Writing fieldnotes in an ethnographic study of peers - collaborative experiences from the field

Fieldnotes and their processes tend to be implicit endeavours in the nursing and midwifery literature. The opportunity, therefore, to build an understanding of the social practice of this part of the research process is lost. This paper explores fieldnote generation in an ethnographic doctoral study examining the building of research capacity. Ethnographers claim that data is generated collaboratively. In this study, data was collected from two fields of 'peers'. First data set contained 50 h of observation with doctoral research fellows, and the second data set contained 2 years diary recording of a nurse working in a national research funding agency. The paper shows that the levels of collaboration in constructing the ethnographic data can depend on the field itself, the stance of the researcher and the willingness of peer participants.