The association between blood pressure and work stress: The importance of measuring isolated systolic hypertension

The objective was to study whether the relationships between elevated blood pressure and (a) work stress as related to the stressor overtime, and (b) unwinding after work, depend on what kind of criteria are used for the diagnosis of hypertension. A total of 126 healthy men (aged 20-66 years) employed in white-collar jobs were tested over 24 hours by means of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring on a regular working day. Four groups were defined according to their blood pressure status: normotensives (NT), hypertensives (HT), isolated systolic hypertensives (ISH), and isolated diastolic hypertensives (IDH). No differences of age, body mass index, overtime work, and disturbed unwinding were found between the normotensives and the hypertensives. ISH was found to be related to working overtime and to disturbed unwinding but not to biological risk factors; IDH, however, was related exclusively to the biological risk factor high body mass index. Thus, significant differences associated with overtime were found between ISH and both NT and IDH, with the isolated systolic hypertensives carrying out more than twice as much overtime as the normotensives or isolated diastolic hypertensives. More men with a disturbed ability to relax and vital exhaustion were found in the ISH group than in the NT group. It seems that, in addition to the usual diagnosis of hypertension, the classification of ISH and IDH adds new information about the relationship between blood pressure elevation and both work stress and disturbed unwinding.     

The Effect of Father–Toddler and Mother– Toddler Role Reversal on the Development of Behavior Problems in Kindergarten

Role reversal is a relationship disturbance in which a parent looks to a child to meet a parent's need for comfort, parenting, intimacy or play, and the child attempts to meet these needs. The current study examined, within a developmental psychopathology framework, the effect of father and mother role reversal with toddlers on the development of attention problems, externalizing symptoms, internalizing symptoms, and social problems in kindergarten. In a normative sample, N=57, role reversal was assessed in an observational paradigm, and teachers rated behavior problems. Father role reversal predicted attention problems and externalizing symptoms, whereas mother role reversal predicted social problems. Gender was an important moderator such that father role reversal predicted social problems for boys and mother role reversal predicted social problems for girls. The importance of a developmental psychopathology perspective, the role of fathers, and implications for the development of diagnosable disorders and for preventive interventions are discussed.     

Sektionen Jugendsoziologie und Kultursoziologie

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Gender Equality and Corporate Governance: Policy Strategies in Norway and New Zealand

Advancing gender equality in the labour market continues to be a policy objective in many OECD countries. Wide national variations are evident in strategies and accomplishments towards improving gender equality at all levels of the labour market, including senior management and corporate governance roles. This article compares policy strategies in Norway and New Zealand directed towards achieving gender equality in the governance of corporate institutions. A principal feature of the New Zealand strategy has been a soft regulation approach in the form of advocacy and encouragement of equal employment opportunity policies, awareness‐raising and benchmarking. For Norway the use of legislation in the form of quotas and affirmative action programmes has been the predominant strategy. Using empirical data collected in 2004–2005 on women's perceptions and experiences of corporate governance participation, this article critically examines these different policy strategies.     

Intake strategies: organising the intake of new social assistance inquirers

This article looks at how the intake of new social assistance clients is organised in Sweden and which factors affect the existence of special intake units, using interview and register data from 100 Swedish municipalities. The discussion is organised along two distributional principles: that of general access for all citizens and that of social assistance only to those who are in need. The results show that different intake types can be distinguished: to promote or limit both access to the social assistance units and the possibility for selection among the callers. Examining factors that affect the organisation of intake in special intake units, the results show that factors related to the economic and demographic structure of the municipalities have no, or only in indirect, effect on the organisation of intake. Intake is instead mainly related to the structure of the whole social assistance unit. In addition, some factors related to professional norms have an impact.     

The multivariate hazard gradient and moments of the truncated multinormal distribution

It is well known that the expectation and variance of a truncated normal distribution can be simply expressed in terms of the hazard rate function. This paper shows that it is possible to express the expectation and covariance matrices of a truncated multinormal distribution with similarly simple expressions in which the hazard rate function is generalized to thevector multivariate hazard rate(also: hazard gradient) of Johnson and Kotz. This provides a concise computational form for the mutivariate moments and lends support to the contention that the hazard gradient is the appropriate generalization of the univariate hazard rate.     

Effective local governance assisting vulnerable groups: The case of youth not in employment,education or training (NEETs) in Sweden

Youth not in employment, education or training (NEETs) have been analyzed from either individual or macro-structural perspectives, while policy discussions have emphasized national policy. This disregards (i) the substantial variation in NEET rates within countries, and (ii) the importance of local governance for this variation. We examine these issues in Sweden through the lens of interactive governance. Theoretically, four aspects of collective action are highlighted: identification of local NEET subgroups, perceptions of problems and of solutions, and stakeholder relationships. Empirically, an initial multi-level regression analysis of all 290 Swedish municipalities provided the basis for semi-structured interviews regarding local work with NEETs in 20 strategically selected municipalities. The qualitative data are here analyzed using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. The results suggest that municipalities where local governance combines three of the four aspects, namely identifying NEET subgroups and sharing perceptions of problems and of solutions, have lower NEET shares than predicted.     

Visitor suicide risk in casino resort areas

In a well-publicized analysis of visitor suicides in three casinoareas (Atlantic City, Las Vegas, and Reno), elevated suicide risk among interstate visitors was attributed to the presence of legalized gambling. A fundamental limitation of the analysis, however, was the absence of estimatesfor at-risk populations. In the present paper, an analysis of 1995 visitor-suicide rates (incorporating estimates for at-risk population) for 310 large UScounties, including places both with and without gambling casinos, yields no evidence to support a gambling-suicide relationship.