The well-known divergence between what policy and protocol look like on paper, and what happens in the actual practice of daily life remains a central challenge in health services provision and research. This disparity is usually referred to as the theory–practice gap and contributes to concerns that scientific evidence fails to make substantial impacts on the processes of service delivery. In this article, we present an argument for the inclusion of ethnographic methods in health services research and show that this approach enables researchers to address this divergence by working within it. We trace how ethnography, through generative processes of oscillation, can take us beyond lamenting the gap and capture the relational dynamics of people working together in complex systemic arrangements. By moving from example to methodological reflection, to principle of research, we demonstrate how the oscillation of ethnographic research between theory and practice can productively contribute to the field of health service research.

政策和协议在纸面上的样子与日常生活中实际发生的情况之间众所周知的分歧仍然是卫生服务提供和研究的核心挑战。这种差异通常被称为理论与实践的差距，并导致人们担心科学证据无法对服务提供过程产生实质性影响。在本文中，我们提出了将民族志方法纳入卫生服务研究的论点，并表明这种方法使研究人员能够通过在其中开展工作来解决这种分歧。我们追溯民族志如何通过振荡的生成过程，让我们超越对差距的哀叹，并捕捉在复杂系统安排中一起工作的人们的关系动态。通过从例子转向方法论反思，