Incorporation of Ethnographic Methods in Occupational Therapy Assessment

Many constructs of interest to occupational therapists can only be studied through qualitative methods. Such constructs include meaning of activity or the illness experience and the context in which these occur. The purpose of this paper is to describe how ethnographic methods used in research can be generalized and applied to clinical practice. Ethnography is compared with other qualitative research approaches and a model clinical ethnographic assessment process is described.