Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 215 are meant to do three things:

(1) Encourage you to think about readings and class topics and to use those materials in your discussion of the field experience;
(2) Raise issues for you about participation in community life and political activity and to discuss how engagement and social responsibility, or disengagement and social irresponsibility happen;
(3) Give you field experiences to prepare you for other courses that will have more intensive field experiences, like Anthropology/Sociology 201.

Your paper is not meant to be long. Three or four pages is enough. You also should not try to write about all of the themes given below. Pick your focus, state it, and give lots of description and detail to develop your points.

One of the most important things about the time you spend observing is that you should not be passive. Be involved in activities and, most importantly, talk to people. Try especially to meet people other than the hosts who bring us into the settings. In addition to the main participants in the program (the kids in a school), seek out and talk to some of the people who are more in the background---office people, family members, custodial staff. Look at the questions given for each assignment and ask people in the setting what they think about the issues that are listed.

The Objective of Visiting A Hospital Emergency Room

1. Professional Orientation.

Meeting Emergency Department staff, you will have an opportunity to learn how these professionals view their work. It is important for you to be exposed to their philosophy of work and to learn what they do. We have talked about how institutions create morality. Spending time with these people will give you information of how value-driven and moral emergency room work is.

2. Division of Labor

Emergency rooms have a highly efficient division of labor both internally and in their relationships with outside services, both in the area of what is called prehospital care and in relationship to the inside wards of the hospital. Who are the role players in the division of labor?

3. Authority

Emergency rooms like all intensive medical systems are hierarchical systems run by physicians. While it is tempting to say that doctors "run" the emergency room you will find that it might be more accurate to say that the emergency room runs itself. This is the subject of the article by Vosk and Milofsky given as suggested reading with this field assignment

What to Write About

a. In all of our writing assignments, one task for you is simply to tell about your experience. Write about what you did, what happened, who you talked to, what caught your attention and what you learned.

b. Be respectful of staff, patients, and families and be sensitive to their needs. Emergency room visits are often crises and involve life-changing or frightening experiences. Confidentiality is essential. When you write, do not use names. While evocative descriptions are important, do not describe people---especially patients---in ways that would allow their identities to be easily recognized.

c. In more focused terms, it is important to pay attention to who is a player, who is a bystander, and what people do in the emergency room. One way to capture this is to describe the people who work on one or two cases. Doing this would allow you to describe the division of labor, including the pre-hospital phase and the admission-to-the-hospital phase.

d. Talk about how authority works in the emergency room. What signs to you see of people supervising or directing others? Pay attention and describe situations where people who are seemingly of lower status take charge of a case and give direction to their superiors (nurses structuring the case for doctors or paramedics structuring cases for emergency room staff). What surprises you about these authority relations? Do you see the relationships described in the Vosk and Milofsky article played out in your ER observation experience?