is Executive Vice President at GfK V2. She has extensive experience in both qualitative and quantitative methodologies with specifi c areas of expertise including theory and research in attitude formation and persuasion; theories of personality; jury / argumentation research; research design; and construction of explanatory models based on quantitative survey data. She has clients from among the world ' s largest pharmaceutical companies and has worked on both US and global product strategies. Michael Gibbonsis a consultant at GfK V2, one of the world ' s foremost healthcare marketing research agencies. He has more than ten years of qualitative and quantitative research experience, including interviews, ethnography, survey design and analysis. Prior to joining GfK V2, Dr Gibbons taught for more than six years at the university level. He has engaged in a broad range of social psychological and sociological research, and has presented and published internationally.Abstract Ethnography, as an observational methodology, provides specifi c benefi ts in research on medical topics that other qualitative approaches cannot. Medicine is practiced in a broader context and involves multiple players, a fact that cannot be fully captured by surveys and studio or telephone interviews. In the pharmaceutical realm, ethnography has garnered much press over the last few years. Clients are increasingly interested in ethnography and have commissioned ethnographic research studies because many medical products face tougher competition. Therefore, a more thorough understanding of the customer , versus just product features / benefi ts, is needed, and a review of ethnography is thus timely. Ethnography has particular strengths and weaknesses, and a review of our own ethnographic work suggests several key areas where it excels for us. This paper will outline the history and theoretical underpinnings of ethnography, before discussing how it is useful in medical and medical-related consumer marketing. The authors will follow this discussion with specifi c examples of how ethnography allows us to better serve our clients in the pharmaceutical marketing industry.

This paper explores the problem of negotiated identity on Madeline Island (Wisconsin, USA). In this social context, who is and who is not an islander is not clearly defined as simply “locals” or “tourists.” The winter population is numerically overwhelmed by the summer population, many of whom spend several months on the island over the summer. This creates a sliding scale of participation where the island identity is negotiated in the context of the rest of the island community. This negotiation is examined in geographic sites of conflict, discourse, and the transcripts referencing winter and its effects on people. This paper takes islanders’ colloquial categories, builds them out more objectively, and illustrates how these categories and their membership is negotiated through claims to the “Islander” identity.

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