Dr. Hosoda has been doing her empirical research on human relations in the health-care field.  She is particularly interested in coordination of people who are concerned with medical health issues, illness experience of patients, relationship among healthcare providers, activities of patient associations, bioethics and medical-ethics, and illness related social stigma and discrimination. 

Her initial research was conducted from 1995 to 1996, which was requested by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Nurses’ Aides Problems Study Board. Creating 12 types of questionnaires and processing 6,000 data samples, her team analyzed the problems about nurses’ aides.  From July to August in 1996, Dr. Hosoda did fieldwork at a general hospital. This research focused on the relationships among healthcare providers, as well as the relationship between healthcare providers and patients, which were then analyzed. Special attention was paid to the concept of “team medical-care.”   From 2001 to 2003, Dr. Hosoda worked on “The Guidelines for Newborn Babies with Severe Illnesses and Disabilities” as a member of the working group belonging to the Board organized by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labor.From 2000 to 2005, Dr. Hosoda conducted in-depth interviews with 27 stroke survivors and participant observation at three self-help groups to explore their experiences after strokes.  From September 2005, Dr. Hosoda was doing her research on a patient’s support groups for newborns.  Also, she has been conducting her fieldwork on Zen-Ryo-Kyo, a patients’ association of Hansen’s Disease, since 2004. 

Recent interested area of Dr. Hosoda is “Medical Governance”.  She has conducted a fieldwork on a social movement which was against the revision of the Social Insurance Medical Fee, public health insurance in Japan. Referring to the studies about Health Social Movements, she analyzes the movement and seeks the possibility to connect the health related social movement with “Medical Governance” to realize the partnership among general public, medical professionals and government.