1.
Lindqvist, Mona, 1963-
(author)
Speaking about social suffering? : Subjective understandings and lived experiences of migrant women and therapists
2016
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
This thesis aims to investigate and illuminate lived experiences, cultural representations, and organizational conditions that influence the way therapists in Swedish psychiatry receive and treat migrant women. This overall aim is pursued through two distinct but interlinked part-studies. The aim of the first of these is to examine migrant women’s perceptions of mental (ill-) health along with their actual experiences of therapy in Swedish psychiatry. The aim of the second part is to describe and explain how therapists, in their organizational work conditions, interpret and experience their professional encounters with migrant women. The thesis is based on qualitative interviews with twelve migrant women and eleven therapists in psychiatry.The result show that the migrant women experience health and mental health through a sense of belonging. Non-belonging, isolation and estrangement will point to the other direction i.e. not having health. The migrant women may gain a sense of belonging to society through therapy. However there are also obstructions on this path to belonging.The therapists, in psychiatry, seeing migrant women are doing emotion work comparable to physical labor. As the production is expected to increase due to marketing principles it puts a demand of acceleration on the therapists emotion work. They, thus have to find strategies to manage their emotion work. Everyday resistance thus becomes a way to gain emotional energy and to avoid emotional numbing and burnout. It is also gives openings to be content with their work with their patients and thereby to be able to offer an adequate reception of migrants into treatment in psychiatry.The thesis contributes to the gap in research by focusing on the borderlands between migrant women’s lived experiences of social suffering and the receiving therapists’ possibility to meet their migrant patients’ request.
2.
3.
Vadelius, Elin, 1976-
(author)
Paradoxernas marknad : En studie om företagande i hemtjänsten
2015
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
The aim of this study is to understand how individuals who run a private business in the publicly financed elderly care sector experience their conditions and opportunities as owners and managers of a business in a quasi-market. The focus is on what happens when the home care service actor’s intentions and conceptions about how home care should be provided encounter the public realm of financing and regulation.The research was conducted as a qualitative interview study of individuals who had started and were running a small or medium-sized business in home care for the elderly. Theories of rationality as well as of actor’s embeddedness in social networks and institutions were used as tools of interpretation and analysis. I also draw on theories of trust and institutionalized distrust as mechanisms for reducing complexity in social systems.The results demonstrate that the reasons for starting a business were multifaceted and thus cannot be understood in terms of dichotomies such as egotism or altruism. Increasing the professional scope of action and the power to make decisions was a central incentive for providers with professional training and experience of previous employment in large health and social care organizations. However, realizing the intentions proved difficult because of the restrictions typically associated with quasi-markets in the elderly care sector. The restrictions involve, for example, relations to the municipal home care service assessor and the elderly client as two different customer categories, the relation between the time allotted for care provision and the remuneration from the municipal authorities, and the tension between trust and distrust in the business relations between care providers and the representatives of the municipal organizations. Still, the results also show that managing a business in home care can be a positive and rewarding experience.
4.
Brandheim, Susanne, 1965-
(author)
A systemic stigmatization of fat people
2017
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
The aim of this work was to develop knowledge about and awareness of fatness stigmatization from a systemic perspective. The stigmatization of fat people was located as a social problem in a second-order reality in which human fatness is observed and responded to, in turn providing it with negative meaning. Four separate studies of processes involved in this systemic stigmatization were performed.In study I, the association between weight and psychological distress was investigated. When controlling for an age-gender variable, this association was almost erased, questioning the certainty by which a higher weight in general is approached as a medical issue. In study II, the focus was on stigma internalization where negative and positive responses combined were connected to fat individuals’ distress. We found that both responses seemed to have a larger impact on fat individuals, suggesting that the embodied stigma of being fat sensitizes them to responses in general. In study III, justifications of fatness stigmatization was explored by a content analysis of a reality TV weight-loss show. The analysis showed how explicit bullying of a fat partner could be justified by animating the thin Self as violated by the fat Other, thus downplaying the evils of the bullying act in favor of highlighting the ideological value of thinness.The implications of these studies were related and seated in a context comprising a historical aversion toward the fat body, a declared obesity epidemic, a new public health ideology, a documented failure to reverse this obesity epidemic, and a market of weight-loss stakeholders who thrive on keeping the negative meanings of being fat alive. The stigmatization of fat people was intelligible from a systemic perspective, where processes of structural ignorance, internalized self-discrimination, and applied prejudice reinforce each other to form a larger stigmatizing process. In paper IV, it was argued that viewing fatness stigmatization as oppression rather than misrecognition could hold transformative keys to social change.
5.
Holm, Marie-Louise
(author)
Fleshing out the self : Reimagining intersexed and trans embodied lives through (auto)biographical accounts of the past
2017
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
This thesis explores how current ways of imagining possibilities for intersexed and trans embodied lives within medical contexts might be informed by and reimagined through the historical lived experiences of intersexed and trans individuals as they have been articulated in autobiographical accounts.Postmodern, queer, intersex, and trans researchers and activists have criticised existing standards of intersex and trans healthcare for limiting the possibilities for diverse embodied lives by articulating certain forms of embodiment and selfhood as more likely to enable a liveable life than others. This has often been done in a medico-legal context by referring to experiences in the past of the unliveability of corporealities and gendersexed situations that differ from privileged positions. With a point of departure in these critiques, this thesis reopens questions about how intersexed and trans people may be embodied and have relations with others by reflecting upon the period of the first three-quarters of the 20th century, when the present standards of care and diagnostic categories were emerging, but had not yet become established.Drawing upon a unique set of historical source material from the archives of the Danish Ministry of Justice and the Medico-Legal Council, intersexed and trans persons’ life stories are rearticulated from their own and medico-legal experts’ accounts written in relation to applications for change of legal gendersex status and medical transition. In this way, the process is traced through which these life stories have been repeatedly rearticulated in order to become a usable basis for diagnosis and decision-making. At the same time, the stories are unfolded once more in a rearticulation focusing on their complexity and diversity.
6.
Madsbu, Jens Petter
(author)
Samordning, effektivisering og forenkling : En sosiologisk analyse av begrunnelser for digitaliseringsprosesser i moderniseringen av norsk offentlig forvaltning
2016
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
This thesis examines the arguments used by politicians and civil servants to justify the implementation of digitalisation processes to modernise and reform the Norwegian public sector. The research questions are “What arguments are used within the Norwegian public administration to justify the implementation of digitalisation processes?” and “How can these arguments be understood in relation to ideas about modernisation and ongoing reforms within the administration more generally?”.Three studies of digitalisation and reform processes within the Norwegian public administration have been carried out to answer the research questions. The first study is of the Minside public electronic communications service from its inception in 2004 until the service was discontinued in 2012. The second study is an analysis of governmental documents on the role and importance of digitalisation reforms in the Norwegian public sector from the mid-1980’s to today. The third outlines how digitalisation is related to a reform process within the public sector, widely referred to as New Public Management (NPM).The analysis shows that justifications for the implementation of Minside and for digitalisation in the Norwegian public administration are generally focused on the simplification, coordination and rationalisation of the public sector. These justifications are closely connected to key normative ideas of NPM on how and why modernisation and reform processes should be carried out within the public sector in general.Despite high expectations, many digitalisation and electronic service implementations aimed at the population do not achieve the effects expected. This does not, however, appear to have had any impact upon these seemingly deeply entrenched expectations. They continue to be as widely held and as high as they have always been, despite widespread evidence to the contrary.
7.
Steigen, Anne Mari
(author)
Social support in nature-based services for young adults with mental health problems
2018
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
Aim: The overall aim of this thesis is to examine nature-based services for young adults with mental health problems, focusing on the meaning of different dimensions of social support.Methods: The thesis includes four studies that use a variety of data sources and methods: an integrative literature review of nature-based services in the Nordic countries; a quantitative cross-sectional survey of 93 young adults participating in nature-based services in Norway; and qualitative data comprising 20 interviews with nine participants in nature-based services. In addition, a sample of clinical mental health care in-patients and a sample of young adults from the general population are used for comparative analysis related to mental health problems. Data are analysed using a variety of statistical analyses and qualitative content analysis. Rasch analysis is employed to analyse the psychometric properties of the Social Provisions Scale (SPS-10).Results: The majority of young adults in nature-based services struggles with mental health problems. The results indicate that they show more symptoms of mental health problems than the sample from the general population, but fewer than the sample of clinical mental health care in-patients. Previous research papers highlight the importance of social support in nature-based services. However, knowledge about social support in these services is limited. Rasch analysis of the SPS-10 supports the division of social support into functional and structural support and the SPS-10 is revised for use in the nature-based sample. Participants receive emotional, esteem, informational and instrumental support in the services, and experience social integration and opportunities for nurturance. The results also indicate that nature-based services add specific qualities to the dimensions of social support, for instance, through support from animals.Conclusions: Social support is important in nature-based services, and various dimensions of social support are provided in the services. Emotional and esteem support, along with opportunities for nurturance, may be of particular importance for participants with mental health problems.
