Children’s Strategies for Agency in Preschool

This article is based on an ethnographic study of children’s everyday life in Swedish preschools. The ethnography is used to explore children’s strategies for influencing, defending and constructing the social order of a preschool institution. The focus of our concern is on how the children, in their interactions with each other and with the preschool teachers, manage the collective regulation and how they negotiate their participation in collective activities. There is an inherent tension between free play and the high degree of routinised and collective activities within the preschool institution. The study shows that children are active in playing at the border, acting as if the institution is the children’s place. It also shows how they draw on different strategies as resources for managing the regulations, accounting for personal autonomy and negotiating the social order. In taking a child perspective and acknowledging children as active agents, it is possible to see how they influence and shape their everyday life in a preschool context. In addition, the article illustrates individual children’s strategic and pragmatic use of resources and in doing so contribute to their own childhood and thereby become part of a social and cultural construction process.     

Parental involvement in the development of a culture‐based school curriculum

This study focuses on parental involvement in Sámi schools when developing a culturally sensitive school curriculum. The research recognizes a number of competing and complementary interests that play a role when constructing structures and policies in curriculum development. Two Sámi schools in Sweden with 115 pupils, their parents and 27 teachers were included in a longitudinal three‐year study. Interviews, school visits, videotapes and document analysis were used to gather information. The results indicate the invisible existence of culture‐based school practice and curriculum texts. The lack of contact among homes, schools and community culture was obvious. Parents and teachers expressed an interest in developing a culture‐based local curriculum through a process of reflecting on and creating an education incorporating the past, the present and the future. The study showed that parents, pupils and teachers experienced increased awareness in culture‐based schoolwork. The study pointed to a desire for cooperation between home and school in the development of a culture‐based school curriculum and a school practice supported by a culturally responsible teacher.     

Generalized Estimation of the BLUP in Mixed-Effects Models: A Comparison with ML and REML

The Best Linear Unbiased Predictor (BLUP) in mixed models is a function of the variance components and they are estimated using maximum likelihood (ML) or restricted ML methods. Nonconvergence of BLUP would occur due to a drawback of the standard likelihood-based approaches. In such situations, ML and REML either do not provide any BLUPs or all become equal. To overcome this drawback, we provide a generalized estimate (GE) of BLUP that does not suffer from the problem of negative or zero variance components, and compare its performance against the ML and REML estimates of BLUP. Simulated and published data are used to compare BLUP.     

Is Transport Safety More Valuable in the Air?

Using a contingent valuation survey, people's willingness to pay for a given risk reduction is found to be much larger, consistently more than two times as large, when traveling by air compared to by taxi. Follow-up questions revealed that an important reason for this discrepancy is that many experience a higher mental suffering from flying, and that they are willing to pay to reduce this suffering. It was also consistently found that people are willing to pay more for a certain risk reduction if the original price was higher. Policy implications are discussed.     

School's out! Why earlier among children of lone parents?

The aims of this population-based study were to analyse educational attainment at ages 24–25 among children of lone parents in comparison with children living with two biological parents, to increase understanding of the factors that seem to be of major importance in increased risks of lower educational achievement and to examine how the life circumstances of non-custodial parents influence possible differences. We found that children who grew up with only one parent showed lower educational attainment than did children in two-parent families. Poorer educational performance on the part of the offspring of lone parents can be explained to a large extent by socio-economic disadvantage, especially a lack of economic resources. However, achievement varies according to cause of lone parenting, and findings strongly indicate that adjusting solely for custodial parents' circumstances may lead to under-estimation of the relationship. Lone parenting seems to have a more detrimental effect on girls' education, and also within groups of children with highly educated parents than among those with a relatively low level of education.     

Experimental Evidence of Discrimination in the Hiring of First‐ and Second‐generation Immigrants

Previous field experiments that study ethnic discrimination in the labour market are extended in this paper, which outlines a study comparing discrimination of first‐ and second‐generation immigrants. Qualitatively identical resumes, belonging to first‐ and second‐generation immigrants from the Middle East, were sent to employers in Sweden that had advertised for labour. The findings suggest, somewhat unexpectedly, that first‐ and second‐generation immigrants have essentially the same probability of being invited to a job interview, which in turn is significantly lower than the probability of invitation to interview for natives.     

Do 12‐Month‐Old Infants Trust a Competent Adult?

Why infants prefer to look at and use information provided by some informants over others was examined in four experiments. In each experiment, 52 12‐month‐old infants participated. In Experiment 1, a familiar expert and a familiar nonexpert and in Experiment 2, a novel expert and a novel nonexpert presented an ambiguous object and provided positive information. In both experiments, the infants preferred to look at the expert and regulated their behavior more in accordance with positive information provided by the expert, regardless of she was novel or more familiar. In Experiment 3, a familiar expert and a familiar nonexpert and in Experiment 4, a novel expert and a novel nonexpert presented an ambiguous object and provided negative information. In both experiments, the infants looked more at the expert and regulated their behavior more in accordance with negative information provided by the expert, regardless of she was novel or more familiar. The results support an expertise perspective of infant behavior in social‐referencing situations.     

Equine-assisted social work counteracts self-stigmatisation in self-harming adolescents and facilitates a moment of silence

The purpose of this study was to determine whether equine-assisted social work (EASW) could affect self-stigmatisation and thereby counteract false identities in self-harming adolescents. Data were collected via interviews with nine female self-harming clients aged 15–21 years and eight staff members. Interviews and video-recorded human–horse interactions with three staff members and four clients were analysed. The interviews were followed by further dialogue with participants while they viewed videos of their own EASW sessions. The analysis indicated that the horse had a calming effect on the clients; enabled them to free themselves of their preoccupations; provided real-time, non-verbal and non-judgmental feedback on their emotions; and increased feelings of trust, patience and empathy. The presence of a horse provided a ‘moment of silence’ for the clients, silencing their inner critic, and made them feel more authentic and better able to regulate their emotions. However, staff could counteract this ‘safe’ healing by being too focused on goals, making interpretations and lecturing and encouraging clients, thus making clients feel judged anyhow. EASW seemed to give clients the opportunity to break free from self-stigmatisation, which seemed to lower the barrier to change.