Being a Citizen

There has been a striving in Sweden, ideologically and legally, since the 1960s to develop and extend citizenship to persons with learning disabilities. This article had the purpose to capture and describe how persons with learning disabilities conceive citizenship and opportunities to participate in the societal arena. Twenty-three persons with learning disabilities were interviewed two times. Qualitative analysis focused on three themes: areas of interest, voting and significant persons. The analysis displayed that the informants' conceptions about citizenship differed in relation to environmental contexts. Significant persons are discussed as having considerable importance when exercising citizenship.     

Designing for social inclusion of immigrant women: the case of TeaTime

We present our design of a digital service supporting social inclusion among immigrant women in an ethnically and socially diverse neighbourhood of a small Finnish town. The aim is to explore experiences and perceptions as well as potential barriers and challenges for using the web-based service. The case study is framed as design research having a strong user-centred design approach. We describe the design process and present the results of a mixed-method evaluation. The results are scrutinized from the perspectives of experience design. The analysis reveals a potential to facilitate social inclusion through the fulfilment of needs related to relatedness, autonomy, competence, pleasure and stimulations as well as popularity. However, some challenges in the interface design and communication of the security and purpose of the site were identified in the study. Significant differences were also found between immigrant women and local people regarding the need for this digital service.     

Children's Perspectives on Happiness and Subjective Well‐being in Preschool

Photo‐elicited interviews indicate that children hardly ever mention educators when asked about elements in preschool that make them feel happy. Happiness is found to occur in activities in the ‘underlife’ of the ECEC institution. Children challenge adult rules and norms in order to create status in the peer‐group, while at the same time, they seek to construct social identity and maintain a positive relationship with their educators. A child that manages to balance both adult expectations and what is needed to participate in the underlife among peers, experiences happiness and thus, is in a good state of well‐being.     

The performativity of surveys: Teenagers’ meaning-making of the 'Health Behavior in School-aged Children Survey' in Sweden

The Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children survey contains scales intended to measure life satisfaction, mental health problems and socioeconomic status. This article takes inspiration from science and technology studies and analyse the survey as performative. It also examines subjective meaning-making through an analysis of interviews with 15-year-old teenagers. It shows how the survey enacts the subject position of an accountable teenager and how teenagers experience the survey as sending a message about how one should live. While some teenagers experience this as positive, others narrate feelings of shame. This could be interpreted as a way for them to be accountable for themselves.     

Modeling individual migraine severity with autoregressive ordered probit models

This paper considers the problem of modeling migraine severity assessments and their dependence on weather and time characteristics. We take on the viewpoint of a patient who is interested in an individual migraine management strategy. Since factors influencing migraine can differ between patients in number and magnitude, we show how a patient’s headache calendar reporting the severity measurements on an ordinal scale can be used to determine the dominating factors for this special patient. One also has to account for dependencies among the measurements. For this the autoregressive ordinal probit (AOP) model of Müller and Czado (J Comput Graph Stat 14: 320–338, 2005) is utilized and fitted to a single patient’s migraine data by a grouped move multigrid Monte Carlo (GM-MGMC) Gibbs sampler. Initially, covariates are selected using proportional odds models. Model fit and model comparison are discussed. A comparison with proportional odds specifications shows that the AOP models are preferred.     

Negotiating deficiency: Exploring ethnic minority parents' narratives about encountering child welfare services in Norway

Evaluating the participatory opportunities for service users within social welfare institutions is a pressing issue. In this article, we explore a group of ethnic minority parents' experiences with child welfare services (CWS) in Norway. A strong narrative theme was deficiency positioning—how lacking a Norwegian normative set of knowledge and skills challenged the parents' opportunities to participate. We analysed how deficiency positioning was perceived, negotiated, and contested in the parents' accounts, and 4 themes emerged: (a) learning to parent, (b) contesting expert knowledge, (c) learning to be a client, and (d) constructing CWS deficiency. Nancy Fraser's concept of “participatory parity” was applied to explore how current institutional structures may enable and limit parents' participation. The analysis provides insight into agencies and informants' sense‐making processes as well as the diverse resources and strategies that parents draw upon in the CWS encounter. Furthermore, we argue that an interplay between a strong focus on “parenting skills” and bureaucratic and economic structures positions ethnic minority parents as deficient, thus providing powerful mechanisms for marginalization. Implications for case work and institutional levels are discussed.     

Beyond appearances – Do dynamic capabilities of innovative firms actually differ?

Dynamic capabilities are the higher-order capabilities needed for changing operational-level capabilities and learning in new domains, and thus they are critical for innovation activities. The aim of this study is to explore heterogeneity of dynamic capabilities in a comparative setting. We chose four innovative case firms representing a single industry, namely magazine publishing. The similarity of the cases provided a solid foundation for comparing their dynamic capabilities. Based on the results it seems that the practices comprising sensing capabilities are likely to be similar across firms within a single industry, while practices comprising seizing and reconfiguring types of capabilities may differ more between companies. Thus dynamic capabilities have both idiosyncratic and common features across an industry. These findings are relevant to practicing managers in that they illustrate that competing companies within the same industry tend to develop similar types of practices to match the changing requirement of the operating environment. Hence, managers should not be falsely comforted by the current situation within their firms, but proactively develop their unique capabilities to gain advantage over their competitors.     

Intergenerationale Fertilitätstransmission in Ost- und Westdeutschland

This study addresses intergenerational fertility transmission: How similar is the fertility behavior of parents and their children? I first discuss the implications of intergenerational fertility transmission for population development and review prominent theoretical mechanisms of fertility transmission. Using data from the German National Education Panel (NEPS), fertility transmission in East and West Germany is compared with fertility correlations and quantile regression models for count data. For the analysis cohorts (1944–66) we find relatively strong fertility transmission in West Germany but no effect in East Germany. In West Germany the impact of parents’ fertility is particularly strong in small and in large families. In line with previous research, the results support that intergenerational fertility transmission is stronger in liberal democratic societies compared with regulative restrictive regimes, such as the communist East. The article concludes that the intergenerational continuity in fertility that is usually found in developed societies was disrupted by the regulative communist regime in East Germany. Fertility in one generation therefore is generated at the intersection of family internal dynamics and macro-structural contexts.     

“The troublesome other and I”: Parallel stories of separated parents in prolonged conflicts

This qualitative study aims to explore how noncohabiting parenting couples in prolonged conflict construct the other parent and themselves. Ten parents from five parent couples were interviewed. A dyadic analytical design was used, where parent's stories of conflict were analyzed in parallel with their co‐parent. Drawing on positioning theory, self‐identity as parents emerged as implicit counter positions in storylines, which construct the co‐parent as “the troublesome other.” Two typologies of conflicted storylines were prominent in the findings: storylines of violations of trust, positioning the co‐parents in relation to traumatic events in the past and, storylines of who is bad, positioning the co‐parent as either a disloyal co‐parent or a dysfunctional parent. The findings indicate that prolonged conflicts made it impossible to find available positions for cooperation. We argue that family therapists should aid each household toward promoting child and family resilience rather than continued efforts to solve chronic conflicts.