Fostering peer support and team spirit is important to ensure staff co-operation and smooth care processes following restructuring.

The purpose of this article is to discuss questions about studying sensitive and contradictory family situations, particularly in the process of gathering qualitative data via interviews. In the article, the authors ask what types of considerations are possible when studying such issues. Three ongoing family studies conducted in the social sciences by the authors are used as the basis for discussing the sensitive and contradictory nature of such family issues. The authors’ studies are about the foster children’s family relations, the sons of problem-drinking fathers and the families participating in a preventive family support system. Family matters are often perceived as being something private that is not to be talked about or shared with outsiders, e.g. talking about negative feelings towards family members may be complicated.

This article considers the meaning of the participants’ home as an interview context when studying sensitive family issues. The article is based on two qualitative family studies by the authors on foster children’s perspectives on their home and their family relations and client families’ experiences of preventive family support. Both studies address sensitive family issues, in particular Finnish child welfare. The first author’s interview data consist of interviews with foster children, social network maps and diaries and the second author’s data of interviews with six client families. Most of the interviews were conducted at the participants’ homes, but in the second author's study two interviews were conducted at the university.