| 1. |
- Thorén, Katarina H., 1970-
(författare)
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Activation Policy in Action : A Street-Level Study of Social Assistance in the Swedish Welfare State
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Work-related activation policies are currently developing in most western welfare states. Sweden is no exception and activation policies were introduced in the 1990s in many municipal social services organizations in Sweden. The Swedish form of activation policies requires social assistance recipients to participate in mandatory activation program in return for financial support. This dissertation investigates the street-level implementation practices of activation policies within the context of the Swedish welfare state. The purpose of the study is to examine how street-level workers in the municipal social service systemtranslate activation policy into practice in their interactions with the clients and what factors that structure their implementation practices. The research project is a multiple-case study that examines the street-level practices in two municipal social service settings in Sweden, Skärholmen city-district in Stockholm municipality and Osby municipality and their local activation programs. The data collection consists of observations of the staffs’ daily operations, interviews with local politicians and other key personnel, and the analysis of formal policy and program documents. Theoretically this dissertation builds on the street-level bureaucracy perspective (Lipsky, 1980), which suggests that organizational working conditions shape street-level workers implementation practices through their development of informal coping strategies. But this study extends the street-level buraucracy approach by including political-institutional factors and normative assumptions about public support and social assistance recipients into the analysis. Findings from the study suggest that street-level implementation practices entail a number of informal coping strategies that removes activation policy from formal policy goals. Implementation practices entail, for example, mass referrals instead of individual assessments and tailor-made solutions. Clients were sorted and categorized on the basis of moral perceptions about behavioral deficits instead of employment needs. These informal practice strategies were the results of both coping strategies and normative assumptions that interacted with the organizational context in which these practices took place.
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| 2. |
- Johansson, Nina, et al.
(författare)
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Ameliorating Child poverty through Connecting Economic Services with child health Services (ACCESS) : study protocol for a randomised controlled trial of the healthier wealthier families model in Sweden
- 2022
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Ingår i: BMC Public Health. - : BioMed Central (BMC). - 1471-2458. ; 22:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- BackgroundSweden is often held up as an example of a country with low child deprivation; yet, rates of relative deprivation are rising. Every municipality in Sweden is required to provide free, timely and accessible budget and debt counselling under the Social Services Act. The services have been encouraged to perform preventative practice with families; however, this has not been realised. The Healthier Wealthier Families (HWF) model embeds universal screening for economic hardship into child health services and creates a referral pathway to economic support services. Given the universal child health system in Sweden, which is freely available and has excellent coverage of the child population, implementation of the HWF model has potential to support families to access the freely available municipal budget and debt counselling and ultimately improve rates of child deprivation in Sweden.Methods/designWe will conduct a two-arm randomised waitlist-control superiority trial to examine the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the HWF model in the Sweden. A longitudinal follow-up with the cohort will explore whether any effects are maintained in the longer-term.DiscussionHWF is a collaborative and sustainable model that could maximise the effectiveness of current services to address child deprivation in Sweden. The study outlined in this protocol is the first effectiveness evaluation of the HWF model in Sweden and is a crucial step before HWF can be recommended for national implementation within the child health services.
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| 3. |
- Scarpa, Simone, 1976-
(författare)
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The spatial manifestation of inequality : residential segregation in Sweden and its causes
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis examines the relationship between income inequality and residential segregation in Swedish cities. In recent years, in Sweden, much attention has been given to the direction of causality from residential segregation to income inequality. Residential segregation is considered to lead to a differentiation of opportunities between neighbourhoods and, therefore, to be a contributing factor to or even a major cause of income inequality in cities. The thesis focuses on the opposite direction of causality, from income inequality to residential segregation. In fact, residential segregation can also be seen as the spatial manifestation of existing disparities in income distribution, since residential location choices are always (although not exclusively) made within a predetermined framework of economic constraints.Specifically, two research questions are addressed in this thesis. What institutional factors, in the Swedish context, favour the transformation of the social divide between specific population subgroups into a spatial divide between those groups? To what extent and in what ways does income inequality contribute to the development of residential segregation in Swedish cities?The first part of the thesis explains why Swedish cities are characterized by higher levels of residential segregation than cities of other countries characterized by higher levels of income inequality. The historical and comparative analyses developed in the first two studies indicate that it is not so much the magnitude of immigration that accounts for this difference between Swedish cities and their more unequal counterparts in other countries but, rather, the institutional factors influencing the modes of incorporation of immigrants into cities.The second part of the thesis analyses how, in recent decades, the increase in income inequality has influenced residential segregation patterns in Malmö and in the three major Swedish metropolitan areas. The third and the fourth study show that, during the studied period, the widening of income disparities between neighbourhoods mirrored the general upward trend in income inequality in the population. The growth of the immigrant population contributed only slightly to this trend and income inequality was primarily driven by changes in the distribution of market incomes. During the late study period, however, income sorting processes have played a steadily more important role in contributing to economic residential segregation. Therefore, neighbourhood-based urban policies have not succeeded to reverse, or even just impede, the trend towards an increased spatial clustering of poverty and wealth in Swedish cities.
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| 4. |
- Westberg, Annika, 1972-
(författare)
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Becoming an Adult : Living Conditions and Attitudes among Swedish Youth
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis studies youth from different perspectives. These are the life phaseand the generational perspectives, which have been studied via questions of establishment and individualisation. The main question is whether young people are different because they have not made socially important transitions into adulthood or if they are different because they have grown up under different circumstances than earlier generations. The consequences of the outcome are important because they can indicate what kind of society young people will reproduce. The following conclusions are drawn: First, there are clear effects of social structurations (class of origin and gender) in the lives of young people. They affect the distribution of attitudes towards welfare state expenditures as well as the economic effects in a long-term perspective. Second, there is rather weak importance of role transitions in relation to what young people believe is important for adulthood, role transitions’ importance for the distribution of attitudes towards the welfare state as well as role transitions’ importance in a long-term perspective. Third, increasing age and subtle socialisation processes may be an explanation to the rather weak meaning of role transitions, cause adjustments to surrounding contexts and people’s expectations. It is concluded that the life phase perspective is a more accurate way of viewing young people, mainly because of the impact of social structurations, which are believed to contribute to continuous reproduction rather than complete change of society.
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