Ethnography Paper Proposal

As of right now, I am thinking of writing my ethnography paper on the subculture of a hospital’s housekeeping staff. By “housekeeping staff” I am referring to the people responsible for doing the laundry, scrubbing the floors, cleaning up spills, etc., the people responsible for keeping the hospital the impeccably clean place it is. The hospital I would most likely go to in order to study this subculture is the hospital right here in New Prague, Queen of Peace Hospital.

For my ethnography, I really wanted to study a subculture within a hospital and for a couple of reasons. First, I’m planning on going into a career in the medical field. Since that means I would more than likely be working in a hospital, I thought it’d be interesting to study a subculture within one. Also, my dad is employed at Queen of Peace, so I figured it would be easy to find a broker into one of the hospital’s subcultures based on the connections he has made through his work. When I started thinking of the different subcultures within a hospital, my initial thoughts were of nurses, lab and x-ray technicians, doctors, and surgeons. I never even thought of the housekeeping staff, so when my mom mentioned that idea, it really intrigued me. When I considered all that the housekeeping staff must do, I realized just how vital a part they are to a hospital’s success and yet no one really acknowledges that. I think I’d want to incorporate that into my thesis. For example, my thesis could be: a hospital’s housekeeping staff may go unnoticed, but without their behind-the-scenes work, a hospital would not be able to function properly.

Personally, I would never want a housekeeping type of job. I hate doing laundry, mopping, cleaning, etc, so I’m interested in seeing what kind of people choose this career and why. Based on the job description, I think that most of these workers are going to be middle-aged to older women. I don’t think that a housekeeping job would be very high paying and difficult to acquire, so I think that most of these workers probably have not attained a college degree, so this job is something they can do in order to make money to help support their families.

I can’t really think of any big obstacles that I would face by choosing to study this subculture. It shouldn’t be hard to find a convenient time to study them since a hospital operates 24/7; however, I still need to figure out what hours and days the housekeeping staff works, what their job all entails, and if they’d be willing to let me observe them while they work. I think that all of these questions can be answered by the broker I have already established, Kathy Sticha. Kathy is the person at the hospital in charge of the housekeeping staff, so she definitely will be a good resource and person to interview. I also know Kelly Skluzacek’s mom is part of the housekeeping staff at the hospital, so she is a potential person to interview as well. I think it’d be interesting to interview other employees at the hospital, such as a doctor or nurse, and get their take on how important the housekeeping staff is to the hospital. I guess the final concern I have is whether or not this subculture will be interesting enough and provide me with enough information to write a 10-15 page paper on them, but I won’t be able to figure that out until after I take some time to observe them.