Clinical Practice and Ethnography as Research Methods

Summary

This article reflects on the conditions necessary for the clinic and ethnography approaches to become research methods in the knowledge field of the human being. The proposal is that the kind of facts that interest this research are “acts of meaning"; therefore, their research methodologies must abandon hard models to qualify the statute of data, and must refer to flexible models which allow observations or discourses that are not objectivable. However, without these facts it is difficult to understand what is essential about the problems that are investigated in a qualitative manner. What is heard and what is seen have certain characteristics as "data", and therefore an articulation between both sources of information is proposed, which takes distance from the methodological metonymy of considering what is observed as a self-sufficient totality.