Beyond Contact? Policy approaches to work with families of looked after children in four European countries

In England, placement within the looked after system is not viewed as a desirable long‐term solution for most children, and policy has prioritised continued contact with parents, and swift return home, wherever possible. This review examines policy approaches to work with families of looked after children in England and in three other European countries: Denmark, France and the Netherlands, aiming to identify areas for shared learning in relation to this challenging area of policy and practice. The research highlights relationships between care populations and policy understandings of the purpose of work with families, including understandings of children's and/or parents’ rights.     

Perception and Communication of Flood Risks: A Systematic Review of Empirical Research

Flood hazards are the most common and destructive of all natural disasters. For decades, experts have been examining how flood losses can be mitigated. Just as in other risk domains, the study of risk perception and risk communication has gained increasing interest in flood risk management. Because of this research growth, a review of the state of the art in this domain is believed necessary. The review comprises 57 empirically based peer‐reviewed articles on flood risk perception and communication from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The characteristics of these articles are listed in a comprehensive table, presenting research design, research variables, and key findings. From this review, it follows that the majority of studies are of exploratory nature and have not applied any of the theoretical frameworks that are available in social science research. Consequently, a methodological standardization in measuring and analyzing people's flood risk perceptions and their adaptive behaviors is hardly present. This heterogeneity leads to difficulties in comparing results among studies. It is also shown that theoretical and empirical studies on flood risk communication are nearly nonexistent. The article concludes with a summary on methodological issues in the fields of flood‐risk perception and flood‐risk communication and proposes an agenda for future research.     

Improving Flood Risk Communication by Focusing on Prevention‐Focused Motivation

This article proposes an approach to flood risk communication that gives particular emphasis to the distinction between prevention and promotion motivation. According to E. Tory Higgins, the promotion system and the prevention system are assumed to coexist in every person, but one or the other may be temporarily or chronically more accessible. These insights have far‐reaching implications for our understanding of people's reasoning about risks. Flood risk communication framed in terms of prevention involves the notions of chance and harm, woven into a story about particular events that necessitate decisions to be more careful about safety issues and protect one's family and oneself from danger. The article describes how the insights worked out in practice, using a flood risk communication experiment among a sample from the general population in a highly populated river delta of the Netherlands. It had a posttest‐only control group design (n = 2,302). The results showed that risk communication had a large effect on the participants’ responses and that this effect was higher among chronic prevention‐focused people than among others. Any information that increased the fit between a prevention‐framed message and a person's chronic prevention motivation produced stronger situationally induced, prevention‐focused responses. This may significantly improve communication about risks. In contrast, the notion of water city projects, featuring waterside living, had more appeal to promotion‐focused people.     

Emotions,Trust, and Perceived Risk: Affective and Cognitive Routes to Flood Preparedness Behavior

Despite the prognoses of the effects of global warming (e.g., rising sea levels, increasing river discharges), few international studies have addressed how flood preparedness should be stimulated among private citizens. This article aims to predict Dutch citizens’ flood preparedness intentions by testing a path model, including previous flood hazard experiences, trust in public flood protection, and flood risk perceptions (both affective and cognitive components). Data were collected through questionnaire surveys in two coastal communities (n= 169, n= 244) and in one river area community (n= 658). Causal relations were tested by means of structural equation modeling (SEM). Overall, the results indicate that both cognitive and affective mechanisms influence citizens’ preparedness intentions. First, a higher level of trust reduces citizens’ perceptions of flood likelihood, which in turn hampers their flood preparedness intentions (cognitive route). Second, trust also lessens the amount of dread evoked by flood risk, which in turn impedes flood preparedness intentions (affective route). Moreover, the affective route showed that levels of dread were especially influenced by citizens’ negative and positive emotions related to their previous flood hazard experiences. Negative emotions most often reflected fear and powerlessness, while positive emotions most frequently reflected feelings of solidarity. The results are consistent with the affect heuristic and the historical context of Dutch flood risk management. The great challenge for flood risk management is the accommodation of both cognitive and affective mechanisms in risk communications, especially when most people lack an emotional basis stemming from previous flood hazard events.     

Associations between overtime and psychological health in high and low reward jobs

This study focused on the relationship between overtime and psychological health in high and low reward jobs, and in jobs with high and low external pressure to work overtime. Data were collected for 535 full-time employees of the Dutch Postal Service. In general, overtime was associated with negative work-home interference and negative home-work interference. Split-sample logistic regression analyses showed that employees reporting low rewards had elevated risks of burnout, negative work-home interference and slow recovery. In addition, the combination of overtime and low rewards was associated with negative home-work interference. A second analysis was conducted separately for employees who reported overtime in order to study the effects of external pressure to work overtime. In this subgroup, low rewards were associated with elevated risks of health complaints, emotional exhaustion and negative home-work interference. Moreover, employees who reported overtime and a high pressure to work overtime in combination with low rewards had elevated risks of poor recovery, cynicism, and negative work-home interference. The results suggest that even a limited number of hours of involuntary overtime is associated with adverse mental health, but only in low reward situations.     

Associations between overtime and psychological health in high and low reward jobs

This study focused on the relationship between overtime and psychological health in high and low reward jobs, and in jobs with high and low external pressure to work overtime. Data were collected for 535 full-time employees of the Dutch Postal Service. In general, overtime was associated with negative work-home interference and negative home-work interference. Split-sample logistic regression analyses showed that employees reporting low rewards had elevated risks of burnout, negative work-home interference and slow recovery. In addition, the combination of overtime and low rewards was associated with negative home-work interference. A second analysis was conducted separately for employees who reported overtime in order to study the effects of external pressure to work overtime. In this subgroup, low rewards were associated with elevated risks of health complaints, emotional exhaustion and negative home-work interference. Moreover, employees who reported overtime and a high pressure to work overtime in combination with low rewards had elevated risks of poor recovery, cynicism, and negative work-home interference. The results suggest that even a limited number of hours of involuntary overtime is associated with adverse mental health, but only in low reward situations.     

Curing The Dutch Disease? Sickness Absence and Work Disability in The Netherlands

The purpose of the current paper is to provide an overview and evaluation, covering the past decade, of developments and experiences in the Netherlands with respect to the prevention and reduction of sickness absence and work disability. The government has made various attempts to restrict expenditure in this area by increasing the (financial) responsibility of employers. It is concluded that the legislative changes do not seem to have long-lasting effects on sickness absence and work disability rates and have not worked out in practice as well as was foreseen. Employers — particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)— often buy minimum service packages from occupational health services (OHSs), show risk-avoiding behaviour, and primarily undertake procedural and person-oriented measures. Some lessons may be learned from the Netherlands' approach, concerning (1) the principle of self-regulation; (2) the position of SMEs; (3) the privatizing of OHSs; (4) examples of good practice.     

Older Parents Providing Child Care for Adult Children: Does It Pay Off?

This study examined whether past grandparental child care is related to present support from adult children. On the basis of social exchange theory, the authors expected that grandparental child care creates a debt that is repaid in the form of receiving support later in life. Using data from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (N = 349 parents, N = 812 adult children), the authors found that grandparents who frequently provided child care for sons in the past more often received instrumental and emotional support from these sons approximately 13 years later than grandparents who less frequently provided child care. Investments in daughters did not pay off. Instrumental support other than child‐care provision did not predict receiving support from either sons or daughters, but emotional support did. These results support the notion of long‐term reciprocity in parent–child relationships, but its importance depends on the child's gender and the type of earlier investment.     

Work-home interference: How does it manifest itself from day to day?

Although work-home interference (WHI) refers to a process of negative interaction between the work and home domains, little attention has been paid to the actual processes involved in the within-person, day-to-day management of work and home. Therefore, this study investigated if, and how, a global report for the individual, of WHI (i.e., a general indicator of experienced WHI) is reflected in daily reports of WHI, in employees' daily activity patterns in the work and home domain, and in their daily health and well-being. Effort-Recovery theory (Meijman & Mulder, 1998) provided the theoretical basis for this study. Data were collected among 120 academic staff members (62% male) who completed a general questionnaire, addressing global WHI as well as demographical information, and who also participated in a 5-day daily diary study. WHI was measured using the 8-item WHI subscale of the Survey Work-home Interaction Nijmegen (SWING), with an adapted version being used for the diary studies. Results showed that global WHI: (1) was positively related to daily WHI; (2) was positively related to the time spent daily on overtime work in the evening; (3) was negatively related to the time spent daily on low-effort activities; and (4) was positively related to daily fatigue and sleep complaints. We conclude that Effort-Recovery theory seems promising for the study of WHI, and that diary studies are valuable, as these provide detailed insight into what global reports of WHI actually signify from day to day.     

Sleep disturbances in shift-workers: A marker for maladaptation syndrome

Abstract

This study aims to examine whether the relationship between overtime and well-being is influenced by the voluntary vs. involuntary (i.e., compulsory) nature of overtime work and by the presence or absence of rewards for overtime. We also explored the prevalence of these types of overtime and how they were related to work and personal characteristics. A survey was conducted among a representative sample of Dutch full-time employees (N=1612). AN(C)OVA was used to compare rewarded and unrewarded, voluntary and involuntary overtime workers on personal and work characteristics, fatigue, and work satisfaction. Most overtime workers were rewarded (62%). About half of the sample (n=814) could be classified as either voluntary or involuntary overtime workers, or as having “mixed reasons” to work overtime. Voluntary and unrewarded overtime workers had a relatively high income and favourable job characteristics. Involuntary overtime work was associated with relatively high fatigue and low satisfaction, especially for involuntary overtime workers without rewards who can be considered a burnout risk group. Voluntary overtime workers were non-fatigued and satisfied, even without rewards. It can be concluded that control over overtime and rewards for overtime are important for well-being. Moderate overtime work may not be a problem if it is done voluntarily. Moreover, the negative effects of compulsory overtime work may be partly offset by fair compensation for the extra work.