Health Governance After Brexit: Street Ethnography and Elite Interviews, 2019-2021

Street ethnography was conducted through street interviews in the North of England (Sheffield, Rochdale and Rotherham) and Northern Ireland (Newry, Derry/Londonderry) designed to elicit public understandings of accountability for post-Brexit realities, and hence legitimacy of post-Brexit governance. Ethnographic street interviews are useful for capturing a diffuse public ‘mood’ in particular locations identified as important for expectations about post-Brexit health governance - the ‘left behind’. The term ‘ethnographic’ means these interviews occur in ‘unstructured’ public spaces, like shopping centres or high streets, and are based on unobtrusive questions about abstract concepts. Their aim is to capture intuitive conceptions of key ideas (‘what do you think of when you hear the word accountability?’, for example), in a context where research participants are more likely to give answers reflecting their intuitive expectations and views in a way that more structured methods like focus groups do not. The metaphors people use to describe abstract or complex concepts (such as accountability for post-Brexit governance of health and the NHS) reveal how they frame, experience and understand the world, and key concepts related to it. Transcripts and field notes from the ethnographic interviews have been thematically coded. This contribution is particularly distinctive in political science studies, which tend not to examine ‘everyday’ conceptions of accountability in a broader context of legitimacy. The collection of data from elite stakeholders relevant to the project was carried out in the first instance through semi-structured interviews. Two interviewers (TH and MW) conducted the interviews with co-producer stakeholder participants in their workplaces in England (predominantly London, but also Leeds and Alton, Kent) and one interviewer (MF) conducted the interviews with participants in Northern Ireland/ROI (predominantly Belfast and Dublin).