The evaluation of home care processes and financial aid via oto-ethnography

In Turkey, some policies concerning individuals who require permanent care have been developed. One of the policies, the subject matter of this thesis, is the home care services and related monthly financial aid payment program, which has been developed as an alternative to the institutional care since 2006. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate home care delivery experiences and financial aid practices by utilizing oto-ethnographic methods based on my and my sister's seven-year home care delivery experiences and relating these experiences with the literature. In this research, "analytic" oto-ethnography rather than "evocative" otoethnographic type was utilized within the processes of analyses, evaluation and writing. The first contribution of this study to the literature is that the oto-ethnography, which has been utilized traditionally while studying dramatic events such as death and divorce, was used for the first time for evaluating home care delivery experiences and financial aid practices, thus, it was introduced within the sociology discipline in Turkey. This is the most fundamental uniqueness of this thesis. vii In contrast to other researchers, who engaged with the same subject matters but collected their data from others' experiences of home care delivery and financial aid supply, grounding my research on my own experiences of home care delivery and financial aid supply can be seen one of the important step. In this process, I want to underline the fact that oto-etnographic research process has been contributed a lot to my ability to imagine a given subject sociologically more than I expected. In this context, the second contribution of this study is related to my realization that the otoethnography can be one of the effective methods in the development of sociological imagination. Key words: Financial Aid Experience, Gender, Patriarchy, Domestic Labor and Reproduction