摘要：After some ethnographic fieldwork within families, an experimental survey has been conducted by a team of economists and sociologists working on care and trying to understand the institutional mechanisms of assignation and the informal processes of designation, which both make a family caregiver. The team has selected, with institutional help, some Alzheimer’s diseased people, has asked the person who is in contact with the institution to fill up a questionnaire, and has then asked members of the kin-circle to fill up different types of questionnaire. 91 cases and 300 questionnaires have been collected. The complexity of this protocol has proved to be worthwhile, only when it has been possible to separate two different ways of ending a case, an individual one (somebody refuses to answer a questionnaire) and a more configurational one (the first contact refuses to give us access to other members of the kin-circle).
