TY - JOUR
T1 - Health and immigration systems as an ethnographic field
T2 - Methodological lessons from examining immigration enforcement and health in the US
AU - Kline, Nolan
N1 - Funding Information:
The author would like to thank David Brunell and Pierre Minn for their comments and encouragement on this article. Funding for this study was provided through a National Science Foundation grant awarded to Mathew Coleman and Angela Stuesse, and a University of South Florida proposal enhancement grant.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2022/5
Y1 - 2022/5
N2 - The complexity of health systems and their social, political, and economic contexts has resulted in a call for multidisciplinary research that can appropriately examine the relationships and interactions surrounding health systems. Anthropologists, who have a disciplinary training that emphasizes social structures and human relationships, are well-suited to conduct health systems research. However, there remains a gap in anthropologically-ground methodological approaches for conducting in-depth, qualitative research that simultaneously conceptualizes and maps out a health system and examines connections between health systems and other social structures, such as immigration enforcement systems. Without such methodological approaches, limitations in examining a health system and its constituent elements will persist, and health and social scientists will miss opportunities to identify links between different factors in a health system and outside the system itself. In this article, I use ethnographic research examining the health-related consequences of immigration enforcement laws and police practices in the United States to show how to examine relationships between multiple social systems. In doing so, I provide an example for how to conduct in-depth, qualitative health systems research by merging theoretical frameworks in health sciences and anthropology to demonstrate how medical anthropologists can conceptualize a health system as a social field for ethnographic inquiry. Overall, I argue that such an approach permits anthropologists a way to conduct rigorous health systems research that emphasizes relationships and reveals potentially hidden interactions.
AB - The complexity of health systems and their social, political, and economic contexts has resulted in a call for multidisciplinary research that can appropriately examine the relationships and interactions surrounding health systems. Anthropologists, who have a disciplinary training that emphasizes social structures and human relationships, are well-suited to conduct health systems research. However, there remains a gap in anthropologically-ground methodological approaches for conducting in-depth, qualitative research that simultaneously conceptualizes and maps out a health system and examines connections between health systems and other social structures, such as immigration enforcement systems. Without such methodological approaches, limitations in examining a health system and its constituent elements will persist, and health and social scientists will miss opportunities to identify links between different factors in a health system and outside the system itself. In this article, I use ethnographic research examining the health-related consequences of immigration enforcement laws and police practices in the United States to show how to examine relationships between multiple social systems. In doing so, I provide an example for how to conduct in-depth, qualitative health systems research by merging theoretical frameworks in health sciences and anthropology to demonstrate how medical anthropologists can conceptualize a health system as a social field for ethnographic inquiry. Overall, I argue that such an approach permits anthropologists a way to conduct rigorous health systems research that emphasizes relationships and reveals potentially hidden interactions.
KW - Critical medical anthropology
KW - Health systems
KW - Multi-sited ethnography
KW - Social ecological model of health
KW - Systems perspectives
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85122935418&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114498
DO - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114498
M3 - Article
C2 - 34893355
AN - SCOPUS:85122935418
SN - 0277-9536
VL - 300
JO - Social Science and Medicine
JF - Social Science and Medicine
M1 - 114498
ER -