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Ethnography is a qualitative, naturalistic research method derived from the anthropological tradition. Ethnography uses participant observation supplemented by other research methods to gain holistic understandings of cultural groups’ beliefs and behaviors. Ethnography contributes to bioethics by: (1) locating bioethical dilemmas in their social, political, economic, and ideological contexts; (2) explicating the beliefs and behaviors of involved individuals; (3) making tacit knowledge explicit; (4) highlighting differences between ideal norms and actual behaviors; (5) identifying previously unrecognized phenomena; and (6) generating new questions for research. More comparative and longitudinal ethnographic research can contribute to better understanding of and responses to bioethical dilemmas.

Surveys about ethically important topics, when successfully conducted and analyzed, can offer important contributions to bioethics and, more broadly, to health policy and clinical care. But there is a dynamic interplay between the quantitative nature of surveys and the normative theories that survey data challenge and inform. Careful attention to the development of an appropriate research question and survey design can be the difference between an important study that makes fundamental contributions and one that is perceived as irrelevant to ethical analysis, health policy, or clinical practice. This chapter presents ways to enhance the rigor and relevance of surveys in bioethics through careful planning and attentiveness in survey development, fielding, and analysis and presentation of data.

In this chapter, we present semi-structured interviewing as an adaptable method useful in bioethics research to gather data for issues of concern to researchers in the field. We discuss the theory and practice behind developing the interview guide, the logistics of managing a semi-structured interview-based research project, developing and applying a codebook, and data analysis. Throughout the chapter we use examples from empirical bioethics literature.

Focus groups can provide a rich and meaningful context in which to explore diverse bioethics topics. They are particularly useful for describing people's experiences of and/or attitudes toward specific ethical conundrums, but can also be used to identify ethics training needs among medical professionals, evaluate ethics programs and consent processes, and stimulate patient advocacy. This chapter discusses these and other applications of focus group methodology. It examines how to ethically and practically plan and recruit for, conduct, and analyze the results of focus groups. The place of focus groups among other qualitative research methods is also discussed.