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- Abrahamson, Maria, 1946-
(author)
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Alkoholkontroll i brytningstid : ett kultursociologiskt perspektiv
- 1999
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The dissertation is a product of four separate cultural studies, intended to throw light on the changes in Swedish alcohol policy taking place in recent years.Paper 1 discusses factors contributing to the rapid proliferation of restaurants in Sweden in the 1980’s and the subsequent tensions arising from a restrictive legislation, an increasingly liberal legal praxis and the new, public alcohol culture. Urban transformations and changes in public life, the transition from modem to late modernism, the emergence of a new middle class and the redefinition of women’s use of alcohol were among the crucial developments. Beginning in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, important steps away from the traditionally strict control of restaurants stimulated competition and led to a loosening up of Swedish restaurant culture. By the 1980’s, the restrictive laws governing restaurants had begun to lose legitimacy as legal praxis was applied in an increasingly liberal spirit. The establishment of the Stockholm Water Festival, which allowed central parts of the city to be transformed into a gigantic beer hall, is one example of this. As in many other countries, age limits have now become almost the only actual restriction on the availability of alcohol. Today, rather than protection, the aim of alcohol policy - especially with regard to restaurants - is keeping damage to a minimum.Paper 2 is based on participant observation in three types of restaurants in Stockholm’s city centre. These are characterised as ‘the fashionable bar’, ‘the folksy bar’, and ‘the ethnic bar’. The study takes its starting point in Goffman’s (1956) concepts of ‘performance’, ‘setting’ and ‘personal front’, and how people consciously or unconsciously choose different milieus as a way of controlling the impression of themselves they wish to project. The fashionable bar clearly functioned as an arena for demonstrating professional and social success. The folksy bar could be used as the setting for a form of play in which company colleagues could temporarily set aside their differences in status. The closed room of the ethnic bar encouraged ‘time-out’ behaviour - seeming to serve as a second home, but also as a sex market for contacts between African men and Nordic women.Paper 3 presents an analysis of how five different occupational groups discuss their alcohol habits in serious compared to humorous speech. The occupational areas are media, politics, business, culture and civil service. In serious speech, the speakers tended to value cautious drinking, setting sharp limits as to how and when use of alcohol is appropriate. In humorous speech, the situation was largely the opposite - the interviewees often presenting themselves as being under external constraints with regard to alcohol. The situations that provoked humour are also where we find controversy in serious speech. Discrepancies between alcohol habits and the role model one represents as a parent gave rise to a number of jokes. The parts of serious discourse that concerned other people displayed a very different content, dealing with excessive drinking, not being able to handle alcohol and not being permitted to drink alcohol - a content reflected in humorous form when the interviewees talked about themselves.Paper 4, based on the same interview data as Paper 3, examines the issue of youth and alcohol. Common dividing lines between the groups could be observed, such as describing the problem as an individual, personal or family affair versus seeing it as a problem for the society, or placing responsibility for problem control on the individual as opposed to placing responsibility on the society. Those active in cultural pursuits viewed teenage use and abuse of alcohol as a social problem, but placed responsibility for its solution on a private, individual level. Journalists saw the problem as belonging within the family, which is also where they placed responsibility for the solution. The politicians clearly perceived teenage drinking as a problem for the society and placed responsibility for solutions on outer agents, such as legislation and extensive information campaigns. Civil servants described the problem both in terms of belonging within the family and as a problem for the society. Business executives varied between the level on which they described the problem and the level on which they sought solutions. In considering the problem from the point of view of the consumer, they stressed individual responsibility. But as the discussion progressed, they came to see teenage drinking both as a family problem and a problem for the society and to place responsibility on outer authorities.The four studies are linked together in an introductory chapter within the common framework of Swedish alcohol control policy.
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| 3. |
- Byqvist, Siv, 1939-
(author)
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Svenska narkotikamissbrukande kvinnor och män : missbruksförlopp och kriminalitet
- 1997
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The main concern of the thesis is the quantitative study of the progression of drug abuse and criminality among Swedish narcotics abusers at the beginning of the 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s. The thesis comprises six articles that are based on data collected from two samples obtained from two research projects. The data in four of the articles were obtained from the BAK/SWEDATE project (Swedish Drug Abuse Treatment Evaluation) which comprised a total of 1,268 drug abusers admitted to institutional care in 1982 and 1983. One article treats the results from the UNO-92 study (The extent of heavy drug abuse in Sweden in 1992), a nation-wide case-finding study comprising 17,000 persons exhibiting heavy drug abuse. One article, finally, treats data from both projects, but mainly BAK/SWEDATE. The data has been processed and reported on with reference to typologies, groupings and gender differences.Article I describes the abusers' careers from debut to established abuse during the year before being admitted to treatment (SWEDATE). Article II describes the polydrug abuse patterns of the populations of both the SWEDATE and UNO-92 studies. New ways of categorising polydrug abuse patterns are introduced. Article III describes the prevalence and characteristics of the pattern of abuse in Sweden as well as the procedure used in the UNO-92 study to estimate the number of unidentified abusers. Article IV describes four types of male substance abusers in terms of a typology based on the extent of the abusers' criminal involvement (SWEDATE). The relation between female drug abuse and criminality (SWEDATE) is analysed in article V. Article VI describes two extreme groups of drug abusers, focusing on childhood conditions, social background, the situation during the year prior to admission to treatment, the year after discharge and after 5-8 years (SWEDATE).The results showed four career paths from drug debut to established abuse. Cannabis as the sole substance was not the only gateway to heavy abuse. Most abusers developed some pattern of polydrug abuse during their drug careers. These patterns were categorised as: simple, double and multiple. The majority of heavy abusers could be categorised according to these patterns of polydrug abuse. The abuse of alcohol in considerable quantities was a common occurrence. There were alcohol abusers with narcotics abuse and narcotics abusers with alcohol abuse. A so-called subcultural group of men was identified, characterised by early crime debut, early narcotics debut, rapid transition to regular use, and extensive juvenile and adult criminality. The extent of criminality was much less among females than among males, fewer women than men were criminal and also the crime pattern was different. Despite gender differences a small criminal group existed even among women. The women's drug career progressed more rapidly than did the men's, and exhibited heavier abuse. The more problems that were added to drug abuse, the more problematic was the lifestyle and the poorer was the prognosis for recovery. Drug treatment agencies and the social services should give special attention to a group difficult to treat, which exhibited a pattern of criminal activity, polydrug abuse, alcohol abuse, mental ill-health and problematic childhood histories. Measures such as early intervention are required in order to inhibit drug abuse and prevent the progression to polydrug abuse and criminality.
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| 4. |
- Eriksson, Bodil, 1933-
(author)
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Från omsorg till socialt förändringsarbete : en analys av villkor för stödgruppsarbete
- 1995
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- What are the prerequisites for conducting social work in housing areas with residents handicapped by severe social problems? This is the main issue addressed in this dissertation. Is it possible to go beyond the bounds of the work at the individual level? Groups previously considered to be in need of institutional care nowadays live in flats in residential areas. The social services seek to develop work methods which will facilitate their integration with the rest of the population.The dissertation is a qualitative case-study of a support-group project in a suburban area heavily burdened with social problems. The focusing of the study upon the support-group project, with its orientation towards non-verbal inputs, led to the choice of observation combined with interviews, examination of documents and recording of informal conversations as research methods. The project was followed for more than two years. The data processing leads up to a structured description of the support-group's work and an analysis of the core conditions.The description shows the support-group project's development process in which the personnel's efforts, aimed at giving the help recipients a chance to achieve more independence, progressed from focusing upon work in the client's home to placing the main emphasis upon work at the project's premises and thereafter reaching out into the local community. This also involved a development from two-person relationships to broader network relationships.The terms of the work are indicated in the analysis. The essential element of the work is the intervention in the everyday life of the help recipient and the development of an informal social relationship. This reciprocal relationship was fundamental in enabling the help recipient to boost his/her own capacity for action and increase the field of action. The terms under which the work was carried out were dictated by the personnel's qualifications and their capacity for learning from experience and accumulating knowledge in their work. The organisational form provided personnel with the scope in which to act both formally and informally and thereby be able to function as mediators between the help recipients’ fife-world and the system of organisations. This also gave the scope in which to make connections with various organisations. In order for this to be possible it was necessary for the support-group project to develop both a certain autonomy in relation to the social services organisation and a legitimacy regarding its actions amongst the actors in the world-at-large.
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- Kurube, Noriko, 1947-
(author)
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Självhjälp och överlevnad : en studie av Länkarna
- 1997
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This study has been carried out as part of a Swedish investigation within the framework of an international project on the AA movement, The International Collaborative Study of Alcoholics Anonymous (ICSAA). The purpose of the study has been to describe and analyse the Link movement in terms of its character and development as a self-help movement by and for persons with alcohol problems. The questions raised encompass the movement's process of development, organisational culture and members' self-image. The most important point of departure for the analysis has been the political culture of Sweden, a culture characterised by an integrative State authority and corporatist solutions to social problems.Data was collected by questionnaire (n=474), by observations of various Link activities, by interview and by studying the movement's seven different periodicals and other written material. Both qualitative and quantitative research approaches have been applied. A comparison with the AA movement and its members is also an important part of the study.The Link Society movement was started in 1945, under the ideological influence first of the Oxford Group and later the AA movement, which is clearly reflected in their seven-point programme. The Link movement has rejected the more spiritual elements of the AA Programme, however, substituting the type of profane solidarity characteristic of Swedish populist movements. The formation of the Links was a backlash against the intensive expansion in Sweden of an institutional care deeply marked by the attempts, coloured by the ideas of emergent social engineering, to "organise and lay straight" the life of the ordinary citizen and not least the life of the deviant one. The movement is anchored in a working-class self-help ideology based on comrade support and the view of alcoholism as a disease, i.e. the Link movement offered an alternative to professionalised community care of alcoholics. Half of the Link movement has successively been incorporated into the government decision-making apparatus and can now be described as a political interest group with hierarchical structures and centralised decision-making. At the same time, the survival strategy of the other half of the movement has been to remain a self-help group independent of the State, a loose organisational structure and grassroots democracy. The study shows also that the Links provides the feeling of security and the opportunity for members, to build up new individual networks both within and outside the movement, and to develop a way of life, an everyday lifestyle as an alternative to the one of alcoholics.
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| 7. |
- Oxenstierna, Gabriel, 1946-
(author)
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Socialtjänstens förutsättningar för barnavårdsarbete : en studie om villkor, påfrestningar och resultat
- 1997
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The purpose of the study was to analyse the conditions under which the social services work with different types of child welfare families.The questions are:What conditions within the social services itself and what factors pertaining to the child welfare families are important for 1) the social workers’ experience of strains occasioned by the job, 2) social workers’ chances of achieving set goals, and 3) the satisfaction of clients with the help they received?The situations of the child welfare families, the organisational preconditions for the work, and the families’ opinions of the social services and the help they received were investigated in child welfare groups in two districts of Botkyrka' Municipality. Factors that might have an effect on the results of the social workers input were reviewed. The results of the study are presented within a framework of organisational theory.The empirical basis of the study was a mail questionnaire to 153 clients (shortfall 19.5 per cent) together with another 140 questionnaires, answered by 13 social workers (no shortfall), concerning the child welfare families.Three input-process-output models of handling child welfare families were created - one for each dependent factor. The data were processed with the aid of canonical correlation analysis.The main results were the following: •Social workers experience of job strains came primarily from four sources:1 Job demands and difficulty of tasks 2 The character of the contact with clients 3 Families with children taken into care 4 Risk assessment of a negative prognosis for juveniles. No other single factors could be directly connected to the experience of job strains. •Five factors turned out to have an effect on goal fulfilment:1 Juveniles’ problems 2 The contact between social worker and client 3 Regular social services cases 4 Own and colleagues’ proficiency 5 Administrative resources. •Three main sources of client satisfaction could be identified:1 Influence over decisions and processes 2 The help they received 3 The subsequent situation of the family. •The power resources that social workers have at their disposal and client influence were identified as crucial factors.
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| 9. |
- Sundh, Kenneth
(author)
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Socialtjänstens strukturinriktade arbete : utveckling, möjligheter och hinder
- 1999
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The dissertation is based on two empirical studies that have the common aim of expanding our knowledge of the possibilities available to social workers to develop and carry out structurally oriented community work within the municipal social services. The first study, conducted in 1982-1984, was part of a larger study of the implementation of the Social Services Act. It was designed as a case study of four municipalities in Sweden, each of which had different structural characteristics (Suburbia, Bigtown, Middletown and Countryside). In the beginning of the 1990s (1991-1993) a follow-up study was made of these four municipalities. The study as a whole can be characterised as an example of the qualitative case study research approach. Three central problems are treated in the dissertation: a) What were the extent and direction of the structurally oriented interventions carried out in the four municipalities during the 1980s? b) What effect did the actors themselves and the municipal organisation have on the possibility of the social services to develop and carry out such interventions? c) What effect did the purchaser-provider model have on this endeavour? The concepts of power, welfare state and profession are discussed as being of central importance to the conclusions reached in the study. The development that took place in the municipalities can, in summary, be described as a professionalisation of the strategies for participatory community planning and a de-professionalisation of community and neighbourhood work. The dissertation shows that the social services were both successful and unsuccessful in the 1980s in their attempts to develop methods to effect changes on the structural level of the municipality. The analysis shows that both the successes and the failures depend on the complex interplay of various sources of power: the power of specific individuals and interest groups, the power of ideology, the power of the profession, and the power of the organisation.
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