Navigating in rare oceans: Notes from a family survey of children and adolescents living with rare diseases

Abstract

This article seeks to highlight the construction of social navigation in a hospital. Our focus is to reflect on scenes of application of a questionnaire on family costs of care/treatment of children with rare diseases. These processes are linked to the markers of gender, race, and generation of one of the authors. The interaction between researcher and subjects of field research is socially constructed according to the specific circumstances that demarcate the invitation to participate in the research, as well as data collection. It implies that his position as a researcher and the ethical perspective need to be well defined. The approach and ethics build this social navigation with the hospital and the subjects are permeated by difficulty and uncertainty, but also by surprises and learning. It was possible to observe remarkable characteristics of the institution, of their employees and the families, to evaluate the used methodological strategies.