phases of fieldwork. In phase one the first author attended 20 sessions of a child health clinic in a town in the Northwest of England between May and December 2001. The clinic was selected on pragmatic grounds, as the first author acted as sole researcher and conducted all observations and interviews and travel was self-funded. The clinic is in a town in the Northwest of England, in which the researcher had not worked as a volunteer, minimising risk of role confusion. Health visitors confirmed that this clinic had a higher rate of breastfeeding women than most others in the town. The breastfeeding initiation rate at the local hospital was 54% at the time of the study, compared to 61% reported for the North of England as a whole\[[@B20]\].

During observations the researcher sat in the small clinic room, which contained one scale. The health visitor staffing the clinic introduced the researcher to women as they entered. As well as observing interactions between health visitors and mothers (and, very rarely, fathers), short interviews were requested and conducted with nine breastfeeding mothers, and longer, private interviews with each of the four health visitors working in the clinic. The researcher also attended the breastfeeding support group run at the clinic, attending 14 sessions; participating in discussions and taking notes. Seventeen women were observed in group sessions. Although the intention was for first-time mothers only to be interviewed, there were relatively few breastfeeding women attending the clinic (despite this area having one of the highest rates of breastfeeding in the