Negotiating professional and moral boundaries: work in progress reflections on fieldwork amongst adult relatives of persons with depression

According to clinical, diagnostic criteria unipolar depression is defined as a recurrent disease that leads to significant reduction of the ill person’s social and occupational functions. Involvement of relatives has long been assumed to shorten the illness trajectory and to optimize treatment and rehabilitation of depression. On that basis, there is current health political interest in involving relatives in the treatment and rehabilitation of depressed people in order to reduce the societal costs of depression. However, qualitative interview studies show that relatives experience the depression and their involvement in treatment and rehabilitation as a major emotional end social burden which may have a negative effect on their own wellbeing, on the mutual relationship, and on the recovery of the depressed person.
This paper addresses the pertinent methodological issue of how to carry out fieldwork amongst adult relatives of persons with depression in order to gain new insights into the consequences of relatives’ involvement. The on-going study includes multi-sited fieldwork by following relatives and observing their interactions across the physical or virtual sites of their everyday lives.
Methodological discussions of the professional and moral boundaries of the process of doing fieldwork in the private spheres of people with depression and their relatives may point out some of the more general professional and moral challenges linked doing fieldwork in psychiatric settings and to involvement of relatives in the treatment and rehabilitation process.
First, we wish to approach this issue by considering how the fieldwork is imbedded in the broader social context for qualitative health research as well as professional practice where ethical codes, health legislation and health political interests seem to condition insights from this kind of fieldwork. Secondly, we wish to consider how situated conditions or circumstances may guide the choice of methods for data production in the empirical field.