The impact of a participatory organizational intervention on job stress in community health care institutions

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of a short-term participatory intervention in health care institutions in Norway on workers' control, other job characteristics, job stress, subjective health and job satisfaction. Participants (including managers and supervisors) were randomly allocated to intervention groups and to a control group. Actions to solve problems based on the employees' own perceptions of the main problems were seen as the key motivators for organizational improvement and increased control at the task and office level in the work situation. The main stressors identified by the participants in this study were lack of information, communication and respect between professions, as well as the need for professional and personal development. The participatory intervention had a positive, but limited effect on work-related stress, job characteristics, learning climate and management style, and seemed to have started a beneficial change process. There were no negative short-term effects on work-related stress and job demands. Organizational interventions may be a potential training ground for acquiring participatory skills and resources, and if sustained after the intervention period, they can have long-term effects on problem solving, job stress and employee satisfaction.     

Responsibility in Home–School Relations — Finnish Parents' Views

Finnish parents' views on responsibility in the home–school relations were explored. Responsibility was here understood as responsibility over education and upbringing. The data consist of semi‐structured interviews with 24 mothers and four fathers. In the home–school discourses, parents and teachers were often referred to as partners, and active parental involvement in school life was seen as a key to children's success. However, in some discourses teachers and parents were seen as polar opposites, e.g. teachers as experts — parents as laymen. Few references were made to children's responsibility.     

Early retirement differences between Denmark and The Netherlands: A cross-national comparison of push and pull factors in two small European welfare states

The goal of this study is to give a comprehensive empirical account of push and pull factors, situated at various societal levels, which may influence people's early retirement. Factors in two contrasting European countries have been analysed and compared: Denmark, where the rate of early exit/retirement is relatively low, and The Netherlands, where this rate is relatively high. Our analysis, looking into possible explanations for the difference in rates, includes factors that operate at the macro or institutional level of the labour market and the social security system, at the meso level of firms and companies, and at the micro level of individual workers. In addition, we not only look into the effects of structural, objective factors, which impacts are usually analysed from an incentive perspective, but also into the effects of cultural factors, i.e. of preferences, attitudes and values. Cultural factors related to early exit have not been the object of much international comparison thus far, although their possible significance is readily acknowledged. The differences in retirement behaviour in Denmark and The Netherlands are explained by the fact that Danish workers, at all three levels, are less experiencing structural and cultural factors pushing them out of the labour market, as well as experiencing factors pulling them into retirement, compared to workers in The Netherlands.     

Finite Sample Comparison of Parametric, Semiparametric, and Wavelet Estimators of Fractional Integration

In this paper we compare through Monte Carlo simulations the finite sample properties of estimators of the fractional differencing parameter, d. This involves frequency domain, time domain, and wavelet based approaches, and we consider both parametric and semiparametric estimation methods. The estimators are briefly introduced and compared, and the criteria adopted for measuring finite sample performance are bias and root mean squared error. Most importantly, the simulations reveal that (1) the frequency domain maximum likelihood procedure is superior to the time domain parametric methods, (2) all the estimators are fairly robust to conditionally heteroscedastic errors, (3) the local polynomial Whittle and bias-reduced log-periodogram regression estimators are shown to be more robust to short-run dynamics than other semiparametric (frequency domain and wavelet) estimators and in some cases even outperform the time domain parametric methods, and (4) without sufficient trimming of scales the wavelet-based estimators are heavily biased.     

Organized Environmentalists: Democracy as a Key Value?

This article, taking as its point of departure that voluntary organizations are of crucial importance in a democracy, views the transformation of the Norwegian voluntary sector through the lenses of what happens within the environmental field. Seeing changes within this field as prototypical for the transformation of the voluntary sector more generally, we start with the organizational level and contrast old versus new environmental organizations. The aim is to ascertain to what extent the newly built organizations are leaving the historically important democratic organizational model. Second, we compare attitudes toward democracy of members of the democratically and nondemocratically built organizations: attitudes both toward democracy within a voluntary organization (internal) and democracy in society (external). Furthermore, we compare these findings with what we find for the population at large. The last section analyzes demographic characteristics of organized environmentalists to see whether a new type of elite, more distanced from the population at large, is emerging in the new and nondemocratically built organizations. The study finds that new organizations are definitely breaking with the democratic organizational model. The support for democracy (internal and external) is comprehensive but not always overwhelming, and there is a tendency in the direction of congruence between organizational structure and individual attitudes. That is, members of democratically built organizations especially value internal but also to some extent external democracy more than members of nondemocratically built organizations. However, even if formal democratic structure and democracy as an absolute and generalized value seems to be under pressure, it does not follow that a new type of elitism is emerging.     

Modeling marginal features in studies of recurrent events in the presence of a terminal event

We study models for recurrent events with special emphasis on the situation where a terminal event acts as a competing risk for the recurrent events process and where there may be gaps between periods during which subjects are at risk for the recurrent event. We focus on marginal analysis of the expected number of events and show that an Aalen–Johansen type estimator proposed by Cook and Lawless is applicable in this situation. A motivating example deals with psychiatric hospital admissions where we supplement with analyses of the marginal distribution of time to the competing event and the marginal distribution of the time spent in hospital. Pseudo-observations are used for the latter purpose.

     

Housing Type and Neighbourhood Safety Behaviour Predicts Self-rated Health,Psychological Well-being and Frequency of Recent Unhealthy Days: A Comparative Cross-sectional Study of the General Population in Sweden

This study aimed at analysing associations among housing type, neighbourhood safety behaviour, self-rated health (SRH), psychological well-being and unhealthy days in the general population. From 2004 to 2013, 90,845 Swedes completed a questionnaire about their health, number of days with poor health, psychological well-being, housing type, and whether they refrained from going out based on perception of neighbourhood safety. People not living in private housing and those who did not go out for safety reasons reported lower SRH and psychological well-being and higher frequency of recent unhealthy days and days without work capacity due to poor health.