Cutting through the layers: Alternating perspectives and co-laborative analytic approaches to understanding occupation and its objects

Abstract

In this paper, three qualitative researchers with professional backgrounds in social anthropology, occupational therapy, and occupational science present their methodological and theoretical standpoints and resultant analytical approaches on a single set of ethnographic data - an event occurring in an in-patient psychiatric unit. In doing so they propose benefits to and considerations for a practice-based understanding of occupation. Data analysis and synthesis from interdisciplinary perspectives is a novel approach to the close examination of occupation. The three analyses presented draw from figured worlds, a praxeographic approach to sociomaterial arrangements, and social identity focusing on what happens when the everyday is made through occupation. The paper concludes with discussion of how these approaches, different in their theoretical perspective, disciplinary, and geographical backgrounds, might contradict or complement one another. Multi-vocal analysis, introducing different theoretical lenses through which to reflect on the construction of the 'everyday-ness' in occupation, serves as an impetus towards an empirically drawn understanding of occupation. Additionally, such an approach reveals similarities, differences, and complexity that may arise when attempting to locate occupation as the central unit of analysis. The conclusion suggests that cutting through the layers of occupation necessarily provides multiple ontologies. 2017 The Journal of Occupational Science Incorporated