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The number of students with special educational needs (SEN) is growing rapidly. This study compared the correlations between the share of students identified with SEN and student diversity (socioeconomic status and ethnicity) at the school level in three countries. We used the principal questionnaire from the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) to examine data from principals in three welfare states (the United Kingdom, France, and Sweden) and whether minority students in these three countries also receive special education. We conducted an ordinal regression analysis to examine the data. First, our results suggest that the share of immigrants in schools does not reliably predict the share of students placed in SEN. Second, the schools' share of refugees predicts the share of students placed in SEN, although the results vary by educational stage and country. Third, the schools' share of socioeconomically disadvantaged students predicts the share of students with SEN in all countries. We conclude that our study both agrees and disagrees with overrepresentation theory and equity theory. Finally, we suggest that welfare state theory may explain these differences.

This article investigates stakeholders' learning and transformative action when developing a collaboration platform between a Swedish regional authority organisation (RAO) and civil society organisations (CSOs) to find new ways to provide welfare services. The material is based on 22 semi-structured interviews and observations of seven general meetings at which RAO officials and CSO representatives met. In addition, notes were taken during two workshops with key stakeholders and interviewees, respectively. Learning and transformative action were analysed through a TADS approach. The findings reveal that a signed agreement, stipulating collaboration between the two sectors (public and civil society) became a second stimulus for shared transformative agency. After signing the agreement, conflicts of motives arose, which challenged learning between stakeholders. Surprisingly, it was not the conflicts of motives between the two sectors, but those within each sector that constituted the most severe expansive learning challenges, and consequently also a delay in the development of the collaboration platform that was to provide welfare services. Nonetheless, the conflicts also contributed to small, incremental, steps of transformative action toward what they had set out to do.

Childhood marginalization is the result of complicated processes that appears difficult to address for policymakers worldwide. Neo-institutional theory enables studies of the complexity of educational organizations, showing how they evolve in responses to their contradictory surroundings and generate unintended social inequality. Three Nordic municipalities are currently participating in a project that focuses on the increasing polarization between exposed and privileged schools in urban areas and on the significance of institutional and organizational factors in their local welfare models in ensuring childhood equity. The project we report on combines data in contrasting urban school areas. After showing some examples of voices in the project, the authors discuss how municipal actors are informed about social problems in school organizations yet lack research-based tools to counteract social inequality in education. They theorize how collaboration between researchers and welfare providers can contribute to counteract social inequality. Lessons from the project indicate a need for further collaboration between different stakeholders that includes different voices to ensure that research on childhood inequality is relevant and has an impact.

This study explores the relation between risk of job automation and participation in adult education and training (AET) and examines variation in that relation across welfare regimes distinguishing between situational and institutional barriers. Using microdata of PIAAC, we analyze participation in formal or nonformal AET for job-related reasons in relation to the risk of automation of the respondents' occupation after controlling for main sociodemographic characteristics. Logistic regression models are run on respondents from 14 European countries representing different welfare regimes: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (Scandinavian countries); Italy, Greece, and Spain (Southern European); Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland (Central and Eastern Europe), Belgium, France, and Germany (Continental); and United Kingdom and Ireland (Anglo-Saxon countries). Our findings confirm that workers in occupations at high risk of automation were found to be consistently less likely to participate in job-related AET, quite irrespective of welfare regime. [The paper was presented at XIII Conferenza Espanet Italia--Il welfare state di fronte alle sfide globali (Venezia, 17 September 2020).]

Purpose: This article examines high school students' understanding of the welfare state as a political issue and discusses how it can be approached in the classroom. The study was conducted within a social-science educational context and departs from a perspective from which educational goals can be seen as intrinsic (goals closely connected to the academic disciplines) or extrinsic (goals formulated by the political sphere, e.g. students' deliberation on political issues). These variant goals can pose a dilemma for teachers and students alike as they engage in highly political topics. Design & methodology: To explain the structure of the dilemmas of teaching issues that can be understood politically in a social-science context, this paper focuses on students' assessment of such topics before teaching and how they generally reason different political views on the welfare state. The data consist of written documents produced by tenth-year students in response to two accounts of the best welfare state. Using a qualitative content analysis, the data were analysed to identify students' approaches to a political issue and their normative reasoning. Findings: The results display an understanding of the welfare state that is consistent with extrinsic goals, i.e. as an issue to engage with as a political entity rather than exclusively as a social scientist. It was noted that students experience difficulty in recognising the difference between politics and the study of politics. Practical implications: The study contributes to an understanding of the influence of normativity on students' thinking and represents an attempt to bridge the difficulty of combining intrinsic and extrinsic goals in social-science education.

The current article examined educational achievement at lower-secondary level in Sweden (Grade 9), using grades and national test results (NTR) as the dependent variables. Linear regressions and bivariate correlations indicated that the proportion of highly-educated individuals in each municipality was positively associated with grades and NTR and that the proportion of welfare recipients and non-natives, as well as rural location, had negative associations. In relation to two case studies with fewer observations, teacher certification rates were more strongly correlated with higher achievement measures. Overall, the NTR of Swedish as a second language (SVA) pupils lowered the overall results in most municipalities. For instance, in low-performing municipalities the native students' NTR was virtually identical to that of the "high-performing" or "best" municipalities when SVA scores were removed. Thus, it seems misguided to highlight "successful" school municipalities whose performance is only average.

The purpose of this article is to explore first-line managers' experiences of workplace learning in elderly care, with a particular focus on the conditions for learning when entering a new workplace as the new manager. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 35 first-line managers from three organisations in Sweden. Four learning conditions emerged as being particularly significant for first-line managers: the managers' previous professional experience, job-specific training, social support, and the joint repertoire of organisational arrangements. These conditions shifted in importance during the process of entering the workplace, and the way in which the conditions gave access to learning for different managers varied. The managers' professional experience and others' recognition of them had a considerable impact on their admittance to the new workplace. After the initial entry phase, the other three learning conditions became more significant and played a role in enabling or constraining the managers' learning and becoming the new manager. One conclusion is that contextual and work experiences from elderly care were significant for learning during the initial phase and in order to gain access to workplace learning. Another conclusion is that high expectations and great responsibility were placed on the managers to satisfy their own learning needs. This implies that professional, social and emotional support that is received informally is just as significant for learning as formalised training for entering a new workplace as a new manager.

Between 1996-1998, England, Scotland and Sweden moved responsibility for all early childhood education and care (ECEC) and school-age childcare (SACC) services from welfare into education. Following an earlier study researching these reforms up to 2003, this article examines and compares subsequent developments and consequences of the initial reform, from 2003-2017. These differed widely. Sweden succeeded in achieving further integration and better access to services, while services in England and Scotland remained divided and fragmented. England's attempt at major reform did not survive political change; while Scotland's more ambitious universalist approach was constrained by lack of appropriate devolved powers and a clear vision of how ECEC and SACC might fit into the education agenda. Undue dominance of the school and the teaching profession posed risks in all three countries. The article considers possible reasons for the differing responses to a common policy change, including the different histories of ECEC and SACC prior to transfer, processes of subsequent policy development, and the effects of differing welfare regimes and path dependency.

In welfare-policy studies, conditions are often depicted at a national level. This is the case not least in studies of young people's paths and detours to working life. Studies at a high aggregation level have their advantages when it comes to distinguishing differences in living conditions between countries at similar economic development levels and examining the degree to which these differences can be related to institutional inequalities, differences in so-called welfare-policy regimes. But there is also a risk that studies of national regimes obscure the differences in socio-geographical conditions that exist in all countries. In this article we show how the socio-geographical conditions, to a great degree, affect young people's ability to find work on the Swedish labor market with good development and support possibilities. A starting point is that the image of the Swedish transition regime as universalistic, as is often depicted in comparative research on young people's transitions, obscures significant differences in young people's transition and establishment patterns that are related to geographical residence. The Swedish universalistic regime encompasses a large and, over time, growing socio-geographically related spread of establishment opportunities for youths and young adults. We illustrate the circumstances by presenting comparable data in the form of an establishment index on the conditions for youths and young adults in Sweden's 290 municipalities.

In international comparisons, Sweden is one of the countries with the lowest number of children growing up in poverty; its material standard is high, and welfare services are extensive and heavily subsidised. How child poverty can be understood in that context is interrogated in the article. The point of departure for the discussion is Swedish Save the Children's 2013 anti-poverty campaign "Fattigskolan" [Poverty School]. The campaign presents child poverty from the vantage point of a welfare state and is informative for understanding normative discourses on childhood. Childhood is investigated as a social imagination that both structures children's and parents' everyday lives and organises society. It is argued that the dominant social imagination is based on a middle-class fantasy permeating the organisation of the welfare state. The elements of this fantasy are critical to understanding child poverty.

In this paper, I examine whether generalized trust and education, as well as social security policies of welfare state institutions matter for cross-national differences in subjective well-being (SWB), because knowledge on this issue is still lacking. For this purpose I integrated the insights of two sociological theories: Social Function Production theory and Actor-Centred Institutionalism. Based on these theoretical notions we derived several hypotheses, which I tested using multilevel analysis of the data from the European Social Survey (2006), in a sample of 37,237 respondents from 22 European countries. My findings indicate that various extensiveness of social security policies matter for the level of SWB, and for the impact of education on SWB. I found negative impact of low education on SWB in all countries, except in Northern and Western European countries. This might suggest that social security policies of the latter countries have diminished the negative impact of low education on SWB. Moreover, my findings indicate positive relationship between individual education and generalized trust; as well as between generalized trust and SWB in countries with all five types of social security policies.

The increasing proportion of senior citizens in the population places new demands on the existing welfare system, in terms of the delivery of social services, but also with respect to democratic issues such as 'inclusion' and 'participation.' Participation in adult education offers a context where senior citizens can be included in society, experience meaningfulness, and even create the conditions for their own well-being. In Sweden, there exist formal adult education systems that have enjoyed more success than others with respect to attracting groups of senior citizens who traditionally have not participated in the same degree in this domain. The Folk High School is one such educational system. The purpose of this article is to provide a description of how Folk High School senior courses are organized and what role the courses that are offered there play in the participants' lives with respect to meaningfulness, their well-being, and life-long learning. Eight focus group interviews with 33 participants were conducted at eight different Folk High Schools in southern Sweden. The results of this study indicate that Folk High Schools' senior courses are organized together with the participants and in such a manner that interaction with participants from other courses is made possible. This interaction gives rise to an unpretentious- and, in a broad sense, an intercultural learning experience. The participants experience this as meaningful, and as something which impacts on their quality of life in a positive manner. Furthermore, it plays an important function in the participants' continued life-long learning.

Purpose: This study explores outcomes of treatment provided by specialized units within the social welfare sector in Sweden to clients seeking help with hypersexual behavior. Method: The participants were 27 males and 1 female (M = 40.3 years) who sought help from one of the three specialized units within social welfare in Sweden. A pretest-posttest group design was used to assess changes after treatment. Quantitative data were collected through interviews and self-report forms. Results: At posttreatment stage (on average a 10-month follow-up), mental health was significantly improved and hypersexual behavior reportedly reduced. The treatment at the specialized units appeared to help the clients. Conclusions: The specialized units seemed to deliver favorable service without shaming and stigmatizing participants. As this study can be considered a pilot study, it needs to be replicated.

The aim of this article is to analyse the ways in which migration plays out in adult students' narratives about their occupational choice and future, focusing on three individual narratives of adult students with various experiences of migration to Sweden. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's conception of orientation, our results show how the adult students' narratives on their future occupations are formed on the basis of migration, pertaining to their particular experiences of being recognised as migrant Others. Among the three students, similar challenges emerge in terms of their claims for belonging. One the one hand, the students do claim belonging to the Swedish social community. On the other hand, they are -- as 'migrants' -- repeatedly reminded of their non-belonging to this community. In various ways, they feel out of place. Although migration, in the narratives, is not played out one and the same way, but in various ways, engagement in adult education as a means of finding a job appear as the main orientation guiding the futures of the adult students, as being an important way of finding a future and claim one's belonging to the Swedish social community.

Low completion rate in upper secondary education is seen as a big problem in the Nordic countries. School failure has shown to dramatically increase the risks for unemployment and labour market exclusion with severe consequences for both society and the young person. This paper analyses national policy measures to combat low upper secondary education completion rates in Norway and Sweden, often regarded as representing a social democratic welfare model and a universalistic transition regime. The analysis demonstrates that although this issue has received extensive political attention, the two countries display somewhat different policy designs. The Norwegian approach is proactive and targeted while the Swedish policy is more general and directed towards reforming organisational structures in upper-secondary education. In sum, our analysis demonstrates that national governance structures shape and influence policy design in the context of an increasingly diversified Nordic social democratic welfare state regime.

In this article, we approach large questions regarding justice and equality in the Nordic classrooms. A substantial body of previous research emphasises the importance of student engagement in teaching and learning. Drawing on video data from Norway, Sweden and Finland, we focus on whole-class teaching, i.e. situations in which the teacher addresses the class from the front of the classroom, to investigate justice trough participation. We have approached our topic through two concerns: student participation in classroom discourse and student engagement as providing access to content. Our findings seem to pose some serious challenges for the Nordic welfare society vision of classrooms as core societal hubs for justice and equality. While whole-class teaching is one of the primary tools available for attempting to achieve justice and equality for all, this interaction format seems to contain inherent constraints that do not support equitable student engagement. Further, the way the Nordic classrooms have responded so far to the massive digitisation in their societies seems to pose serious questions rather than provide comforting answers.

The purpose of this article is analysis of discursive marginalisation through education in Nordic welfare states. What knowledge do Nordic research discourses produce about marginalisation through education in Nordic welfare states? What are the Nordic contributions to research discourses on marginalisation through education? We apply a discourse theoretical approach and analyse 109 peer-reviewed publications on marginalisation by the Nordic Centre of Excellence "Justice through education in the Nordic countries" (NCoE JustEd) between 2013 and 2017. The publications are from Finland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. Four critical Nordic research discourses reconceptualise marginalisation in relation to dominant educational discourses on marketisation, Eurocentrism, gender equity and ableism. These Nordic research discourses document discursive effects of the dominant, normalising discourses in terms of stigma, segregation and exclusion of poor, working-class students, non-white and immigrant students and descendants of immigrants, as well as sexual minorities and disabled students. Based on ethical, epistemological and methodological considerations, the critical Nordic research discourses produce knowledge about marginalisation as a relational, intersectional and interdiscursive phenomenon. The critical Nordic research discourses de- and reconstruct knowledge about marginalisation in Nordic welfare states.

Lifelong learning is becoming increasingly important in today's societies. Individuals need to develop their skills through training in order to be successfully integrated in the labor market. We use data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies to investigate gender differences in training across 12 countries. We analyze participation and perceived barriers to training for women in comparison with men and control for family structure and employment. As institutional framework, we use four different welfare state regimes to show how policies can affect the decision to participate. Our results show that different welfare regimes have an impact on the extent adults take part in training and on their perceived barriers. In all countries except Belgium and the Nordic states, men are more likely to participate in training. However, this inequality disappears once controlling for further individual characteristics. Our research provides insights why adults are deterred from engaging in training.

The Nordic Education Model was an important part of the social democratic welfare state for many years in the second half of the 20th century. Since the millennium, transnational agencies have drawn education from the realm of politics into a global market place by advocating strategies such as efficiency, competition, decentralisation, governing by detailed objectives, control, privatisation, and profile schools. This article gives brief accounts of major trends in current school development policies, discourses, and practices in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden since the millennium, and explores how the values of the Nordic model are affected by the new policies. It is argued that the Nordic model still exists as the predominant system for the large majority of Scandinavian children at a national level, but that a number of new technologies aiming to increase the efficiency of teaching and learning are gradually undermining the main values of the Nordic model.

This article presents analyses of documents from special schools in Sweden for students in the care of social welfare who have been assessed with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. The aim is to use actor-network theory to analyse how blame and critique are handled in individual educational plans, and how responsibilities are produced in interactions between human and non-human actors. The documentation can be read as a materialised network that produces a distributed responsibility; the network is stabilised by accepting and recognising differences between actors. The template headings for each actor enable different translations of the network and make it possible for responsibilities to be distributed between students, parents, social service officers and teachers, thereby reducing the risk of conflicts. While the network provides opportunities for students to become learners, it is silent on the topic of adults' responsibilities.

This article compares the welfare services for adults with an intellectual disability in three European countries: England, Norway and Sweden. The purpose of the comparison is to develop an understanding of the welfare state and institutional contexts of the country-specific policies and to develop a critical analysis through a comparative method based on selected secondary literature. Typological frameworks of European welfare states are applied as analytic frameworks to enable comparison between the countries. It is argued that there are international policy developments but these are shaped at a national level by different types of welfare states and histories. Through a comparison of similarities and differences, the article suggests that international policy ideas that impact on the lives of people with intellectual disabilities are mediated by different types of welfare states and institutions.

Objective: This study examines whether the psychometric properties of the short version of the Evidence-Based Practice Process Assessment Scale (EBPPAS) remain satisfactory when translated and transferred to the context of Swedish welfare services. Method: The Swedish version of EBPPAS was tested on a sample of community-based professionals in social care services and health care services (n = 710). Internal consistency, test-retest reliability (n = 95), and the factor structure were examined. Results: The findings support the scale's reliability. Both a values and test-retest coefficients were satisfactory or excellent for the entire scale and for each of its four sections. A four-component structure was achieved. Thus, the results are consistent with previous research on the EBPPAS. Conclusion: The study provides support for the EBPPAS, short version, to be used in evaluating EBP implementation efforts in Sweden.

The historical origins and development of comprehensive schooling have seldom been analyzed systematically and comparatively. However, there is a rich comparative and historically grounded literature on the development of welfare states, which focuses on many relevant policies, but ignores the education system. In particular, the power resources approach applied by many welfare state scholars has been continuously elaborated and refined in various ways. Two major comparative-historical analyses of the development of education systems, and comprehensive schooling in particular, are therefore reviewed and discussed with a view to how their insights could be enriched with knowledge drawn from welfare state literature. The article argues that, while education does constitute a separate analytical issue, scholars of comprehensive and other educational reforms could nonetheless improve their arguments by taking into account the debates and theoretical elaborations produced in the field of welfare state analysis.

The empirical investigation in this paper develops the perspective of media in education by focusing on how the use of film in education stimulates the production of cultural, societal and social values and norms in school when pupils talk about "the police" in school cinema activities in Sweden. "Police" is regarded as a keyword and stereotype and the analysis focuses on how difference is created and negotiated between pupils and between pupils and teachers. Moreover, the paper highlights how acknowledging or disavowing difference is used by the pupils to position themselves. The result suggests that pupils create the police as negative and positive sign to gain position as: (1) included in a welfare society and (2) as problem solvers in the classroom (and society).

Using international data on child well-being and educational attainment, this article compares child well-being in the United States to member countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Multiple measures of child well-being are analyzed, such as material well-being (including poverty, unemployment, and income inequality), child health and safety (birth weight, infant mortality, health care, and childcare), educational attainment, and family and peer relationships (including generational cleavages). Using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory as an organizational framework, the impact and interrelatedness of these systems on educational attainment are examined, with parallels drawn between a nation's social policies, child well-being, and educational attainment. The author asserts that social policy in the United States is more comprehensive than is commonly believed, although the redistributive benefits of social policies are allocated much differently compared to OECD countries. Explanations for comparative differences in social policy include differences in political culture and political development as well as racial and class conflict. The author concludes that it is difficult to ignore the role of race and socioeconomic class in explaining differences in social welfare expenditures between the United States and European countries because the pattern of social welfare distribution (broadly conceived--including programs, tax breaks, and incentives) falls largely along racial and class lines.

Understanding the role of social policies in intergenerational transfers from old to young people is especially important in times of population aging. This paper focuses on the influences of social expenditures and social services on financial support and on practical help from older parents to their adult children based on the first two waves from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE, "N" = 60,250 dyads from 13 European countries). Multilevel models showed that social policy plays an important role for intergenerational transfer patterns: The more public assistance was provided to citizens, the more likely parents supported their adult children financially and practically, but this support was less intense in terms of money and time given. Thus, the analyses support the specialization hypothesis that posits a division of labor between family and state for downward intergenerational transfers. (Contains 3 tables, 3 figures, and 1 note.)

Neoliberalism is the dominant economic paradigm in the globe today. It has led to stagnant wages, high unemployment, increased income inequality and a decline in quality of life for the average citizen in the industrialised world over the past 30?years. It has also fomented a dramatic increase in economic instability, culminating in the 2007 financial crisis. In this article, I argue for Neo-Keynesian economic policy, including reregulation of the financial sector, a more progressive tax system and strategic government investment in the economy. Looking at education, I conclude that economic reform is a necessary corollary to educational reform if we are to improve the prospects of the next generation.

The national policies and historical roots of early childhood education (ECE) vary from society to society. In the Nordic countries, early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies have been built in the context of the welfare state. As such, they are closely connected to other welfare policy areas such as social policy, family policy and education policy, in addition to which a close relationship with labour policy is also evident. This article sheds light on the historical roots of Nordic ECEC policies by describing the commonalities and differences between the Nordic countries. The "Nordic model" is commonly described as integrated. Education, teaching and caring form an integrated unit and the term early childhood education and care is therefore typically used when describing the "Nordic model". It is also said to be based on a child-centred, holistic approach with an emphasis on participation, democracy, autonomy and freedom, while its track record of high quality ECE services is considered to be due in part to the use of a well-trained workforce. The Nordic countries are, however, developing and redefining their ECEC policies in the global economic and cultural context, in which governments have to choose their priorities. Pressure to standardize ECE services is also apparent, and signs of erosion of the key elements of the Nordic model have been seen in recent policy debates. This paper discusses the current direction of Nordic ECE policy making and the future of the Nordic model.

As an answer to the welfare state's transformation and increased focus on goal- and result-oriented regulation, Swedish educational policy is in a state of change. The matter of the teaching profession's aspirations with regard to professionalisation has come up once again: reminders that reference the introduction of teacher certification in order to guarantee the quality of education have emerged from political quarters, while union quarters are pleading for greater status for the teaching profession. The article discusses whether the municipalisation of the teaching profession in 1989 was a break with the goal of Sweden's previous political debate on education--namely, "a comprehensive school for all"--and whether the increased control over the work of the teachers can be said to be a consequence of the reform. (Contains 8 notes.)

Previous research in the United States suggests that depression related to economic hardship decreases with age. We test whether this pattern can be generalized to other developed nations. Based on data from 23 countries in the European Social Survey (2006-2007), multilevel analyses show that the moderating role of age depends on the socio-political context. While the hardship-depression link is not significantly different across the life course in Nordic and Bismarckian regimes, the hardship-depression link increases with age in Southern and Eastern European countries and decreases with age in strength in Anglo-Saxon welfare states. Our findings suggest that welfare state regimes play a significant role in attenuating, boosting, or even reversing the health effects of social experiences such as economic hardship on aging. Health knowledge gained through research that ignores the socio-political context may be limited in terms of generalization. (Contains 2 notes, 4 tables, and 1 figure.)

This article deals with the representation of children in the Swedish welfare state, and particularly how children and parents living in economic hardship are positioned in issues regarding financial aid. According to Article 12 in the UNCRC, children have a right to be heard "in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child". However, children are not participants in processes concerning welfare benefits, despite the effect that the outcome of these processes may have on children's everyday life. Using welfare benefits appeals as a starting point, the article argues that the impact of the centrality of work discourse in Swedish welfare policy further emphasizes children's position as passive and non-participants in the welfare discourse. (Contains 9 notes.)

This article places the choice to claim welfare benefits in a social context by studying how neighborhood welfare receipt affects welfare receipt among couples in Stockholm, Sweden. It is expected that the propensity to claim welfare should increase with welfare use in the neighborhood, primarily through stigma reduction and increasing availability of information. I use individual-level panel data (N = 1,595,843) for the Stockholm County population during the 1990s, data that contain a wide range of information and allow extensive controls for observed and unobserved confounding factors. The results from pooled and fixed-effects logistic regressions suggest that welfare receipt among people in the same neighborhood substantially increases the number of households entering the welfare system ("inflow"), but the effects on "outflow" are negligible. (Contains 7 tables and 16 notes.)

This article argues that unemployment benefits are providing a crucial but often overlooked function by reducing the insecurity associated with modern labor markets. Because job insecurity is associated with concerns about future financial security, economic support during unemployment may lessen the negative effects of job insecurity on employed individuals' well-being. Using data from the European Social Survey, this article shows that the generosity of unemployment benefits makes a difference to the subjective well-being of employed individuals, especially those with limited economic resources and an insecure position in the labor market. These results indicate that unemployment benefits may be viewed as a collective resource with important external benefits, i.e., benefits to society over and above those to the unemployed who directly utilize such benefits. (Contains 3 tables, 1 figure, and 9 notes.)

The decentralised Swedish school system has become increasingly directed to the construction of self-governing and responsible pedagogic identities that are supposed to enable integration and participation. Drawing on the work of the geographer Edward W. Soja, I acknowledge how material and symbolic spatialisation intersect with the local production of included and excluded identities in the context of restructuring education. The paper is based on a study in two areas in a segregated Swedish city; one disadvantaged and one advantaged area. I use a wide range of data such as policy documents, questionnaire data, longitudinal statistics, interviews with local politicians, school actors and former students. The findings show that former students from the disadvantaged area were more often excluded from further education and were dependent on social welfare to a higher extent. Moreover, they faced low expectations and were simultaneously excluded from new educational processes that explicitly aim at social inclusion. In the paper I discuss how ethical ideals of decentralisation and participation, and the evaluation of such policies in terms of access to further education and work, conceal the local production of excluded identities. This production, I argue, is based on an amalgamation of material conditions and spatial representations.

In Sweden, most HIV-infected parents are of African origin. The present study explored the frequency of HIV-infected African parents' disclosure of their status to their children and custody planning for their children's future to identify support needs among these families. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 47 parents (41 families). The study population included first-generation immigrants, with a total of 87 children less than 18 years of age. Only women had disclosed their HIV status, and only to eight of 59 children older than six. Half of the parents had talked to someone about future custody arrangements. These parents had more contact with a social worker at the social welfare office and with a medical social worker at the HIV clinic. Most parents (30) wanted their children to be cared for by a relative in Sweden or by their HIV-negative partner. Neither disclosure nor custody planning was associated with clinical status or antiretroviral treatment. This study highlights the low HIV-disclosure rate to children of HIV-infected African immigrant parents and the importance of support from social workers.

Sweden and Switzerland are among the wealthiest countries in the world, but also two countries with different approaches to how to provide welfare. Sweden has followed a social democratic welfare model and Switzerland a liberal model. This has implications for how the education systems have been organised. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study makes it possible to compare the achievements of students in reading and mathematics. Students in Switzerland are significantly better than Swedish students in mathematics. In reading, Swedish students are significantly better than Swiss students. In both countries, girls are better readers than boys. The gender difference in reading is larger in Sweden than in Switzerland. Boys are better than girls in mathematics. The gender difference in mathematics is smaller in Sweden than in Switzerland. The difference in reading between natives and non-natives is considerably lower in Sweden than in Switzerland. Sweden is among those countries where the variance between schools is very low. In Switzerland the variation in student performance among schools is higher than the average in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Both education systems may be regarded to be of high quality in an international perspective. The Swedish system has, with the exception of the gender gap in reading, produced a system that seems to have a higher degree of equity than the Swiss system.

This paper examines peer effects in welfare use among refugees. We exploit a Swedish refugee placement policy, which generated exogenous variation in peer group composition. Our analysis distinguishes between the quantity of contacts--the number of individuals of the same ethnicity--and the quality of contacts--welfare use among members of the ethnic group. Long-term welfare dependence increases if the individual is placed in a welfare dependent community. The number of contacts is either irrelevant or negatively related to welfare receipt; not controlling for residential self-selection yields the opposite conclusion. The results are very similar across household types and in different parts of the predicted earnings distribution. (Contains 7 tables, 1 figure and 29 footnotes.)

To assess prevalence and odds for teenage parenthood among former child welfare clients, we used national register data for all children born in Sweden 1972-1983 (n = 1,178,207), including 49,582 former child welfare clients with varying intervention experiences. Logistic regression models, adjusted for demographic, socio-economic and familial background factors, were used to estimate odds ratios. Among youth who received interventions in adolescence, 16-19% of the girls and 5-6% of the boys became teenage parents, compared to 3% for girls and 0.7% for boys without child welfare experiences. Youths who entered child welfare services in their teens had four- to fivefold adjusted odds for becoming a teenage parent. For other child welfare clients, adjusted odds were mostly twofold. Youth of both sexes who receive child welfare services in adolescence are a high-risk group for teenage parenthood. Child welfare agencies should, as a minimum, provide each individual client youth with access to birth control counselling and contraceptives.

Because of high unemployment rates among youth in Europe, comparative research has focused on identification of those risks and opportunities associated with the integration process from unemployment to work. The integration process of immigrant youth, however, received much less attention, despite their initially higher risk of unemployment than that for non-immigrant youth. Therefore, this study aims to analyse the exit from longer-term unemployment, with a focus on the integration into work of young immigrants in Finland, Sweden, France and Germany, countries that represent different welfare models and have different integration policies towards immigrants. The research is based on a European survey on youth unemployment with representative samples of longer-term unemployed young people in each of the studied countries. The results demonstrate that longer-term immigrant youth, compared with their non-immigrant counterparts, are less likely to find employment in Finland, face greater risks of mental health problems in Sweden and face increased risks of financial deprivation in France. In agreement with previous literature, these findings demonstrate that, with regard to expectations, the social democratic welfare states in particular have failed to promote the integration of longer-term unemployed young immigrants. (Contains 4 tables.)

Young unemployed persons are a prioritised group in active labour market programmes. Such programmes can be regarded as "integrative", facilitating integration into the labour market for young people in accordance with their own preferences. However, such programmes can also be regarded as "defensive", discouraging young unemployed persons from claiming transfer incomes and urging them to lower their sights when looking for jobs. The article examines the conceptions of the young participants themselves, analysing whether activation programmes are experienced in ways endorsing the integrative or the defensive perspective across different European welfare states. Survey data from these countries indicate that activation programmes for youth are at the integrative end of the spectrum. This is especially the case in the universal welfare regime countries, which are also the group of countries in which youth activation schemes are most widespread. Participant's scheme evaluations are least favourable in Scotland, in line with expectations of a liberal welfare regime approach. Most conservative welfare regime countries fall in between. (Contains 2 figures, 3 tables and 9 notes.)

A structural, static model of household labor supply and multiple welfare program participation is formulated and estimated. Results suggest that labor supply among two-parent families in Sweden was quite inelastic.

Although the economic and social conditions of families have changed considerably, the framework of U.S. social policy with regard to families has not changed. Under the framework, policymakers assume that the poverty of families or individuals is largely their own fault. This long-standing belief has impeded the expansion of public spending on behalf of families. I compare public policy on family benefits in the United States and Sweden. The analysis indicates that the United States spends only a fraction of what Sweden spends on family benefits. I also describe the allocation of funds to specific family benefits programs in the two countries and discuss the policy directions that the United States may take in the future.

Examines factors distinguishing men's partnership and parental statuses in the United States and Sweden, which differ in state support to families. Unlike the United States, in Sweden the presence of a man in a household has little effect on receipt of income support and health insurance. This article examines how resources affect men's family relationships in these countries. (BF)