Gender,Culture and Intervention: Exploring Differences between Aboriginal and Non‐Aboriginal Children’s Responses to an Early Intervention Programme

Evaluation of a group parenting programme in the Northern Territory of Australia showed significant differences in benefits for Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal boys and girls. The analysis considers whether boys and girls from different cultural backgrounds present with different problems; whether parental expectations for boys and girls differ and whether the intervention activates different responses in different settings. Conclusions suggest that there is a need to closely examine the ‘cultural logic’ of interventions, the appropriateness of their assumptions about child development and hypothesised mechanisms of change in different settings.     

Education and Poststroke Separation Among Couples With Mutual Children

The objective of this study based on Swedish registers is to examine the influence of socioeconomic position on poststroke divorce and separation using education as a marker. People aged 18 to 64 who suffered a first stroke between 1992 and 2005 were included if they were married or cohabiting and had mutual children. The material included 42,026 first stroke cases and 424,281 nonexposed persons, both populations divided into three different educational groups. Results show that the risk of separation is much higher in the incident year and in the first poststroke year, above all among people with only compulsory (elementary) education.     

Fertility tourism: circumventive routes that enable access to reproductive technologies and substances

“Fertility tourism” is a journalistic eye‐catcher focusing on the phenomenon of patients who search for a reproductive treatment in another country in order to circumvent laws, access restrictions, or waiting lists in their home country. In Europe, the reasons why people seek reproductive treatments outside their national boundaries are quite diverse, in part because regulations differ so much among countries. Beginning with four examples of people who crossed borders for an in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment with gamete donation, this article provides some insight into these transnational circumvention practices based on material from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in Spain, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. In all three countries, gamete donation is made strictly anonymous. Clinical practices such as egg donor recruitment and phenotypical matching between donors and recipients serve to naturalize the substitution of gametes and to install social legitimacy through resemblance markers with the prospective child. In comparison to other areas of medical tourism, which are subjects of debate as a consequence of neoliberal health politics and international medical competition, mobility in the area of reproductive technologies is deeply intertwined with new forms of doing kinship. For prospective parents, it holds a promise of generating offspring who could pass as biogenetically conceived children. Therefore, IVF with gamete donation is mostly modeled after conceptions of nature. Through anonymity and concealment it creates forms of nonrelatedness that leave space for future imaginings and traces of transnational genetic creators.     

Intra‐household Allocation of Time to Household Production Activities: Evidence from Swedish Household Data

Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to study the intra‐household allocation of time to different household production activities using Swedish cross‐sectional household data. The Tobit model is rejected in favor of the Cragg model, suggesting that an empirical model has to take into consideration that allocation of time within the household is determined by two separate processes. Moreover, the results indicate that valuable information concerning the intra‐household allocation of time may be missing when household production is defined as the sum of different household activities, but there is no indication that statistically significant effects are wiped out in an aggregated analysis.     

Reconstruction of post‐war social work: Experience from former Yugoslavia as an inspiration

Immediately after the civil war among the nations of former Yugoslavia that took place 1992–1995, Swedish members of the social work faculty were recruited by UNICEF to support the organising of foster homes for war‐orphaned children. Around 20 projects, some initiated by UNICEF and others by SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) were also organised with Sarajevo University as the main location of the administration. At the request of the Parliament of Republika Srpska, a new school of social work was established at the University of Banja Luka. This was a successful project thanks to network collaboration among the faculties of social work in the former Yugoslavian nations and with academic contributions from universities from Sweden and Berlin. In this article, the two social welfare projects based in Sarajevo and Banja Luka are presented. Together with an accompanying group of experts, I found that an explorative mindset and an abductive approach were helpful tools in dialogues with our partners in the developing world.