What Mothers Do: Motherhood as a Resource for Negotiating Sick-Leave Legitimacy in Swedish Sickness Insurance Interactions

Sick leave in the Nordic countries is a gendered issue. Alongside other explanations, women’s higher levels of sick leave have been linked to their far-reaching family responsibilities. Meanwhile, studies have shown how such responsibilities induce questioning of the legitimacy of sick leave, indicating that normative aspects linking these categories cannot solely be approached in terms of causal explanations. The current study suggests an alternative way of studying this relationship, approaching motherhood as something being “done” in situated ways, to particular ends; a resource for interaction. By analysing naturally occurring interactions—meetings held by the Swedish Social Insurance Agency—the study renders visible the collaborative production of sick leave as a gendered matter, and motherhood as part of the negotiation of sickness insurance. The analysis shows the meaning and import of motherhood for sick leave to be a live issue for participants, drawing attention to how these categories are neither culturally predefined, nor dispositional, but flexibly assembled for certain purposes. Motherhood functions as a resource in two ways: (1) displaying restricted ability to care for children supports claims of impairment; (2) invoking motherhood works to account for slow or inactive rehabilitation. However, occasioning motherhood in the examined context is also risky: (3) displaying extensive mothering may be treated as indicating low commitment to rehabilitation, and (4) displaying limited mothering may be taken as indicating unfitness as a parent.     

Not-Knowing or Knowing Naught: Revisiting the Concept of Collaboration and Expertise in Child and Youth Care Practice

This article discusses the complexities associated with adopting a not-knowing stance in Child and Youth Care practice. By highlighting some of the challenges, it also clarifies the distinctions between practitioner lack of knowing how to proceed and an intentional, uncertain attitude when working with children, youth and families. Recommendations or caveats are provided if a practitioner chooses to adopt this kind of orientation to practice.     

Gendered bodies in academia — an analytic approach to social meaning‐making among students

This article presents an analytic approach to the study of gender meaning in an academic context. In the presentation empirical material from an interview study among 29 Danish male and female university students is applied. The analytic approach is based on the conception of gender meaning as a culturally constructed phenomenon in continuous process. Current gender meaning is seen as a construction based on the idea of coherence between the gendered sign on the body and a variety of components including sexual and professionally related aspects. The connections between body sign and the components as well as among the components themselves are a continuous goal of negotiation processes among the male and female students.     

Sexual Attraction, Sexual Identity, and Psychosocial Wellbeing in a National Sample of Young Women During Emerging Adulthood

Identity-based conceptualizations of sexual orientation may not account adequately for variation in young women’s sexuality. Sexual minorities fare worse in psychosocial markers of wellbeing (i.e., depressive symptoms, anxiety, self esteem, social support) than heterosexual youth; however, it remains unclear whether these health disparities exclusively affect individuals who adopt a sexual minority identity or if they also may be present among heterosexually-identified youth who report same-sex attractions. We examined the relationship between sexual attraction, sexual identity, and psychosocial wellbeing in the female only subsample (weighted, n = 391) of a national sample of emerging adults (age 18–24). Women in this study rated on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely) their degree of sexual attraction to males and females, respectively. From these scores, women were divided into 4 groups (low female/low male attraction, low female/high male attraction, high female/low male attraction, or high female/high male attraction). We explored the relationship between experiences of attraction, reported sexual identity, and psychosocial outcomes using ordinary least squares regression. The results indicated sexual attraction to be predictive of women’s psychosocial wellbeing as much as or more than sexual identity measures. We discuss these findings in terms of the diversity found in young women’s sexuality, and how sexual minority status may be experienced by this group.     

Farm-Level Pathways to Improved Nutritional Status: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

Global, national and local policies and programmes for agricultural development are recurrently justified based on their alleged role in improving food and nutrition security. However, strikingly little evidence is available to prove that a direct, household-level link between agricultural production and improved nutrition exists. The objective of this special issue is to systematically and empirically test, using data from Africa and South Asia, whether a relationship between household agricultural production and nutrition can be found. Overall, the studies in this special issue support the hypothesis that household agricultural production has direct and important linkages with dietary patterns and nutrition.     

Intergovernmental Grants and Public Expenditures: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

The relationship between intergovernmental grants and public expenditures is one of the most studied phenomena in the local public finance literature. However, little is known about whether the impact of unconditional grants is fundamentally different from that of other sources of municipal revenue. We study this question by means of a large-scale randomised survey experiment among Danish local politicians, which allows for a comparison of the impact of changes in various sources of municipal revenue. Our findings challenge the conventional conception in the public finance literature that money works differently depending on which sector they are generated in. Instead, ideology plays an important role in explaining how local politicians want to allocate resources when faced with changes in local government revenue.     

Economic Hardship and Adolescent Problem Drinking: Family Processes as Mediating Influences

Alcohol is the most commonly used substance among adolescents in the United States, and adolescent drinking is associated with various health risk behaviors. Given the prevalence and consequences of adolescent drinking, understanding family factors that contribute to adolescent drinking is an important area for research. This study used three waves of data to evaluate a family stress model in which economic hardship is indirectly related to adolescent problem drinking through maternal psychological distress, parenting behaviors, and adolescent externalizing behaviors. Respondents included 300 mothers (71 % Black, 29 % White) and adolescents (51 % male) who were interviewed when adolescents were ages 10, 14, and 16. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized model and findings supported our hypothesized model. Economic hardship was positively related to maternal psychological distress. Maternal psychological distress was negatively associated with supportive parenting, which in turn was negatively associated with externalizing problems. Externalizing problems were positively associated with problem drinking. In support of our hypothesis regarding indirect effects, economic hardship was indirectly related to problem drinking through maternal psychological distress, parenting behaviors, and adolescent externalizing problems. The findings from this study highlight the role of family processes in adolescent problem drinking.     

Institutional and Personal Spirituality/Religiosity and Psychosocial Adjustment in Adolescence: Concurrent and Longitudinal Associations

Spirituality/religiosity is hypothesized to promote positive adjustment among adolescents. The goals of this study were to assess the unique and joint associations between two dimensions of spirituality/religiosity—institutional and personal—and a range of domains of psychosocial adjustment (intrapersonal well-being, quality of parent–child relationship, substance use, and academic orientation) and to evaluate the direction of effects in these associations. Participants included 803 predominately Canadian-born adolescents (53 % female) from Ontario, Canada, who completed a survey in grade 11 and grade 12. At the concurrent level, higher personal spirituality/religiosity consistently and uniquely predicted more positive adjustment in terms of well-being, parental relationship, and academic orientation. Higher institutional spirituality/religiosity uniquely and consistently predicted lower substance use, particularly when personal spirituality/religiosity also was high. With regard to the direction of effects (i.e., longitudinal associations), institutional spirituality/religiosity predicted lower future substance use. The results imply that the personal and institutional dimensions of spirituality/religiosity may be associated differentially with psychosocial adjustment, and it may be only in the domain of substance use that spirituality/religiosity predicts change in behavior over time.