Table 1.

Summary of data collection methods

Method/approach	Details of data collection
Organisational ethnography of GP practices	184 hours observation in three GP practices, observing professional practices relevant to prescribing including shadowing staff and 6 interviews
Organisational ethnography of community pharmacies	140 hours in four community pharmacies, observing professional practices relevant to polypharmacy, including shadowing staff and 21 interviews29
Longitudinal follow-up of 24 patients	Ethnographic observation in patients’ homes (66 home visits) and regular follow-up conversations by telephone (258 telephone calls). We accompanied participants to selected hospital and GP consultations and on trips to the local pharmacy (29 clinical consultations of which 18 were video recorded).
Biographical narrative interviews with patients	24 in-depth narrative interviews using Wengraf’s biographic-narrative-interpretive method,42 eliciting a narrative with one opening question (“please tell me the story of your life since you were first advised to take medicines”) and using the participant’s account to elicit further narratives.
In-depth interviews with patients about their medicines	23 in-depth interviews focused on participants’ medicines and medicines practices (one participant withdrew from study due to a decline in health before this interview could be completed).
Cultural probes with 14 of the patient participants.	Cultural probes encouraged participants to depict their lives with their medicines through a number of optional activities43: giving participants a camera and asking them to take pictures of what their medicines mean to them drawing body maps of how they are feeling and how their medicines make them feel completing diaries of social contact ‘wishful thinking’: participants imagined conversations they would like to have with a healthcare professional about their medicines