Using Critical Ethnography to Study Acute Care Clinicians: A Critical Review

Healthcare researchers are increasingly using ethnographic methods to understand the social dynamics and cultural contexts of specific groups, such as clinical teams in hospitals and community clinics. Critical ethnography is a subtype of ethnography that mobilizes critical social theory to expose and challenge group inequities and power dynamics shaped by broader social, economic, and political conditions. Critical ethnography is particularly useful for understanding how providers interact with one another in complex and high-acuity environments such as emergency rooms and intensive care units. Given the varied approaches to critical theory and ethnographic methods, this critical review summarizes how critical ethnography has been conceptualized and applied to study providers in acute care settings. After conducting a comprehensive cross-database search, we extracted the following information from the 27 reviewed publications: paradigm, theoretical framework, axiology, positionality, data collection and analysis methods, approach to rigor, and research ethics considerations. After synthesizing key trends in literature, we identified and critically interpreted several themes, contradictions, and tensions present across the studies. Drawing on social science commentary on theoretical and methodological coherence, axiology, and citational practices in critical theory, this article provides several conceptual, ethical, and methodological considerations for the use of critical ethnography in healthcare research.