Health and immigration systems as an ethnographic field: Methodological lessons from examining immigration enforcement and health in the US

• Published in: Social science & medicine (1982) Vol. 300; p. 114498
• Main Author: Kline, Nolan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier Ltd 01.05.2022; Pergamon Press Inc
• Subjects: Anthropologists; Anthropology; Anthropology, Cultural; Behavior; Concept formation; Critical medical anthropology; Emigration and Immigration; Enforcement; Ethnographic research; Ethnography; Health research; Health sciences; Health services; Health systems; Humans; Immigration; Immigration policy; Interdisciplinary aspects; Medical Assistance; Medicine; Methodological approaches; Multi-sited ethnography; Qualitative Research; Research methodology; Social ecological model of health; Social education; Social relations; Social structure; Social systems; Systems perspectives; United States; United States; United States > US; Health systems; Multi-sited ethnography; Systems perspectives; Social ecological model of health; Critical medical anthropology
• ISSN: 0277-9536; 1873-5347
• DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114498

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. •Health and immigration systems should be studied together to examine relationships.•Anthropological and systems approaches can advance health and immigration research.•Merged approaches reveal otherwise hidden relationships within and between systems.