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Patient-centered care: Kleinman’s Mini-Ethnography


Submitter Information


Name: Lisa Day
Title: Assistant Clinical Professor
Credentials: RN PhD
Organization: UCSF, School of Nursing, Dept. of Physiological Nursing
Email: lisa.day@nursing.ucsf.edu
Address 1: 2 Koret Way, Rm N631
City: San Francisco
State: CA
ZIP: 94143-0610

Teaching Strategy


Competency Category(s):
Learner Level(s):
  • Pre-licensure ADN/diploma
  • Pre-licensure BSN
  • RN to BSN
  • New graduates/transition to practice
  • Graduate students

Learner Setting(s):
  • Clinical settings

Strategy Type:
  • Paper assignments

Learning Objectives:

Students will:

  1. demonstrate skills in hearing patients’ and family members’ stories of living with illness.
  2. identify their own explanatory models of illness and disease.
  3. demonstrate attitudes that reflect a desire to cultivate cultural humility and cultural competence in nursing practice.

Strategy Overview:

Students are assigned to read the article, Anthropology in the Clinic: The Problem of Cultural Competency and How to Fix It by Arthur Kleinman and Peter Benson1 freely available by open access online and as a pdf attached here . Based on the “mini ethnography” described by Kleinman and Benson, students then interview a patient/client or family member of a patient/client in their clinical site to elicit the narrative of their illness experience. Students can use the interview guide attached and, depending on the restrictions imposed by the clinical site, tape record their interviews. If tape recording is not possible, students are encouraged to take detailed written notes. Drawing on notes from their interview, students then write one paper that is the narrative of the illness from the perspective of the interviewee and another paper that describes the students own explanatory model.


Submitted Materials


Media Type(s):
  • PDF files

File(s):



Evaluation Description


Students will be evaluated on their ability to elicit the full story of the patient/client/family member’s experience, and their ability to imaginatively dwell in the experience of another as they write the narrative.

At first students have trouble understanding the assignment. They tend to want to write a “history of present illness” note rather than the story of the patient’s experience. Encourage them to write creatively rather than clinically. It helps to assign some illness experience reading beforehand like Arthur Kleinman’s The Illness Narratives or Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals.