Serial Mapping Focus Group: Expanding Participation within the IE Frame

Background: The ongoing Ph.D. project "Hva er samhandling?"/ "What is collaboration?" is exploring how services for children, youth, and families in a Norwegian municipality do work together. A serial mapping focus group, which meets quarterly, accompanies the research to ensure its relevance.

Introduction: Institutional Ethnography (IE) aims to ensure proximity and relevance to the “knowers'" everyday life (Smith, 2005, s. 9). It promotes the inclusion of informants, the field, the community, and academia equally, allowing for a collective examination of a study object and accommodating different perspectives (Gullestad, 2003).

Significance to IE: IE's ontological position emphasizes participation, yet there's a risk of leaning away from it. The subjective experiences of the knowers experiences are incorporated when mapping and illuminating translocal relations, however, this may occur without the direct involvement of the knowers in the later stages of the research process.

Methodology: Introducing the serial mapping focus group within the IE frame, ensures proximity and meaningful knowledge development. It provides a longitudinal perspective and includes key individuals who balance being service practitioners and collaboration engineers. Their lived experiences inform the research direction, question framing, and material interpretation. Despite not being action research, the group's ongoing experiences feed back into their work.

Significance to IE Methods Development: The method increases data collection and perspective breadth (Baden et al., 2022), keeping the researcher grounded in the material. It also helps navigate power dynamics between the field and researcher (Madriz, 2003), fostering trust and ensuring research relevance at the data source.