Interviews with Children Exposed to Violence

The aim of this article is to show how research practices may simultaneously follow principles of children’s citizenship rights to participation and principles of protection and support when children exposed to violence are informants. The article focuses upon organisation of interview processes and interactions between adult researchers and child informants in interview encounters. We point to a number of ways in which one may negotiate the tensions between, on the one hand, victimised children’s vulnerability and dependence upon adults for protection and support, and on the other these children’s agency and rights to participation.     

Care for Sick Children as a Proxy for Gender Equality in the Family

Swedish parents are entitled to government paid benefits to take care of sick children. In this paper we show that the gender distribution of paid care for sick children is a good proxy for the gender division of household work. Using two examples we show that registry data on care for sick children is a useful data source for studies on gender equality in the family. Our first example shows that increased effort at work leads to a lower effort in household work, and a higher effort at home for the other spouse. Our second example provides some evidence for a pro-cyclical pattern in gender equality.     

Keeping the family balance – adult daughters’ experiences of roles and strategies when supporting caring fathers

The Scandinavian countries represent a progressive approach to gender equality and transitions of traditional gender roles but little attention has been paid to gender equality in old age and how normative constructions of gender intersect in the lives of family carers. The aim of this study was to understand how adult daughters experience their roles and strategies when supporting fathers caring for an ill mother. A sample of eight daughters shared their experiences through in-depth interviews. The findings show that the daughters provide substantial and crucial effort and are intimately involved in the caring for their father and the sole contributors towards the emotional support of their fathers. They tend to devote a lot of energy towards picturing their family as ‘normal’ in terms of the family members adopting traditional roles and activities inside as well as outside the family context. In conclusion, the lack of understanding about gender as a ‘norm producer’ is something that needs to be further elaborated upon in order for professionals to encounter norm-breaking behaviours. The daughters’ position as family carers is often assumed and taken for granted since the intersecting structures that impact on the situations of the daughters are largely invisible.     

A lay-statistician explanation of minority discrimination

We outline a new explanation of discrimination against numerical minorities. In contrast to prior work that focuses on how the content of categories affects discrimination, our argument describes how the size of categories leads to discrimination. Specifically, we argue that, when comparing multiple categories, actors tend to view larger categories as more closely approximating an underlying population than smaller ones. As a result, a decision maker will tend to expect that members of a numerical majority are more likely to be what he/she is searching for, whether it is the best or worst candidate. We report the results of two studies designed to test these arguments. To demonstrate the generality of the proposed mechanism, Study 1 tested the argument in a non-social domain. Participants disproportionately favored the majority (vs. minority) category when searching for a single winning lottery ticket, and favored the minority category when the goal was to avoid a single losing ticket. Our second study supported an additional implication of the argument in a social domain: decision makers tended to rank highly qualified majority job candidates as better than equally qualified minority candidates, and relatively unqualified majority candidates as worse than equally unqualified minority candidates.     

Can Changes to Gender Equality Be Sustained?

The aim of this paper is to discuss how changes to gender equality in organizing can be made sustainable. Numerous studies have reported on projects which have not succeeded in their efforts to implement gender equality. In this paper, we analyse the results from two programmes which aimed to increase equal opportunities among private and public sector organizations. Theoretically, the study is based on the framework of doing gender, which is combined with insights from studies using the translation model of organizational change. The translation model of organizational change enables investigation of formal and informal processes within an institutionalized setting. By studying those aspects that were stabilized into an institution within these two programmes, as well as those which were not, the approaches that had become sustainable for the programmes in the long term could be discerned. When comparing the two programmes, it became apparent that complications arose at the point at which the theoretical aims of gender equality were translated into actions. The analysis of the outcomes of these programmes indicates, however, that, even though the formal goals were not reached, equal opportunities within the participating organizations did benefit from these programmes.     

Incorporation and Individualization of Collective Voices: Public Service User Involvement and the User Movement’s Mobilization for Change

‘Service user involvement’ is a widespread and well-known phenomenon within welfare policy and practice in Western countries and is usually perceived as a way of improving welfare services to better aid service users in managing their predicaments. However, the presented ethnographical study of service user involvement within a Swedish psychiatry organization shows that user involvement initiatives might also result in unintended and undesired effects on the collective user movement (i.e. the service user organizations involved in the activities). The analysis suggests that initiatives on user involvement might affect both the constitution of the user movement as well as the way the movement operates. Theoretically co-optation theory informs the analysis.     

The Labor Market Consequences of Gender Differences in Job Search

This paper uses data from an Internet-based CV database to investigate if women are more restrictive than men in their choice of search area, and if this is of importance in the early stages of the hiring process. We show that women are less likely to search in the metropolitan areas or far away from where they currently live. Moreover, our results indicate that these differences are important: Female searchers get fewer firm contacts, and we show that this is to a large extent explained by their more restrictive search area. When we include controls for the searchers?? search area, the negative gender effect disappears. However, the results differ somewhat across subgroups: For highly skilled women the search area is important, but there remains an unexplained negative gender effect. Our results suggest that gender differences in job search may be important to consider in studies of gender differences in labor market outcomes.     

Risk Assessment of Nitrated Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons

Nitrated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (nitro-PAHs) constitute a group of substances formed during incomplete combustion. Sources include diesel vehicles, heating, smoking, certain types of food-processing, and incomplete combustion in general. 2-Nitrofluorene (NF) represents a model substance for the nitro-PAHs. An attempt has been made to estimate the lifetime human cancer risk due to background exposure to nitro-PAHs by two different models. The first model is based on genotoxic lesions produced by gamma-irradiation and the second model is based on an earlier published mega study (24,000 animals) on the carcinogenicity of the major metabolite of NF. Both models agreed well-representing a yearly human cancer risk in the range of 0.15–49 × 10⁻⁶ for an urban citizen. The weaknesses and strengths of the models are discussed.     

Inequality Regimes and Men's Positions in Social Work

The aim of this article is to contribute to the exploration of men's positions in professions numerically dominated by women through an in depth analysis of the gendering practices in groups of social workers. The empirical material consists of interviews with three work groups in Sweden, each with one man and several women as members. The analysis focuses upon gendering practices in the interview setting. It shows how the positions occupied by the men in the sample confirm or undermine constructions of masculinity as dominance. Furthermore, it is argued that to fully understand men's positions in these groups the analysis needs take other forms of inequality into account in addition to gender. It is shown that in the empirical cases under scrutiny men's positions are shaped by regimes of inequality where age and gender relations, as well as notions of professional experience, are interconnected.     

Adolescent Children of Alcoholics on Disclosure,Support, and Assessment of Trustworthy Adults

The aim of this study is to describe adolescent children of alcoholics’ (COA) perspectives on disclosure and support. COA reported assessing the trustworthiness of adults before disclosing their home situation. Before disclosure they may have raised their own level of consciousness, told a peer, told an adult stranger, or in-directly communicated with an adult. These findings are the result of interviews with 27 adolescents attending support groups for COA in Sweden. Adults, who ask questions, listen carefully and cooperate with the child/adolescent, and who are knowledgeable about families with alcohol problems, are considered as supportive and trustworthy. The adolescents reported psychological, communicative, environmental, and generational aspects of the disclosure process.