The research proposal was made to the National Welfare Grants, Health and Welfare Canada. The study aims to shed light on people with HIV/AIDS and how they navigate social service agencies. So much of people’s lives with HIV/AIDS is based on their access to health care, in the proposal referring it  as their “lifework.” The study is unique in that it’s from the perspective of the people receiving the services and their interactions with social service workers. The study would like to explore the “legislation, regulation, policy directives, and standard paperwork practices that organize the interface between people with HIV/AIDS and social agencies from the institutional side.” The questions they ask are: “What characteristic problems emerge? How are such problems generated by the interplay between the HIV/AIDS configuration of life problems and the institutional structure within which social service agency employees work? How do the conditions of the everyday work of living with HIV/AIDS, the organization of that work, and its relation to social service agencies vary with different social locations (e.g class, gender, injection drug use, ethnicity, race..) of these people? And lastly what effect does the stage of someone’s illness have on this organizational matrix?”

The data that would be used for the study are: focus groups, in depth interviews, archival research, and textual analysis. The form of the study is an institutional ethnography because it would explore how the social service agencies operate in relation to HIV/AID patients. Overall interviews would be conducted from major community based AID organizations,  organizational data would include general welfare assistance to housing agencies etc, and documents would include legislation, agency applications, and other bureaucratic forms. The analysis used for this study would examine the “social relations” as an “investigational technique for locating and describing the social form of people’s activities over time.” The researcher would examine “empirically how people’s activities are reflexively/recursively knitted together into particular forms of organization” The research proposal was clear with its focus. It also offers a new discussion on recipients of social service agencies. However, the proposal is from 1990 and thus the treatment and social services of HIV/AIDS has changed since then so if we were to carry out the study today it would produce differing results.

Smith, Dorothy E. Institutional ethnography as practice. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.