Ethnographic approaches to studying end-of-life care: qualitative methods for tracing care trajectories by Dr. Annemarie Samuels and Dr. Natashe Lemos Dekker
In this talk Dr. Annemarie Samuels and Dr. Natashe Lemos Dekker discussed the affordances and challenges of ethnographic methods in end-of-life care research. In particular, they focused on long-term person-centered and family-centered participant observation. This qualitative method is aimed at gaining insight into the ways in which people seek out different forms of care over several weeks, months or even years, in the last phase of life. Using semi-structured interviews and participant observation to focus on care trajectories as they unfold over time produces knowledge of the cultural and social dimensions of access to professional and non-professional care. This enables further elucidation of the institutional frameworks through which care is organized. These insights help to better understand the possibilities of adapting and developing professional palliative care in culturally diverse situations.
Natashe Lemos Dekker is Postdoctoral Researcher at the institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Within the Globalizing Palliative Care project, her research focusses on end-of-life care in Brazil.
Annemarie Samuels is Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded Globalizing Palliative Care research project (grant agreement nr. 851437).
A recent blogpost on the EAPC blog, co-authored by the speakers, gives a succinct overview of this project.
Questions? Email us: endoflifecare@vub.be
Flyer: 2021Webinar series_March (1.49 MB) "pdf"
