Scholarly research suggests that Canadian election campaigns are centralized affairs, with party headquarters managing a disciplined campaign organization across 338 federal constituencies. At the same time, local realities can incentivize constituency campaigns to deviate from their parties. This article examines the extent of local campaign discipline, given these tensions between parties’ centralizing compulsions and countervailing forces that militate against party cohesion. The article relies on original data to identify and explain the extent of local campaign behaviour that defies central party preferences and directives. It draws from interviews with 87 former candidates and eight party strategists, as well as observational data gathered from 10 constituency campaigns during the 2019 federal election. The findings indicate a relatively high level of undisciplined constituency campaign behaviour during the 2015 and 2019 elections. The article contends that this behaviour stems from insubordination, innovation and incompetence within constituency campaigns.

This article contributes to our understanding of transnational family relationships and the circulation of care. We are interested in understanding how large-scale emigration affects the support and care of older people in the origin country. Using in-depth interviews and participant observation, we examine the significance of transnational family support for older people, and the ways in which migrant children and other kin care for elderly relatives from afar. Our case study is of the Transylvanian Saxons, a German-speaking minority in Romania, who experienced mass-exodus to Germany following the end of socialism in 1990. The lapse of time since the exodus allows us to examine how transnational family practices evolve, and what the challenges are to maintaining family-hood over time and distance. Contrary to expectations, we find that material family support from Germany to Romania is not significant and has declined. Care, by contrast, remains an important part of what most transnational families provide, although practices of ‘caring about’ are more prevalent than hands-on ‘caring for’. Counter to optimistic accounts of transnational family care in the literature, we argue that the difficulties and challenges for older people of being cared for by distant family members are fundamental, and strong transnational family ties are not an inevitable outcome of migration.

Political scientists have started to focus on ‘practice’ as the smallest unit of analysis. Following a broader turn in the social sciences, the practice focus provides multiple advantages, including better conceptualizations of short-term social change, getting closer to the everyday activities of those speaking, writing and doing politics, appropriate conceptualization of agency-structure dynamics, or forms of analysis resonating with other communities than scholarly ones. This contribution asks what the methodological implications of the practice turn are. It is argued that the practice focus does not only imply a certain ‘theory’ but also a certain methodology. I advance the term praxiography to speak about the forms of analysis produced by practice researchers. I discuss key guidelines of praxiographic research on two levels: first, general research strategies that provide empirical access points, second, guidelines for data collection in the frame of participant observation, expert interviews, and document analysis. I conclude in arguing that although praxiography is context driven, and hence requires to be tailored to the research problem, it is vital to reflect on the methodological repertoire of praxiographic research.

This paper reports on an assessment of participant observation used for evaluation in a structured and gerontolgoical field context. Participant observation was used to evaluate whether a search conference was a viable means for older persons to identify community needs and create an ongoing community organization to address them. I attended planning meetings, the conference and a follow-up meeting. Observations were recorded in field notes and analysed to identify the decision-making processes. These older persons successfully engaged in a health promotion process whereby they exercised decisive direction in identifying and addressing health and social needs of importance to them. These results attest to the flexibility and applicability of participant observation in structured field settings with older persons who were circumstantially difficult to survey by other means. Participant observation is an effective method of collecting data on the process of how groups of older persons respond to a defined task through several observation points in time.

A critical ethnography of the process of discharge decision-making for elderly patients was conducted to examine the nature of the process over the total course of patients' hospital stays. The focus was on describing the timing and conditions of decision-making, the related activities of professionals, professionals' perceptions of the process, and the effects of the process on those involved and on the hospital organization. Data analysis demonstrated that the process is not intricately linked with patients' clinical progress, that often inaccurate assumptions about the importance of patient-related clinical and social factors and organizational parameters underlie decisions, and that professionals' perceptions of the process are shaped by organizational imperatives. In the current process, resources are used inefficiently and humanitarian and ethical consequences arise for participants. The analysis supports attempts to achieve greater congruence between the discharge decision process and the patient's clinical progress so that the fiscal and humanitarian goals of the hospital can be achieved.

This article presents the results of a study on the barriers and facilitators to bus use for people aged 60 or older. Two complementary methodologies, nominal group technique and focussed ethnography, were used to identify barriers and facilitators and rank their importance. Two sample sites from Queensland, Australia, were selected, with 227 people participating in the nominal group technique and 40 people participating in the focussed ethnography component. Seven priorities for age-friendly bus systems emerged from the data: vehicle entrance/exit; bus driver friendliness and helpfulness; timetables and scheduling of buses; bus stop locations; pedestrian infrastructure; information and training for older people; and bus routes and destinations. These findings will assist researchers, policy makers, and transport providers to set evidence-based strategic directions for creating age-friendly bus systems. Both methods provide complementary perspectives on bus usability, which could not be gained from either method alone.