1.
Wickford, Jenny, 1979
(author)
Physiotherapists in Afghanistan. Exploring, encouraging and experiencing professional development in the Afghan development context
2010
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
Aim: The aim of the thesis is to analyze the matter of supporting professional development of physiotherapists in Afghanistan, and the issues involved in expatriate physiotherapists working with professional development cross-culturally and in development contexts. The thesis is based on two field studies, aspects of which are reported on in four papers. The first field study aimed at analyzing and describing the physiotherapy component of a disability programme. The aim of the second field study was to explore the process of a development project, in order to gain understanding of how such work can be done in a better way. Participant observation was used for the data production of both studies. The adult learning theories of transformative learning and situated learning were used as a theoretical framework in the thesis. Paper I describes the situation, needs and challenges for developing physiotherapy in Afghanistan. The therapists worked in isolation with little opportunity for further education or professional development. Their approach was mainly medical, where the work was dictated by the patients’ expectations and doctors’ recommendations. They used primarily passive methods of treatment, and their work was affected by cultural, religious and situational factors and they demonstrated a basic capacity of clinical reasoning. Paper II explores factors that impacted learning and professional development of the Afghan physiotherapists in the development project. Examples of these factors were: a pattern approach to treatment, linear thinking, and socially oriented decision-making that affected how new things learned were put into practice; concrete representations and an instrumental view of knowledge characterized learning approaches; language barriers, different interpretations of meaning and cultural codes challenged communication; and a prescriptive, encouraging approach of the expatriate physiotherapy development worker affected teaching and learning. Paper III explores professional ethics for Afghan physiotherapists and identifies two ethical tensions for the professional practice of Afghan physiotherapists: between individualistic and communitarian ethical perspectives, and between normative ethics and local morals. Paper IV is a critical reflection over the expatriate development worker’s development process through, and impact on, the development project. The perspective of the development worker is transformed from an idealistic helper to an enterprising learner as a consequence of active participation in and a self-critical reflection of the process. Conclusion: Working with and researching professional development cross-culturally and in development contexts is complex and requires consideration of many different factors. Cultural competency is essential, where to understand others one needs to first understand oneself, and oneself in relation to others. This requires support when in the field. Physiotherapy theory and practice must be adapted to the local context. Actions taken towards promoting learning and professional development must be firmly rooted in the Afghan context, and investigated, planned and implemented together with Afghan physiotherapists. The professional development of Afghan supervisors and teachers should be a priority. To encourage reflection of both Afghan and expatriate physiotherapists a communicative learning approach could be taken, where ethical challenges and disorienting dilemmas can form the basis of a reflective discourse and lead to increased understanding.
2.
Bergström Casinowsky, Gunilla, 1965
(author)
Tjänsteresor i människors vardag - om rörlighet, närvaro och frånvaro
2010
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
Title: Business travel in everyday life: Mobility, presence and absence. Written in Swedish and English. 248 pages. Author: Gunilla Bergström Casinowsky Doctoral Dissertation at the Department of Sociology, University of Gothenburg, Box 720, SE 40530 Göteborg, Sweden ISBN: 978-91-975405-8-2 ISSN: 1650-4313 Göteborg 2010 In this thesis, current debates on mobile lifestyles and the work-life interface are woven together and studied from the perspective of frequent business travellers. The overreaching aim is to investigate the significance of travel at work in people’s everyday lives. More specifically, the main objective is to shed some light upon emotional and practical consequences of travel-related absence from home for friendship and family relations. The thesis consists of four papers based on two different empirical studies: one qualitative study comprised by two sets of observations and 15 interviews, and one quantitative study based on survey data. The analysis of the qualitative data resulted in two papers written in Swedish (papers I and II). The results from the quantitative study are presented in two papers written in English (papers III and IV). Paper I is an exploratory study with the purpose of discovering focal dimensions of the work-life interface from a business traveller’s perspective. The second paper further explores gendered experiences of overnight work travel revealed in the first paper. Whereas the women’s experiences are characterized by feelings of loneliness, guilt and a sense of vulnerability, the men’s experiences are less negative and they also call attention to some positive sides of being cut off from everyday life at home. The gendered experiences have practical implications for how the respondents organize their mobile life. In prioritizing being at home, the female strategy aims at reducing the amount of nights away and, consequently, leads to comparatively many hours on the road. In contrast, the male strategy is more focused on minimizing the hours on the road with the purpose of actively “being there” for the family while at home and taking advantage of the “free” time while away. Questions about implications of overnight work travel in terms of the traveller’s ability to keep in touch with locally based as well as long-distance friends, and the opportunities that the travel might offer as a source of geographically extended social networks, are elaborated through analysis of the survey data (paper III). The benefits of mobility in terms of extended social networks represent the main social consequences of work travel as established in the analyses. Staying away from home due to work travel is also seen as potentially facilitating the coordination with friends living elsewhere. Some downsides are reported as well. The most frequent travellers feel negatively affected by mobility, reporting problems hampering coordination with friends close to home. Following up one thread noticed in the qualitative study, one issue explored by the quantitative data is the significance of work-related travel for the gendered division of domestic responsibility (paper IV). The results reveal a clear pattern in two key respects. When the work traveller is a woman, the allocation of home-based responsibility seems to remain unaffected. By contrast, the effect of the business trips when the travellers are men is a reduction in their relative share of responsibility for the home and the family.
3.
Eriksson, Bo G., 1944
(author)
Studying ageing: experiences, description, variation, prediction and explanation
2010
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
The study follows a line of experiences, description, variation, prediction and explanation concerning ageing, health promotion and longevity. The experiences of aging were acquired during my studies of conversations, participation in longitudinal population studies in Gothenburg, and working with the Centre for Development of Home help services. A main interest of mine has been to understand how health and longevity can be promoted during aging. The first paper reports the start of the intervention studies. During these studies I have met an increasing variation between individuals in age cohorts. The other striking phenomenon is the high degree of trainability in higher ages by putting load on human functions. This training by functional load is of increasing importance with increasing age as the reserve capacity of functions generally decline during aging. Thus I am interested in variation in factors related to health, survival and death. I studied the variation of registered death causes during one year in the United States. I expected an increased variation by increasing age as a result of decreasing functional reserve capacity and thus an increased vulnerability. Contrary to my expectation the variation by age had a bimodal distribution like a camel’s back. I interpreted this finding as one example of institutional ageism. In the third report I studied variation in aspects of social participation measured in the longitudinal population studies. In agreement with my expectation the variation increased by increasing age. This is contrasted to the common attitude that the aged are lonely. In that respect I interpret that attitude as one example of ageism. The forth paper reports predictions of 7-year survival studied by a common method, binary logistic regression, compared to a less used method: Artificial neural networks (ANN). Both methods could predict survival. The ANN gave a better prediction when the predictors were medical and health variables but not when social variables were entered as predictors. Conclusions were that ANN could be used 1) as predicting models for outcomes with a multi factor genesis which is not well understood by other methods and 2) that ANN can be used to evaluate results provided by other methods of analyses. The two last papers reports developments of sociological theories in order to explain how social interaction can promote health and longevity. Durkheim’s theories of social facts, nomie and anomie are developed in the fifth paper. I argue that the production of social facts, nomie and anomie promotes health by promoting activities. The social fact production also supports identity and feelings of cohesion. The production of nomie and anomie produce self esteem. The last paper reports health promoting functions of ordinary conversations, especially with confidants: Definition of situation, reducing ordinary anxiety, decision making, training of attention and memory, identity construction, formulation of dreams and maintenance of social networks. By these efforts I hope that I have achieved to report experiences, descriptions, variation, predictions and explanations in studying aging.
4.
Haug, Christoph, 1975
(author)
Discursive Decision-making in Meetings of the Global Justice Movements: Cultures and Practices
2010
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
Based on audio-recordings of 8 and participant observation in about 200 activist meetings in the Global Justice Movements in Europe (especially Attac and the Social Forum process), the thesis addresses two main questions: 1. In what way do the constraints of the meeting-form influence the discussion and hence the decision-making process? 2. How do meeting participants navigate across the various and potentially controversial junctures in the decision-making process to eventually establish what they call "consensus"? Four elementary structural constraints in meetings where identified: sequentiality, face, status, and frames. While these constraints are thought to be universal, they can be dealt with in culturally contingent ways, which are described as "regimes"; governing the interactions in the meeting. The turn-taking regime of a meeting determines the way in which sequentiality is handled. It prescribes whether a queueing mechanism (e.g. a list of speakers) is used to determine the order of speakers (formal turn-taking), whether speakers self-select at what conversation analysts call turn-transition points (informal turn-taking), or whether the chair or facilitator arbitrarily switches between these two modes (casual turn-taking management). The politeness regime (or the etiquette) of a meeting determines the range of conflictual issues that may be addressed without causing loss of face and embarrassment. In the regime of avoidance, few conflictual issues can be discussed without risking serious offense and eventually the decline of the meeting. In the regime of fight, on the other side, conflict and potentially harsh controversial debate about any kind of issue is possible, if not encouraged. In the regime of candour, the range of controversial issues and the harshness of adequate debate is considerably reduced, though allowing participants to express their views candidly as long as they take personal feelings into consideration. The leadership regime of a meeting determines how status differences are dealt with, namely whether they are accepted and reinforced by granting high status participants special authority, or whether status differences are denied or resisted on the basis of egalitarian values. The regime of authority readily accept and install a central decision-making authority who is usually the chair of the meeting. In the egalitarian regime, on the other side, participants tend to work against rather than reinforce the public production of status and prestige by refusing to award high-status participants superior decision-making authority. In the regime of complex equality, there is also a strong sense of equality, but limited authority is nevertheless temporarily granted to participants with a special status in a relevant field of knowledge. Seven types of leaders can be distinguished, each of which is based on a different source of authority: veterans (experience), brokers (connections), experts (expertise), representatives (a constituency), mobilizers (mobilizing-capacity), organizers (maintenance of a meeting arena), and facilitators (focus on process)). The preparatory regime of a meeting determines to what degree preparatory efforts are made before the commencement of the meeting are accepted as a fait accompli and hence to what degree (pre)established frames (such as the points on the agenda) are allowed to structure the discussion. In the regime of pre-structuration the results of 'external'; preparations are highly valued and cannot easily be overturned. In order to be relevant, participants have to respect these prepared frames. In the open space regime, on the other side, relatively few contributions will be dismissed as irrelevant, let alone illegitimate. The regime of evolving structures values a certain degree of structure in the discussion, some of which may also come from 'outside', but these elements are not automatically established but always subject to discussion so that the autonomy of the meeting is respected. The decision-making process was modelled as an incremental construction of the public opinion of the meeting. In this continuous process, six critical junctures were identified: the topic, the problem, the task, the options, positions, and determination. Conflicts are likely to occur around the process of establishing these decision-elements. Depending on the meeting culture, the participants use different practices to deal with (or avoid) controversies around these critical junctures. Some of these practices are described in detail in chapter 6 of the thesis. In total, the empirical findings show that (1.) the role of the facilitator has gained crucial importance in the global justice movements, (2.) decisions often are made implicitly first and made explicit later (post-hoc decisions), (3.) the productive role of interruptions, pauses, and 'new beginnings' in the decision-process.
5.
Jonsson, Christer
(author)
I fäders och mödrars spår. Landsortsungdomars identitetsutveckling och vuxenblivande i ett livsformsperspektiv.
2010
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
Abstract Title: Following in their Father’s and Mother’s Path: Young people’s steps to adulthood in a Swedish municipal community from a life form perspective. Language: Swedish with an English summary, 280 pages. Author: Christer Jonsson Doctoral Dissertation at the Department of Sociology, University of Gothenburg, Box 720 SE-405 30 GÖTEBORG, Sweden ISBN: 978-91-975405-9-9, ISSN: 1650-4313 Gothenburg 2010. This dissertation examines young people, aged 16-24, their life expectations and steps towards adulthood. Life form analysis of their families plays a central role in understan- ding how social and cultural reproduction continues in traditional class-patterns in Swedish late modern society during the 1990’s. Theories of the ’individualized society’ are considered to have less validity for interpreting how these young people look at diffe- rent aspects of their everyday lives. In this study, five groups (types) of young people are distinguished. Four types demonstrate discernible patterns related to the career life form and the wage-labour life form. The young people with this two life-orientation were then separated according to gender for further interpretation. The fifth group of young people seems to be less connected with cultural socialisation in the family; their every-day engagements and their life expectations are devoted to a special interest. The empirical study, grounded in semi-structured interviews, focuses on growing-up in a Swe- dish rural community. Data was collected during a turbulent time in Swedish society. The first occasion of data collection took place at the beginning of the 1990’s when entering adult society had a relatively low threshold. The second occasion, the follow-up study some years later, took place when the unemployment rates of the 1990’s economic crises had reached their summit. This societal changes complicated, particularly for the wage labour-oriented, young people’s integration into adult society. Keywords: Youth, young people, life form, life expectations, social and cultural repro- duction.
6.
7.
Eneman, Marie, 1969
(author)
Developing child protection strategies: a critical study of offenders’ use of information technology for the sexual exploitation of children
2010
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
The overall aim of this thesis is to critically explore offenders’ use of information technology for the sexual exploitation of children, focusing upon child abusive material and grooming, in relation to the societal response, i.e. legal and technological regulation models. The following aspects are highlighted (i) How can offenders’ use of information technology for child abusive material and grooming be understood in relation to current regulation models? (i) What alternative models for regulation of child abusive material and grooming could be proposed? (iii) What are the implications of applying a critical approach? The motivation for conducting this research has been to contribute, with empirically based research, to the development of effective child protection strategies in relation to child abusive material and grooming. The empirical material used in this thesis consists of court and police records and interviews with offenders. The result shows that offenders’ use of information technology for child abusive material and grooming is more complex and multifaceted than current regulation models have managed to envisage. It has been recognized that the offenders are aware of the illegality in their activities and thus the risk of being observed by law enforcement and have therefore developed different technological and social strategies to be able to continue with their criminal activities. Therefore, this thesis suggests that existing regulation models such as law and the use of technology for filtering should be re-evaluated and that further dimensions such as norms and markets should be considered.
8.
Klamas, Maria
(author)
Av egen kraft tillsammans med andra : Personer med psykiska funktionshinder, socialt stöd och återhämtning.
2010
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
The purpose of this study was to describe and analyse the significance of social support to adults with psychiatric disabilities, based on the individual's experiences. This includes research questions concerning what type of social support was perceived to be beneficial or restrictive, which relational aspects were considered having a beneficial or restrictive effect on the support- and recovery process, as well as what strategies and capacities the individual developed on their own in order to cope with their obstacles and disadvantages.The empirical material was based on qualitative inteviews with ten individuals that defined themselves as having psychiatric disabilities. They were each interviewed on three occasions. The repetetive form of the interviews lead to three separate interview guides being created over the course of the data collection process. The goal of the first interview was to get a general idea of the subject's daily life, activities, arenas, relationships and support. The second interview focused on meaningful relationships. The third and final interview had one general and one individual part. The general part focused on the subject's psychiatric disabilities, their opportunities as well as existing and desired support measures. The subject matters in the individual part were related to the previous interviews with each of the participants and aimed to develop or expand on previous discussion.The material was analysed using theories about social support and recovery and was presented with roots in four different networking entities: close and extended family, friends, coworkers and fellow students, as well as formal support instances. The result showed that it is the support with mobilising qualities that is beneficial to the recovery process. It increases the individual's degree of control over their illness, obstacles and challenges. In addition, it appeals to the individual as a central actor and as a person with difficulties as well as resources. The fact that the social support from the various support agencies have varying focus and direction benefits recovery since it increases the individual's opportunity to maintain as well as develop their social bonds and roles within the community. A relational prerequisite for social support is an equal relationship, which benefits the recovery process as it encompasses acknowledgement and acceptance of both the individual on a personal level and of their situation. The type of social support that hinders recovery is the kind that lacks a connection between the individual's perceived problems, their need for support and their over time fluctuating ability to handle their psychiatric disability. This is due to the fact that it robs the individual of control over the situation, increases the need for support and strengthens their perception of themselves as sick. Recovery comes to a halt when the individual isn't included in the support and recovery process, which is clarified in relational aspects such as lacking attentiveness, subpar acceptance as well as rejection. The individual's will and capacity to actively take on the responsibility to steer their recovery in a positive direction was made visible through four groups of strategies that were crystallised through the course of the research; creation of understanding and legitimisation, cultivation, including strategies and the creation of boundaries.
9.
Niemi, Mariella, 1965
(author)
Naturbaserade aktiviteter i daglig verksamhet och gymnasiesärskola. En studie om personer som lär långsammare och om trädgårds- och naturbruksarbetets möjligheter och begränsningar i ett socialt perspektiv.
2010
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
This study is about people with learning disabilities and nature-based activities. The study has an ethnographic approach and is based on observations and interviews at a daily activity center specializing in horticultural work and in an upper secondary special school specializing in farming. Totally the empirical evidence consists of 46 occasions of observation and 21 interviews. The study proceeds from three questions at issue. How can the interaction between man and nature be understood within the framework of the academic discourse, and which interpretative repertoires are found in the nature-based practice directed towards persons with learning disabilities? How are nature-based activities used in a social pedagogic perspective for social learning and preparation for work-life? How are persons with learning disabilities categorized and disciplined in the nature-based practice? The analysis shows that within the academic discourse a cultural and an evolutionary type of discourse have emerged. The former type of discourse emphasizes the value of nature as being relative and includes a cultural, a pedagogic as well as a social dimension. The evolutionary discourse type instead emphasizes nature as being vital for man. The discourse type includes three directions: nature for everyone, nature as medicine and gardening as social treatment. Within the discourse order of the practice, three interpretative repertoires including nature are distinguished. Nature makes us happy consists of statements such as nature is a positive factor for the wellbeing of man. The interpretative repertoire gardening demands motivation implies that nature is not beneficial to everybody, but rather emphasizes the fact that an interest in gardening is needed. The third interpretative repertoire, nature activities can lead to fellowship, has similarities with the former in that the value is not found in nature itself. The analysis shows that when the floodlight is placed on a social pedagogic perspective in the work with nature-based activities, social learning and learning of vocational skills come into focus. The study has demonstrated that learning with the help of nature-based activities can be productive and develop the participants, who learn to take social responsibility as well as concepts and vocational skills. The value of nature in this context consists of nature-based activities becoming tools for social learning, but also for learning a trade. When another floodlight is turned on and focused on power relations, and instead problemizes the work with persons with learning disabilities in nature-based activities, something else appears. The disciplinary aspects become more manifest and more revealing. Consequently the value of nature-based activities can be explained as that of helping persons with learning disabilities find their “right place” in the distribution of work. In Swedish with an English summary
10.
