Sektion Wissenssoziologie

Ohne Zusammenfassung unter Mithilfe von Jule Lorenzen, Sabine Petschke, Lisa-Marian Schmidt und René Tuma     

Intra‐ and Inter‐generational Perspectives on Youth Participation in Sweden: A Study with Young People as Research Partners

In this study, intra‐ and inter‐generational perspectives on youth participation are combined and compared. Young people were invited to participate as research partners in an interactive research circle and conducted a survey about participation with other young people as respondents. The discussion concerns how an interactive methodology contributes to the understanding of the concept of participation. It is suggested that political definitions of participation be amended to include having a sense of being recognised in a communicative context, taking responsibility and share with other people one's experiences. This is based on the perspectives of young people.     

The study of mental distress and the (re)construction of identities in men and women with experience of long-term mental distress

This article explores the possibility of using a theoretical framework drawn from disability studies in the field of mental health, and the study of identity (re)construction in the recovery process. In this PhD project, 33 narratives were analysed using framework analysis. The analysis showed that disablism was present and powerful in the participants’ lives, and also showed how disablism shaped how the participants thought and felt about themselves. As Carol Thomas argues, when analysing disablism one should also focus on who we are and are prevented from being, as disabled people. The conclusion is that processes of oppression were central when it comes to understanding the (re)construction of identities. A disability studies perspective is thus relevant in the field of mental distress, and can be used to enhance the understanding of the process of identity (re)construction.     

Climate events and the role of adaptive capacity for (im-)mobility

Population and Environment - The study examines the relationship between sudden- and gradual-onset climate events and migration, hypothesizing that this relationship is mediated by the adaptive...     

Der dreifache Bezug zur Arbeit – Transformation öffentlicher Dienste und berufliche Identität

During the last 2 decades the public administration and the public services have undergone far-reaching transformations that resulted in substantial changes in work and employment. This contribution discusses the question as to how workers perceive these upheavals and what consequences these have for their occupational identity. Based on empirical research on an Austrian town the authors show how local government employees, doctors and nurses at the community hospital and the post office’s deliverers and counter clerks interpret the transformations in particular from the perspective of their occupational self-conception. The article makes clear that using the concept of a threefold relationship to work makes it easier to understand workers’ perceptions, interpretations and reactions. Such a threefold relationship to work includes a labour power perspective, a subject perspective and the public sector ethos.     

The Direct and Indirect Impact of Religion on Well-Being in Germany

A European Social Survey (ESS)—based study of Clark and Lelkes on the European level showed a double positive connection between religion and life-satisfaction: not only did a personal involvement have a positive impact, but there was also a regional externality. Even atheists seemed to be happier in areas with many religious people. However, the regional structure of the ESS can be seen as methodologically doubtful. We therefore replicated the study with more rich German data. In our study we confirm the positive individual effect of religion, but we did find a negative regional externality. However, further analysis revealed, this was an effect of an omitted variable: the degree of urbanization. In a more detailed approach we show that this effect is confined to areas with a protestant majority. We conclude that the positive degree of urbanization influence on life-satisfaction is presumably due to the chance for more political participation in the (protestant) city states in Germany.     

Differences in Child Health Across Rural,Urban, and Slum Areas: Evidence From India

The developing world is rapidly urbanizing, but an understanding of how child health differs across urban and rural areas is lacking. We examine the association between area of residence and child health in India, focusing on composition and selection effects. Simple height-for-age averages show that rural Indian children have the poorest health and urban children have the best, with slum children in between. With wealth or observed health environment held constant, the urban height-for-age advantage disappears, and slum children fare significantly worse than their rural counterparts. Hence, differences in composition across areas mask a substantial negative association between living in slums and height-for-age. This association is more negative for girls than boys. Furthermore, a large number of girls are “missing” in slums; we argue that this implies that the negative association between living in slums and health is even stronger than our estimate. The missing girls also help explain why slum girls appear to have a substantially lower mortality than rural girls, whereas slum boys have a higher mortality risk than rural boys. We estimate that slum conditions (such as overcrowding and open sewers), which the survey does not adequately capture, are associated with 20 % to 37 % of slum children’s stunting risk.     

Unhealthy Weight in Indian Families: The Role of the Family Environment in the Context of the Nutrition Transition

India faces a dual burden of increasing obesity and persistent underweight as it experiences the nutrition transition—the dietary and lifestyle changes that accompany globalization, economic development, and technological change. Yet, the nutrition transition is not solely a top-down process; rather, global forces converge with local practices at multiple levels of the social ecology. The family environment, a key site for the transmission of local customs and norms, remains largely unexplored in India. We examined the extent to which opposite-gender siblings and mother–child pairs were concordant or discordant in body weight, and whether domains of the family environment, specifically, food practices, food-related gender norms, and household resources, were associated with patterns of unhealthy weight within and between families. Multilevel dyadic analysis and logistic regression were conducted using survey data from a representative sample of 400 families in a Southern Indian city. We identified substantial clustering of weight among opposite-gender sibling pairs (ICC = 0.43) and mother–child pairs, as well as important patterns of discordance, including 11% of families experiencing a dual burden of underweight and overweight. Household resources, including mother’s education and income, were salient in explaining the distribution of body weight within and between families. Importantly, less examined domains of the family environment were also relevant, including food practices (e.g., grocery shopping frequency), and food-related gender norms (e.g., mother’s control of food served at home). Continued exploration of how global and local practices converge in households will be necessary to develop programming that effectively addresses India’s dual burden of unhealthy weight.