Looking for elderly people´s needs: teaching critical reflection in Swedish social work education

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on how to use critical reflection in social work education in order to encourage students to critically reflect on their standards regarding assessment, opinions and values about aging. Material, both oral and written, from needs assessments of older persons conducted by 106 social work students was analyzed. The result shows that the students initially interpreted needs based on prejudice and assumptions about aging. However, when using Schön´s three steps of reflection in the exercise, together with knowledge of critical social work theories, students became more concerned and reflected more critically on their assessments. This study shows the possibilities of working with pedagogical exercises in order to increase the awareness and critical knowledge of social work students in order to attempt to reduce discrimination. Educating students in critical social work enables them to learn how to comment on and transform the profession of social work and our unjust society, while questioning their own as well as society’s prejudice regarding the needs of elderly persons.     

Teamwork among midwives during neonatal resuscitation at a maternity hospital in Nepal

Problem

The ability of health care providers to work together is essential for favourable outcomes in neonatal resuscitation, but perceptions of such teamwork have rarely been studied in low-income settings.

Self-employed immigrants and their employees: evidence from Swedish employer-employee data

We present a study of the employees of self-employed immigrants with unincorporated firms in Sweden using matched employer-employee data from 2014. Non-European immigrants are more likely than natives to have employees in their firms. Furthermore, immigrants, especially non-European immigrants, are more likely than natives to employ immigrants in their firms, and non-European immigrants are most likely to employ recently arrived non-European immigrants with low education in their firms. Males are more likely than females to have employees in their firms, but self-employed females are more likely than self-employed males to have female employees. This is the case for all immigrant groups as well as for natives. We conclude that self-employed immigrants play a role in the labour market integration process since they create employment opportunities for immigrant groups that have difficulty entering the labour market.

     

The additive hazard estimator is consistent for continuous-time marginal structural models

Lifetime Data Analysis - Marginal structural models (MSMs) allow for causal analysis of longitudinal data. The standard MSM is based on discrete time models, but the continuous-time MSM is a...     

‘They Cry,Cry, They Want to go to School’: the Micro‐Politics of Asylum‐Seeking Children's Articulated Emotions and Belonging in Relation to the Swedish School

This study illustrates how asylum‐seeking children, through articulated emotions, respond to being affected by experiences that enhance or restrict their sense of belonging. The findings show that, owing to power structures and relations, the children's sense of belonging was made uncertain by temporal, situational and relational boundaries of belonging. However, through their articulations, the children also contested these boundaries. The study argues that the children were moved by their structural situatedness and that their articulated emotions demonstrated their micro‐politics. The study also visualises how children may be affected when their rights are not realised in their lived forms.     

Towards a language of sexual gray zones: feminist collective knowledge building through autobiographical multimedia storytelling

This article examines the narrative and discursive feminist labor of the Swedish 2010 Twitter-initiated #talkaboutit campaign focusing on sexual “gray areas.” The campaign sought to lessen the perceived gap between experience and discourse and work towards an adequate language encompassing difficult sexual situations presented as residing in the gray area between choice and coercion. Autobiographical narratives of negative sexual situations amounting to something less than rape were summoned, produced, and intensively disseminated online and in print media. I mainly analyze the autobiographical stories produced by what could be called the core members of the campaign as they signal the purpose of collective autobiographical storytelling as well as what is sayable and culturally exigent. I analyze how new grounds of contention in between sex and violence are staked out focusing equally on the feminist act of personal/political storytelling and on the story told about sexual “gray areas.” The article discusses the tension between the feminist collective, side-by-side, mode of storytelling and knowledge building and the equally present neoliberal narrative arc which culminates in a subject personally responsible for acting differently next time.     

Shared decision making from the service users’ perspective: A narrative study from community mental health centers in northern Norway

This article aims to contribute to the understanding of shared decision making as an important aspect of user involvement in mental health care from the perspectives of service users. A thematic analysis of interviews with 25 individual service users in three different community mental health centers in Norway identified different understandings of shared decision making. Shared decision making was identified as essential in four contexts: 1) during admission, 2) in individualized treatment, 3) in different treatment contexts, and 4) in user-professional relationships. We consider shared decision making to be intertwined with treatment from the service user perspective.     

Associations between observed and reported infant negative affectivity,fear and self-regulation,and early communicative development—Evidence from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study

Self-regulation and language are intertwined abilities, but the nature of their relations in early childhood when both skills are still emerging is insufficiently understood. Our knowledge of the relations between early negative affectivity and preverbal and verbal communicative development is still limited. Further, observed and reported temperament capture how aspects of temperament operate in different settings but are rarely used in parallel in studies examining early language. During the period of rapid development, longitudinal studies are needed to identify early risk factors for delayed communicative development. We studied relations between aspects of emerging self-regulation and negative affectivity using both observations at 8 months and mother-reports at 6 and 12 months, and communicative development measured by gesturing and vocabulary at 14 and vocabulary at 30 months in 183 children. Mother-reported self-regulation was related to a higher use of communicative gestures and observed self-regulation by gaze aversion to poorer receptive and expressive vocabulary at 14 months, but neither was significantly associated with vocabulary at 30 months. We found little evidence for associations between negative affectivity and fear in infancy and communicative development. Our findings highlight different aspects of self-regulation as both potential risk and protective factors for communicative development. Mixed results indicate a need for a more detailed examination of different strategies of self-regulation in different conditions and developmental stages to yield a deeper understanding of the relations between self-regulation in infancy and communicative development.     

Socioeconomic disparities in climate vulnerability: neonatal mortality in northern Sweden, 1880–1950

Population and Environment - The aim of this study was to analyse the association between season of birth, temperature and neonatal mortality according to socioeconomic status in northern Sweden...