Abandoning questionnaires

Abstract

Care-concepts have proliferated over the past couple of years, and have been used tostudy all kinds of practices, situations and sites. This begs the question: What is gained bystudying practices in terms of care? The paper addresses this question by using a specificcare-approach, which is the study of daily life dealings (Mol et al., 2010). It mobilises thisapproach to investigate a particular object, namely a good provision of haemodialysistreatment in nephrology practice. It does so in a given place, a dialysis unit in Austria.Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a focus on how patients' quality of life was improved,the paper reports how, in this dialysis unit, a quality of life questionnaire was introducedbut soon abandoned. It first analyses how the prominent ideal that quality of life is to bemeasured with a questionnaire arrived in the goings-on in the unit. It then teases out howconnecting and disconnecting patients to dialysis machines, and seeing them during thedaily round enacted knowing, improving and quality of life in other ways than the prominentpractice. It argues that questionnaires, forms, protocols, and the prominent practice theyare part of may not only be made to fit into daily clinical practices or that daily life dealingsare other to prominent practices. Daily clinical practices may also be the basis upon whichquestionnaires, forms, protocols, and the prominent practice they are part of are evaluated,abandoned, and forgotten. Recommending further investigation into the conditions ofpossibilities for alternative enactments of a good provision of health care to thrive, thepaper concludes that what has been gained by using this specific care-approach to studythis particular object are insights into daily life practices that have so far been othered innephrology practice and STS.