Family members' strategies when their elderly relatives consider relocation to a residential home - Adapting, representing and avoiding

The aim of this article is to reveal how family members act, react and reason when their elderly relative considers relocation to a residential home. Since family members are usually involved in the logistics of their elderly relative's relocation, yet simultaneously expected not to influence the decision, the focus is on how family members experience participation in the relocation process in a Swedish context. 17 family members are included in 27 open, semi-structured interviews and follow-up contacts. Prominent features in the findings are firstly the family members' ambition to tone down their personal opinions, even though in their minds their personal preferences are clear, and secondly, the family members' ambivalence about continuity and change in their everyday lives. Family members are found to apply the adapting, the representing, or the avoiding strategy, indirectly also influencing their interaction with the care manager. Siblings applied the adapting strategy, spouses the representing strategy, while family members in the younger generation at times switched between the strategies.     

Psychological Symptoms of Sexually Victimized Children and Adolescents Compared With Other Maltreatment Subtypes

The differential effects of sexual victimization and other forms of maltreatment on psychological functioning are not well understood. A sample of sexually victimized children and adolescents (N = 70; 6.3–17.9 years) and a group of youth with a history of nonsexual maltreatment (N = 108; 6.7–16.9 years) were compared using measures of mental health and psychosocial functioning. Assessments included standardized clinical interviews on individual maltreatment history and current psychopathology as well as questionnaires on behavioral and emotional symptoms, including posttraumatic stress symptoms. The results from this study suggest that the risk of experiencing any current mental disorders was independent of type of maltreatment. The risk of meeting the criteria for a current diagnosis of major depression, however, is greater among youth with a history of maltreatment that includes sexual victimization. The significant impact of sexual victimization on posttraumatic stress symptoms was found to be nonsignificant after controlling for age and gender effects. The results indicate that the outcomes of child maltreatment depend on type of maltreatment, but age and gender must be taken into account.     

Prevalence of Child Sexual Abuse in the Nordic Countries: A Literature Review

This review examined child sexual abuse in the Nordic countries focusing on prevalence rates and victims’ age and relationship to the perpetrator. The results show a prevalence of child sexual abuse (broadly defined) between 3–23% for boys and 11–36% for girls. The prevalence rates for contact abuse were 1–12% for boys and 6–30% for girls, while 0.3–6.8% of the boys and 1.1–13.5% of the girls reported penetrating abuse. The findings suggest an increased risk of abuse from early adolescence. In adolescence, peers may constitute the largest group of perpetrators. The results highlight the need for preventive efforts also targeting peer abuse. Future research should include cross-national and repeated studies using comparable methodology.     

Leaks,legislation and freedom of speech: How can the law effectively promote public‐interest whistleblowing?

Attention is increasingly being focused on leaking, whistleblowing and associated compliance and incentives questions. The authors outline the differences between leaking and whistleblowing, notably on protection of the disclosers. They review provisions of international conventions on human rights and corruption, and compare approaches to protecting freedom of speech in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Their findings highlight the complex, sometimes conflicting issues involved: public, individual, commercial and financial interests; abuse of power; security; confidentiality; the individual as law enforcer; and the employment relationship.     

Aktuelle Probleme der Modellierung von Mehrebenen-Daten

Multilevel analyses are applied for many research problems in different research domains. They allow for adequate statistical modelling of individual characteristics embedded in contexts. The contribution reviews the present discussion of the relation between modelling and interpretation of multilevel analyses. Both the problems of data (number of cases and structure of data) and of estimation (selection of estimation procedure, validity and centering) are assessed.     

Recovery: experiences of resistance to disablism?

This article explores whether it is fruitful to use a service user/survivor approach to recovery, by seeing recovery as survival of social invalidation. That is survival of the psychosocial forces that were the source of the experience of mental distress, and as survival of social oppression by the psychiatric services and/or wider society. It could be argued that the participants in this study in the United Kingdom and Sweden recovered, and reclaimed and (re)constructed positive identities. They actively resisted experiences of disablism and rebuilt their lives. By approaching recovery from a service user/survivor perspective, one is focusing on the social, structural and political aspects of the recovery process, and one is resisting biomedical, deviant and reductionist notions of recovery.     

Case history discourse: a rhetoric of troublesome youngsters and faceless treatment

In numerous social control settings, staff routinely write case histories on clients to assist colleagues and authorities in treatment decisions. In this article, we examine how such institutional writing constructs ‘working versions’ of youngsters, portraying their objects of care as personally troublesome. Simultaneously, the institution is portrayed as facelessly, uniformly and collectively remedying their behaviour. Using material from a centre for juvenile delinquents in Sweden, we analyse three discursive techniques that accomplish this documentary reality: (1) trouble zooming, (2) mood notes and (3) deflecting staff agency. We also reflect on the social conditions for the recurrent rhetoric.     

Estimating intrahousehold allocation in a collective model with household production

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the intra-family distribution of income and the individual demand for leisure and household production from Swedish cross-sectional household data. As a basis for the analysis, we use a collective model where each individual is characterized by his or her own utility function and divides total time between leisure, household production and market work. For the purpose of comparison, we also estimate a version that is consistent with a more traditional model of labor supply, the unitary model. Received: 14 April 2000/Accepted: 12 January 2001