a radical critique (2019)
Journal Article
Whitaker, E., & Atkinson, P. (2019). Authenticity and the interview : a positive response to a radical critique. Qualitative Research, 19(6), 619-634. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794118816885

We respond to recent discussions of the interview, and the ‘radical critique’ of interviewing, as reiterated in publications by Silverman and Hammersley. Reviewing and extending the critical commentary on the social life of the interview and its impl... Read More about Authenticity and the interview : a positive response to a radical critique.

Emic and etic analysis (2017)
Book Chapter
Whitaker, E. (2017). Emic and etic analysis. In The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0640

This entry explores the origins and usage of the terms “emic” and “etic” as they relate to positions of knowledge in research in the social sciences.The entry explains the origins of the emic–etic distinction and how these have changed over time. Read More about Emic and etic analysis.

Surrender, catch and the imp of fieldwork (2017)
Journal Article
Whitaker, E., & Atkinson, P. (2019). Surrender, catch and the imp of fieldwork. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(9-10), 936-944. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417735137

We build on the work of Kurt Wolff to capture some distinctive aspects of ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on the sociology of knowledge and phenomenology, Wolff introduced and developed the idea of surrender-and-
catch in order to encapsulate the tw... Read More about Surrender, catch and the imp of fieldwork.

Personalisation in children’s social work : from family support to “the child’s budget” (2015)
Journal Article
Whitaker, E. (2015). Personalisation in children’s social work : from family support to “the child’s budget”. Journal of Integrated Care, 23(5), 277-286. https://doi.org/10.1108/JICA-07-2015-0031

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the changing meaning of personalisation from the New Labour era of bespoke, integrated family support to the more recent implementation of personal budgets for disabled children to deliver “choice and... Read More about Personalisation in children’s social work : from family support to “the child’s budget”.