I have also gained new work life skills during my internship. I think active listening is the most precious tool that you need in qualitative research. There is a lot to take in with every interviewee, and every story I collected for the project is unique. That is the beauty of sociology – being able to access multiple social worlds by listening carefully about what the people speaking to you want to say and express.

When I began my studies in Sociology in University of Helsinki – where I originally come from – I did not expect to end up researching health related topics in my master’s thesis. However, when looking through a sociological lens, health is a very relevant topic: Health is present in every individual’s life in all stages, and entails many different aspects interesting for social research, such as inequality in access and information and also contestation of expert information. The contestation of expert information, however, goes beyond just health-related themes and is connected to a larger number of contemporary phenomena, e.g., the fall of the “ivory-tower position” of researchers in controlling the narrative of critique, especially online due to the egalitarian nature of Internet discussion (Väliverronen 2016). Researchers and scientific community need new ways to engage in civil debate, especially where understanding, distribution and appreciation of expert information is needed. In many ways, this is one of the great goals of VAX-TRUST – to guide better encounters between patients and health care professionals and creating space for safely asking questions about health in a dialogical manner.

The most challenging part of the research process – because honesty is always the most interesting – was the recruitment and finding the vaccine hesitant parents to be interviewed. I would be lying if I said there weren’t times where I felt being at the end of all my known means, having exhausted all the different channels and strategies of recruitment that I know of and still not finding enough people who were willing to talk to me. However, in the end, we hit our goal number in parent interviews after months of active recruiting, and I have to say I feel very proud of our final collected data! It sometimes required doing two interviews per day which is the very maximum you can take in in one day, but it was very well worth it at the end. Our data is very rich and insightful into the phenomenon.