Rethinking cultural safety while waiting to do fieldwork: methodological implications for nursing research.

The concept of culture has been widely applied as an explanatory concept within health care, often within a framework representing culture as a fixed, reified entity, with cultural groups existing in a binary sense vis-;-vis mainstream culture. However, if our scholarship is to generate knowledge that addresses longstanding patterns of inclusion and exclusion along lines such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender, interpretive frames are needed that account for culture as embedded in fields of power relations; as mediated by social forces such as economics, politics, and historical patterns of oppression and colonization; and as being constantly renegotiated. In this article we trace a series of theoretical explorations, centered on the concept of cultural safety, with corresponding methodological implications, engaged in during preparation for an intensive period of fieldwork to study the hospitalization and help-seeking experiences of diverse ethnocultural populations. Copyright 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.