Mather, CharlesFinlay, Juli2014-09-232014-11-172014-09-232014Finlay, J. (2014). Elephants on a Flatbed Truck: Ethnography of an Integrated Applied Health Services Research Collaboration (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25864http://hdl.handle.net/11023/1785Previous studies of science reveal that research collaborations require negotiations as researchers form themselves into a project team that confronts a research question, collects data, and transforms the data into agreed-upon facts. Collaborations that span geographic, institutional, and epistemic borders are increasing in frequency. Funding agencies like Canada’s health research grant agency, CIHR, are encouraging collaborations that span multiple academic disciplines and include research users throughout the research process. This change from the traditional research model has the potential to affect the academic and health services landscapes through its emphasis on non-traditional research products and CIHR’s expectation that research users will allocate portions of their limited time budget to areas of knowledge production that may not be of interest to non-researchers. Erevna is the pseudonym for a five-year CIHR-funded multidisciplinary applied health services research project examining new knowledge uptake by health care aides in seniors’ long-term care facilities across Canada’s Prairie Provinces. Erevna’s project team included investigators from several universities and decision makers from provincial health authorities, and urban and rural elder care facilities. The team’s varied membership, specifically the inclusion of research users in the project’s formative stages, provided an opportunity to document a boundary-spanning research collaboration as it unfolded. Existing studies of science have focused on laboratory and natural scientists. Erevna, as an applied health services research project, took place firmly in the “real world” of Canada’s long-term care sector. This setting’s inherent heterogeneity brought with it complexities not found in controlled laboratory settings, or in studies that do not involve human beings interacting naturally. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork spread over more than two years, I used actor-network theory to explore how people spanning institutional, organizational, provincial, and national boundaries formed into an actor-network that pursued a common goal and how Erevna’s actor-network persisted over five-years. I also documented the challenges to Erevna’s stability. In this dissertation, I compare Erevna’s public and behind-the-curtain narratives revealing the complexities of science-in-the-making that published accounts generally omit. I examine how membership in Erevna’s component social worlds and epistemic cultures influenced the collaboration. Finally, I explore the construction of Erevna’s actor-network, and examine effective and ineffective strategies for its maintenance.engUniversity of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.Anthropology--CulturalActor-network theoryApplied health services researchEthnographyResearch collaborationsdoctoral thesis10.11575/PRISM/25864