Shaping social situations: A hidden aspect of care work in nursing homes

A significant aspect of care work in nursing homes involves dealing with emotional responses such as anxiety, fear, pain, depression and anger on the part of residents and their families. Previous care and nursing research on this topic centers around dyadic relationships and does not provide useful conceptualizations of how care workers actively deal with the social situations they encounter as part of their work. Drawing on ethnographic field work and interviews conducted in two Norwegian nursing homes, this article aims to describe and conceptualize a previously neglected aspect of good care work: the active shaping of social situations in order to lessen uneasy feelings of residents and their families. Three episodes of good work are described to illustrate how social situations can be shaped. Strategies include such actions as timing events, regulating one's presence, and composing social groups. The concluding section discusses some implications for nursing home management.     

The development of synchronous text-based instant messaging as an online interviewing tool

The article reports the development of a synchronous text-based online interviewing tool with a continuity of private discussion that is not achieved in open-ended questionnaires, email interviews and online discussion boards. The participants were women who had undergone a surgical or natural menopause, who in a pilot interview highlighted the potential sensitivity of this subject and inspired the implementation of this method. The overall feedback was positive with the main advantages centred on feelings of anonymity, convenience and a more comfortable interview environment. Disadvantages included lack of body language and technical issues with computers. This technique ensures a degree of confidentiality while still obtaining depth of enquiry, where other qualitative methods potentially risk invading a participant’s privacy. It can be offered both alongside other interviewing techniques to allow participant choice and on its own when exploring sensitive and personal topics or when extra participant anonymity is appropriate.     

A pilot study of CBT versus escitalopram combined with CBT in the treatment of pathological gamblers

We conducted a randomised controlled trial pilot study (N = 30) with two treatment groups: (1) Manualised cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) (n = 15) and (2) escitalopram combined with CBT (n = 15). Treatment was administered individually and the CBT included weekly sessions for eight consecutive weeks. The treatment with escitalopram lasted for a minimum of 16 weeks (20 mg/day), with an optional continuation for a 6-month follow-up period. Repeated measures ANOVA with modified intent-to-treat analyses were conducted. Results showed significant time effects on all measures for both treatment conditions, although no significant group or time × group effects. The results indicated that both treatments were effective in the short term (effect sizes (ES) ranging from 0.45 to 0.91 for the CBT group and 0.27 to 0.72 for the escitalopram+CBT group), and that adding CBT to escitalopram had no additional statistically significant effect (between-group ES of 0.11 and 0.29 for primary outcome measures at 16-weeks post-treatment).     

Disciplining Disability under Danish Active Labour Market Policy

This article explores how caseworkers are re‐constructing disability in the Danish welfare system and disciplining themselves and clients according to the active labour policy paradigm. Combining Foucault's ideas about discipline with Maynard‐Moody and Musheno's method of interpreting street‐level bureaucrats' stories ( Foucault 1977 ; Maynard‐Moody and Musheno 2003 ), we analyze caseworkers' stories about their clients, fellow caseworkers and themselves to understand how they practice the ideology behind active labour policy. Our analysis uses Møller's (2009 ) interviews with 24 Danish caseworkers who administer social welfare and sick leave benefits based on disability as the primary eligibility criterion. We selected stories told by caseworkers that exemplify archetypes of good and bad citizens, good and bad clients, and good and bad caseworkers. Through interpretative analysis, we elucidate how caseworkers make sense of active labour policy and internalize the pressures of managerial reforms to discipline both citizens and each other.     

The Role of Quality of Life Surveys in Managing Change in Democratic Transitions: The South African Case

The South African Quality of Life Project hastracked subjective well-being, lifesatisfaction and happiness, since the earlyeighties at the national level. In mostdemocratic countries around the globe, theaverage citizen says he or she is satisfiedwith life in general. In South Africa this isnot the case. Since the early 1980s, thetrend study shows up disparities between onesector of the South African population that issatisfied with life in general and variousaspects of life and another sector that is verydissatisfied. Generally, the better-off reporthigher levels of satisfaction and happinessthan the worse-off.The most plausible explanation for the SouthAfrican quality-of-life constellation is thehuge gap in living standards between rich andpoor, a legacy of the apartheid era, whichdiscriminated against blacks and to a lesserextent against Indian and coloured people.Euphoria following on the first democraticelections in April 1994, which registeredequally high aggregate levels of happiness andlife satisfaction among all sectors of thepopulation, was short-lived. Under democracy,expectations ``for a better life for all'’, theelection slogans for the 1994 and 1999 generalelections, has risen. South Africa has one ofthe most enlightened constitutions, whichguarantees basic human rights and supportsadvancement of the previously disadvantaged. Aslong as South Africans perceive barriers toaccessing the material rewards of democracy,they do not see justice has been done.South Africa is currently grappling withproblems common to other societies intransition to democracy. Since 1994, governmentprogrammes and policies have been devised toaddress the critical twin problems of povertyand inequality in society. The latest round ofresearch for the South African Quality of LifeTrends Project probes popular assessments ofthe policies and programmes aimed at improvingthe quality of life of ordinary South Africans.Interviews with a panel of 25 opinion leadersin the run-up to the June 1999 generalelections were followed by a nationallyrepresentative opinion survey in October 1999.The paper outlines the role of socialindicators in monitoring quality of life inSouth Africa and reports findings from theelite and rank-and-file surveys. Generally, thewinners and losers in the new politicaldispensation see changes from a differentperspective. The disadvantaged are more likelyto have seen material gains and recommendincreased delivery of services andopportunities for social mobility. Theadvantaged, who have mainly experiencednon-material or no gains since 1994, are morelikely to be pessimistic about the future. Itis concluded that the groundswell of optimismwill sustain the majority of South Africans whoare still dissatisfied with life until theirdreams of the good life are fulfilled.     

The Shape of South African Society and its Challenges

South Africa's negotiated settlement and its transition to democracy reads like a modern fairy tale. A brief review of South Africa's social indicators serves to temper some of optimism about the country's future. The indicators reflect the society's quality of life which has been shaped by its turbulent history. Political “caste formation”, changing political alliances, the reforms intended to forestall the demise of apartheid, and the race for global competitiveness have left indelible marks on the society's social indicators. A comparison of living conditions in South Africa with those of roughly comparable economies indicates that the country lags behind in securing overall and widespread socio-economic upgrading of the population at large. A review of a cross-section of South African indicators and their trends over time shows that South Africa is still a very deeply divided society with a very large backlog in socio-economic development. There is evidence of breakdown in the society's social cohesion. Popular expectations of future quality of life indicate that the euphoria following on the first democratic elections has been replaced by a sense of realism among all sectors of the population. It is concluded that quality of life as reflected in South Africa's social indicators may get worse before it improves. The challenge will be to avoid new forms of economic “apartheid” which would depress the quality of life of marginal sectors of the population at the expense of the economically privileged.     

Satisfied and dissatisfied South Africans: results from the General Household Survey in international comparison

Who are the satisfied South Africans 10 years into democracy? How do material factors contribute to their life satisfaction? These are the questions addressed in this paper. Earlier South African research has consistently found a close positive relationship between life satisfaction and material standards of living in the apartheid and post-apartheid era. Recently, a new source of information has become available to shed further light on the association between material and subjective well-being. In 2002, Statistics South Africa, the country’s official source of statistical information, agreed to ask South Africans participating in the General Household Survey whether they were satisfied or dissatisfied with life. The 2002 General Household Survey (n26’000) used a measure developed for the Euromodule that allows for international comparison. The wide-ranging information contained in South Africa’s official?household survey offers a unique opportunity to explore what makes for satisfied and dissatisfied South Africans in relation to their material living standards. Results indicate that the improved living standards afforded to many black South Africans under democracy are associated with increases in life satisfaction. Furthermore, habituation does not appear to have diluted the positive relationship between living standards and well-being. However, political factors continue to play an important role in shaping subjective well-being. In conclusion, it is argued that material gains might also have restored the pride and dignity denied to black South Africans in the past.     

Your Place or Mine? On the Residence Choice of Young Couples in Norway

Norwegian registry data are used to investigate the location decisions of a full population cohort of young adults as they complete their education, establish separate households, and form their own families. We find that the labor market opportunities and family ties of both partners affect these location choices. Surprisingly, married men live significantly closer to their own parents than do married women, even if they have children, and this difference cannot be explained by differences in observed characteristics. The principal source of excess female distance from parents in this population is the relatively low mobility of men without a college degree, particularly in rural areas. Despite evidence that intergenerational resource flows, such as childcare and eldercare, are particularly important between women and their parents, the family connections of husbands appear to dominate the location decisions of less-educated married couples.     

Is Social Capital a Good Concept?

This paper explores whether the concept of social capital as popularized by Robert Putnam is a good social science concept. Taking Gerring’s work on concept evaluation as the starting point, the paper first presents a set of criteria for conceptual ‘goodness’ and discusses how social capital performs on these criteria. It is argued that social capital eventually may be a good concept if it can be shown empirically to be a unidimensional concept. An empirical section therefore explores the validity of the unidimensionality assumption and rejects it in four separate tests at both the individual and aggregate level. We conclude that even if social capital has been a remarkably productive idea, it is not a good concept as most popular conceptualizations define social capital as several distinct phenomena or as phenomena that already have been conceptualized under other labels.     

Expert rule versus majority rule under partial information

We study the uncertain dichotomous choice model. Under some assumptions on the distribution of expertise of the various panel members, the probability of the expert rule to be the optimal one is compared to that of the majority rule to be optimal. It turns out that for the former probability exceeds the latter by far, especially as the panel size becomes large.