‘Missing out’: Reflections on the positioning of ethnographic research within an evaluative framing

Abstract

Contemporary approaches to evaluating ‘complex’ social and health interventions are opening up spaces for methodologies attuned to examining contextual complexities, such as ethnography. Yet the alignment of the two agendas – evaluative and ethnographic – is not necessarily comfortable in practice. I reflect on experiences of conducting ethnographic research alongside a public health evaluation of a community-based initiative in the UK, using the lens of ‘missing out’ to examine intersections between my own ethnographic concerns and those of the communities under study. I examine potential opportunities posed by the discomfort of ‘missing out’, particularly for identifying the processes and spaces of inclusion and exclusion that contributed both to my ethnographic experiences and to the realities of the communities engaging with the initiative. This reveals productive possibilities for a focus on ‘missing out’ as a form of relating for evaluations of the impacts of such initiatives on health and social inequalities.