Stress,health and the working environment of Swedish prison staff

Abstract

A random stratified sample of just over 2000 was drawn from staff working in 67 different prisons in Sweden. Questionnaires on working conditions and symptoms of ill health were administered and subjects were given health examinations. Morning plasma Cortisol and gamma glutamyltransferase (g GT) levels were measured and factual information on the prisons was collected for use in the analyses.

There were differences between prisons in terms of both objective and self-reported working conditions which appeared to affect health status, physiological state and sick leave rate. Cardiovascular and hypertensive conditions were found more often among prison staff than among a large reference group made up of many different occupations. Sick leave rates among prison staff, especially those over 45 years old, were very high compared with this reference group. The situation appeared particularly difficult in prisons with a high proportion of drug abusing inmates.

The data allowed the identification of several factors which might counteract the effects of stress at work: a proactive management style, goal consensus among staff, a high degree of decision latitude, satisfaction with work performance and a supportive psychosocial climate.     

Serious games in prevention and rehabilitation—a new panacea for elderly people?

Digital games cannot only be used for fun and entertainment. The term “serious games” (SG) denotes digital games serving serious purposes like education, training, advertising, research and health. Recently, a new generation of games has emerged involving whole-body movements. Compared to traditional interventions, these games may help elderly people to improve their health by enhancing physical fitness and coordinative abilities by combining increased motivation, game experience like fun and game flow and training. Serious games, particularly adventure and shooter games, already play an important role in health education, prevention and rehabilitation, e.g. to enhance health-related physical activity, improve sensory–motor coordination, prevent asthma, change nutrition behaviour and alleviate diabetes and prevent smoking or HIV. In this paper, the impact of SG on prevention and rehabilitation is discussed. Three criteria are applied. Beyond effectivity and efficiency, the additional benefits of serious games can be described and explained by different models including social, psychological, physiological and sensory–motor factors. The quality of study serves as a third criterion. Despite first promising results, there are only few high-quality studies. Adequate content, game interfaces, sustainability and appropriate settings are critical factors for the success of SG. In this regard, (sport) science can help to develop and evaluate SG and test appropriate settings that ensure sustainable use of serious games.     

Using Ecological Momentary Assessment to investigate associations between ejaculatory latency and control in partnered and non-partnered sexual activities

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) was used to investigate associations between, and variations in, ejaculatory control and ejaculation latency time (ELT) over repeated measurements of sexual activities. Differences between measures recorded in partnered or non-partnered settings were also investigated. The sample consisted of 21 male Finns aged 18 years or above, contributing a total of 158 reports of partnered and non-partnered sexual activities over a six-week period. In the context of non-partnered sexual activities, after controlling for within-subjects dependence, ELTs between events were predictive of one another, but ELT did not predict ejaculatory control when measured simultaneously, nor at subsequent events. Also, ejaculatory control could not predict simultaneously measured ELT or ejaculatory control at subsequent events. During partnered sexual activities, both ejaculatory control and ELT could be accurately predicted by observing ejaculatory control at prior events. In this context, ejaculatory control could also reliably predict simultaneously measured ELT. ELT or ejaculatory control during partnered sexual activity could not be predicted by observing ELT at prior events. Between-event correlations were generally low, indicating considerable variation in ejaculatory functioning over time. EMA is a thrifty assessment method for studying variations in ejaculatory function, and is likely suitable for studying sexual dysfunctions in general.     

Women’s experience of midwife-led counselling and its influence on childbirth fear: A qualitative study

Background

Women with childbirth fear have been offered counseling by experienced midwives in Sweden for decades without evidence for its effectiveness, in terms of decrease in childbirth fear. Women are usually satisfied with the counselling. However, there is a lack of qualitative data regarding women’s views about counselling for childbirth fear.

Public Social Services’ encounters with irregular migrants in Sweden: amid values of social work and control of migration

This article outlines Public Social Services’ encounters with irregular migrants in Sweden from the perspectives of institutional and street-level bureaucrats. Staff and executive considerations are influenced by a de jure exclusion of irregular migrants, which is an element of the control of migration. Staff face contradictory demands concerning international and national regulations, which leads to legal ambiguities open to discretionary powers. The aim is to explore the handling of such cases, experiences and considerations with an interest in the values that are invoked when enacting discretion and to discuss implications of the unclear legal situation. The material was obtained using web-based questionnaires. A tentative analysis confirms that the Public Social Services encounter irregular migrants and that handling differs greatly. It suggests that different approaches and the contradictory legal framework endanger the rule of law. Differing reference points appear to be invoked when enacting discretion: some related to social work and others to controlled migration. The social work values invoked by some respondents might imply an appreciation of a right to services and control of migration as independent processes and jurisdiction related to human rights that are applicable beyond the nationally framed legal status and not subordinated to policies of migration.     

Cosmopolitan militaries and dialogic peacekeeping: Danish and Swedish women soldiers in Afghanistan

Feminist security studies (FSS) scholarship advocates the analysis of women’s war experiences and narratives to understand conflict and military intervention. Here we add a non-great power focus to FSS debates on the gendered discourses of military interventionism. We zoom in on Danish and Swedish women soldiers’ reflections on their involvement in the ISAF operation in Afghanistan. Their stories are deconstructed against the backdrop of their states’ adoption of a cosmopolitan-minded ethic on military obligation. Both states employed women soldiers in dialogic peacekeeping in Afghanistan to establish links with local women and to gather intelligence, tasks that were less frequently afforded to male soldiers. However, feminist FSS scholarship locates military intelligence gathering within racial, gendered and imperialist power relations that assign victimhood to local women. This feminist critique is pertinent, but the gendered and racial logics governing international operations vary across national contexts. While such gender binaries were present in Danish and Swedish military practice in Afghanistan, our article shows that dialogical peacekeeping offered an alternative to stereotypical constructions of women as victims and men as protectors. Dialogical peacekeeping helped to disrupt such gendering processes, giving women soldiers an opportunity to rethink their gender identities while instilling dialogical relations with local women.     

Poverty and Old Age in Scandinavia: A Problem of Gendered Injustice? Evidence from the 2010 GERDA Survey in Finland and Sweden

Material deprivation is represented in different forms and manifestations. Two individuals with the same deprivation score (i.e. number of deprivations), for instance, are likely to be unable to afford or access entirely or partially different sets of goods and services, while one individual may fail to purchase clothes and consumer durables and another one may lack access to healthcare and be deprived of adequate housing. As such, the number of possible patterns or combinations of multiple deprivation become increasingly complex for a higher number of indicators. Given this difficulty, there is interest in poverty research in understanding multiple deprivation, as this analysis might lead to the identification of meaningful population sub-groups that could be the subjects of specific policies. This article applies a factor mixture model (FMM) to a real dataset and discusses its conceptual and empirical advantages and disadvantages with respect to other methods that have been used in poverty research. The exercise suggests that FMM is based on more sensible assumptions (i.e. deprivation covary within each class), provides valuable information with which to understand multiple deprivation and is useful to understand severity of deprivation and the additive properties of deprivation indicators.     

Target groups for prevention of neck/shoulder and low back disorders: an exploratory cluster analysis of working and living conditions

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) have a multifactorial etiology. Therefore, a holistic approach to identifying target groups for primary/secondary prevention is essential. In this study, an exploratory person-oriented approach was applied, using cluster analysis of variables related to physical and psychosocial work conditions, and conditions in the private sphere, on a data set of 1,341 Swedish women and men who had not sought care for MSDs the 6 months preceding enrollment in the study. Three groups at risk and five "healthy" groups regarding MSDs were identified. Two of the risk groups had a strained situation regarding psychosocial work conditions or domestic/family conditions, respectively. The majority of individuals in these groups were women. The third risk group had a strained situation regarding both physical and psychosocial work conditions. This group consisted largely of men working in male-dominated jobs. The five healthy groups had low/moderate metabolic demands at work, and all of them having high proportions of subjects with moderate to high education, and fairly even distributions of men and women. In conclusion, the results indicate that gender-specific working and living conditions are associated with an increased risk for MSDs. The identification of these subgroups in the population may facilitate a selective prevention approach.