New: Methods

Consider this list:

• Participatory action research

• Ethnography

• Case study

• Narrative ethnography

• Discourse analysis

• Grounded theory

• Visual methods

• Feminist

• Critical humanism

• Photo-voice

• Queer theory

• Mixed method

• Performance ethnography

• Constructivist

• Critical arts-based inquiry

• Oral history

• Online ethnography

• Conversation analysis

• Memory work

• Interpretive phenomenology

• Autoethnography

• Q methodology

• Ethnomethodology

• Historiographic

• Institutional ethnography...

This list is just a sample of some of the different approaches to data collection, text generation and analysis that are part of the growth of qualitative, and theoretically and philosophically-informed research now taking place in health care.  (If you'd like to get a sense of how comprehensive and wide-spread this world of research has now become, take a look at the catalogue of books now available through just one health research publisher here.)

There is nothing particularly exclusive about these methods; certainly nothing to say that they are beyond the understanding of physiotherapists.  They are agnostic about the person or profession that might wish to make use of them.  So their uptake is largely dependent on the knowledge of the user, and the suitability of the question being posed.

With one or two notable exceptions though, the items on the list will be almost entirely alien to most readers.  And yet these approaches offer some really valuable ways to interrogate our practice, our ideas and theories, our past, present and future.

Why is it that physiotherapists have been so slow to join in with doctors, nurses, psychologists, occupational therapists and others in taking advantage of these new approaches?