Frans Feron and Hans Bosma, professors of sociology of medicine at Maastricht University, spent several hours in the Laboratory, where they discussed the prospects of a joint research project on children's health in Russia and Holland. At the beginning of the meeting Daniel Alexandrov told Dutch professors about Summer practice and the experience of collaboration with the Moscow sociologists.  Long-term field studies that is conducted by SESL in small Russian towns, make it possible to research social structure of these communities deeply and intensively, but for a short period of time. Daniel Alexandrov also mentioned the most important results of Summer expedition, 2011 presented in mid-November at a conference in Moscow, among this results is the study of the role of libraries in society and non-obvious social functions of schools and parishes.

For example, researchers who worked this summer in Dmitrovsky district of Moscow region, found that the librarians perform not only their direct functions, but some social work to bring people together, especially the older ones.

A similar situation has been studied on the example of nurses and paramedics, whose visit is often needed not only because people are sick, but because they lack communication. Social factor plays a significant role in medicine, for example, people who feel lonely are hospitalized more often. Daniel Alexandrov recalled the experiment when the volunteers came to old people each week to talk to them, to bring books, etc. Hospitalization rate in the control group of the elderly has decreased twice.

As the colleagues from Maastricht told, there is a position in Holland which is close to paramedics in Russia - community nurses who perform similar social functions. Studies of the role of these people in small social communities can be one of the possible directions of cooperation between Russian and Dutch scholars.

Another area of collaboration could be children oral health research in a social context. Such a project can be fulfilled only by a team of social scientists, theorists of social medicine and medical practitioners.

The researchers plan to involve students in the project. In order to develop a comparable questionnaire students will participate in pilot research in their own and in the partnering country. After this stage Russian students will be involved in the fieldwork in Netherlands and Dutch students will be surveying children in Russia in order to make methods of conducting interviews and questionnaires more similar.

Moreover, to synchronize research process at every stage several working sessions of the research groups from Russia and Holland will be organized.

As the first step, Russian and Dutch researchers decided to conduct a small pilot study to create a questionnaire, to translate and to test it, and only then to proceed to a wide-scale study.

This joint survey promises to become a serious international project which will involve social scientists, medical theorists and doctors from several countries. The next working session on the project will take place in January, 2012.

In the end of the meeting the Dutch colleagues presented us nice gifts – books and sweets from Maastricht.

By Veronica Kostenko