‘What Sort of Jumper Is that, Your Wife Has Terrible Taste Mate’. Exploring the Importance of Positionality Within Ethnographic Research Conducted Alongside a Public Health Programme in Three Scottish Prisons

In this chapter, I explore the possible contribution that ethnography can make to public health research within prison contexts. Prison ethnography literature raises questions relating to the extent to which ethnographic methods have the potential to illuminate what is often a hidden and difficult to access context. Such questions as they relate to public health within prisons are reflected on in this chapter, through the description of a research project that explored the experience of a public health intervention delivered in a number of prison gyms. In particular, I consider the ways in which my positionality as an ethnographic researcher determined the sorts of data I was able to collect to evaluate the Fit for LIFE programme.