Using the stigma engagement strategy in interviews with men who pay for sex [Elektronisk resurs]

The article discusses the development and application of the so-called “stigma engagement strategy (SES)” in interviews with stigmatized study populations, drawing on an interview study with Swedish men who have paid for sex. SES is a qualitative methodological approach that utilizes external sources of stigmatizing narratives, such as newspaper articles and columns, as textual probes within interviews with stigmatized individuals. This strategy can help researchers to 1) concretize public discourse on stigmatized behaviors, 2) bring the broader societal context into the interview setting, 3) create a degree of separation between stigmatizing societal narratives and the interaction between interviewer and interviewee, and 4) contrast different narratives (societal versus personal). As such, this strategy assists in the exploration of how individuals manage stigmatization, enabling researchers to gain a comprehensive understanding of their experiences and perspectives. The article contributes to the existing body of studies on the value of deploying material methods in interview research by elucidating how these texts facilitated the data collection and analysis

Consensus statements on end-of-life care in ICU - A Scandinavian multidisciplinary Delphi study

Background End-of-life care in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is complex, requiring a balance of ethical, cultural and medical considerations while ensuring comfort and dignity for critically ill patients and their families. Aim We aimed to develop a set of core domains for end-of-life care at Scandinavian ICUs along with corresponding consensus statements from patients, families and multidisciplinary experts. Methods In a three-round Delphi study, a multidisciplinary advisory board from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Denmark, including ICU physicians, ICU nurses, palliative care specialists and a former ICU patient and family, developed potential end-of-life care domains of interest. Specialists with special competence/interest in end-of-life care and clinicians in all five countries were invited to rank these domains according to their importance and provide recommendations within each domain. The advisory board rephrased the recommendations into statements, which were sent out in the second round for participants to rate based on their level of agreement. Statements that did not achieve consensus in the second round were rephrased and redistributed in the third round. Results After the third Delphi round, 59 statements across 10 domains reached consensus. The domains were: 1. Communication at ICU admission, 2. Withholding and withdrawal of therapy and end-of-life care decisions in the ICU, 3. Meeting religious and spiritual needs and the needs of vulnerable patients in the ICU, 4. Extubation and termination of mechanical ventilation at the end of life in the ICU, 5. Management and monitoring of symptoms at the end of life in the ICU, 6. Continuous sedation at the end of life in the ICU, 7. Indicators for specialist palliative care consultations in the ICU, 8. Patient transfers from the ICU at the end of life, 9. Bereavement care and 10. Debriefing in the ICU following a patient's death. Discussion We developed core domains and consensus statements aiming at optimising end-of-life care that considers cultural and ethical nuances. The domains may help to shape end-of-life care guidelines in Scandinavian ICUs

Exploratory study of the effects of multi-site mindfulness interventions on the multifaceted self as a psychosocial indicator of mental health [Elektronisk resurs] : A pilot study

The multifaceted self refers to how non-clinical individuals perceive themselves as possessing a more sophisticated self-compared to others by accumulating pairs of opposing positive traits. Conversely, depressed individuals are more multifaceted on negative traits, revealing an absence of self-enhancement strategies, which are known to be associated with psychological adjustment. A pre−/post-intervention study was conducted to observe the changes in multifaceted self and mental health following an 8-week multi-site Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) targeting depression and anxiety disorders. Among the 24 participants, changes occurred across all outcome measures (i.e., trait mindfulness, anxiety, depression and self-compassion). Participants displayed reduced self-negativity, a more positive view of others, and although they still maintained a more negative self-view compared to their view of others, this improved with the MBIs. Mindfulness and social comparison processes are discussed. The multifaceted self serves as a relevant methodological approach to assess mental health adjustment in MBIs.</p

The Transferability of Human Capital and Migrant Incorporation Strategies in the Swedish Labor Market: A Sequence Analysis

Migrants benefit differently from their educational credentials depending on their origin. We use the case of Sweden to study the strategies that migrants adopt to overcome barriers keeping them from fully using their education in the host society's labor market. We used administrative register data on employment, self-employment, unemployment, parental leave, and education to classify nine-year-long labor-market sequences of a cohort of migrants. Optimal matching and cluster analysis yielded five sequence types from which incorporation strategies can be inferred. We studied how institutional barriers to the transferability of human capital moderate the association between education and sequence type. We found that the association between education and the probability of each labor market sequence type depended on the institutional dissimilarity between origin and host country, even when linguistic dissimilarity and cultural dissimilarity were accounted for. Favored by supranational institutional arrangements that standardize educational credentials, migrants whose origin country was a member of what later became the European Higher Education Area avoided inactivity by converting their human capital into early employment. In contrast, highly educated migrants from other parts of the world tended to first obtain Swedish educational credentials before entering the labor market. Strategies based on self-employment were not related to education regardless of migrant origin and resulted in much lower earnings. Our findings show that differences in the transferability of human capital can produce diverse incorporation outcomes by shaping which strategies migrants adopt to navigate the context of reception.</p

An upper pressure limit for low-Z benign termination of runaway electron beams in TCV

We present a model for the particle balance in the post-disruption runaway electron plateau phase of a tokamak discharge. The model is constructed with the help of, and applied to, experimental data from TCV discharges investigating the so-called ‘low-Z benign termination’ runaway electron mitigation scheme. In the benign termination scheme, the free electron density is first reduced in order for a subsequently induced MHD instability to grow rapidly and spread the runaway electrons widely across the wall. We show that the observed non-monotonic dependence of the free electron density with the measured neutral pressure is due to plasma re-ionization induced by runaway electron impact ionization. At higher neutral pressures, more target particles are present in the plasma for runaway electrons to collide with and ionize. Parameter scans are conducted to clarify the role of the runaway electron density and energy on the free electron density, and it is found that only the runaway electron density has a noticeable impact. While the free electron density is shown to be related to the spread of heat fluxes at termination, the exact cause for the upper neutral pressure limit remains undetermined and an object for further study.</p

Prenatal exposure to adverse life events and autism and autistic-like traits in children in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa)

Background: Mothers' experience of adverse life events (ALEs, e.g., divorce, bereavement, injury) during pregnancy has been linked with neurodevelopmental conditions like autism, and related traits like social communication difficulties and repetitive behavior in children. However, both the cumulative association and the underlying mechanism are unclear, and these associations might be confounded by unmeasured genetic or other early environmental factors shared within families.Method: This longitudinal population-based cohort study included 114,247 children, born in Norway between 1999 and 2009, who participated in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study. During week 30 of pregnancy, mothers of 51,940 children (of whom 12,597 were siblings) reported whether they had experienced ALEs. We estimated associations between mothers' cumulative exposure to and perception of ALE and their children's clinical diagnosis of autism, and maternal reports on their children's autistic traits at ages 3 and 8 years through the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ). Sibling comparisons were conducted to account for unmeasured familial confounding.Results: Each additional prenatal ALE was associated with increased adjusted hazard ratios [HR: 1.23, 95% CI: 1.16-1.30] of autism diagnosis, compared to unexposed children. Adjusting for unmeasured familial confounding in sibling comparisons, the association attenuated: HR = 0.53, 95% CI [0.31-0.90]. ALEs perceived as more painful were associated with a 12% elevated likelihood of autism diagnosis [95% CI: 7%-16%], but this association attenuated after sibling comparisons. SCQ scores in children exposed to cumulative prenatal ALE compared to unexposed children were higher at age 3 (beta-coefficient: 0.24 (95%CI [0.21-0.27])), but only slightly at age 8 (beta-coefficient: 0.07 [95% CI: 0.04-0.10]) with differences nullified in the sibling comparison analysis.Conclusion: The association between maternal prenatal exposure to cumulative ALEs and diagnosis of autism and autism-associated traits is likely due to unmeasured familial confounding rather than a direct causal relationship.</p

CodeX: Contextual Flow Tracking for Browser Extensions [Elektronisk resurs]

Browser extensions put millions of users at risk when misusing their elevated privileges. Despite the current practices of semi-automated code vetting, privacy-violating extensions still thrive in the official stores. We propose an approach for tracking contextual flows from browser-specific sensitive sources like cookies, browsing history, bookmarks, and search terms to suspicious network sinks through network requests. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach by a prototype called CodeX that leverages the power of CodeQL while breaking away from the conservativeness of bug-finding flavors of the traditional CodeQL taint analysis. Applying CodeX to the extensions published on the Chrome Web Store between March 2021 and March 2024 identified 1,588 extensions with risky flows. Manual verification of 339 of those extensions resulted in flagging 212 as privacy-violating, impacting up to 3.6M users

"We are all interconnected.": Relationships and hierarchies among preschool teachers' conceptions of early childhood education for sustainability

As a response to the growing recognition of the importance of ensuring a sustainable future for humanity and the planet, there has been a push by various stakeholders for the integration of sustainability education in the early years. This small-scale, exploratory study uses a phenomenographic research approach to examine a variation of conceptions early childhood educators may adopt when practicing sustainability in their respective settings. Four preschool teachers from the Philippines and three preschool teachers from Sweden participated in this study, taking part in semi-structured interviews to explicate their present understandings and practices related to early childhood education for sustainability. From the responses, four preliminary categories of description were identified-connecting with the self; connecting with humans; connecting with more-than-humans; and interconnections-wherein there is a hierarchy in how these categories are related, beginning with the self and then radiating outwards. Participants do not necessarily practice from only one category, but rather embed the different categories of connections in their practice. This study offers an initial investigation of alternative ways of organizing preschool teachers' practices in education for sustainability in a logical, hierarchical structure, as well as allowing considerations for ways in which categories could be expanded or made more inclusive through further research

A Tale of Two Cities: Occupational Change in London 1991 to 2021 [Elektronisk resurs]

Amid growing evidence that national occupational change trends mask substantial subnational heterogeneity, the author uses census data to visualize how the occupational structure changed within the 33 London borough between 1991 and 2021. The visualization documents a tale of two cities. The story in Inner London is one of clear upgrading: the proportion of residents employed in high-paying occupations increased by approximately 20 percentage points, while the proportion of residents employed in low- and midpaying occupations decreased markedly. In Outer London, the story is rather one of occupational polarization. Although the proportion of residents employed in high-paying jobs increased by 10 percentage points, the rate of growth was much slower, and growth at the top was generally accompanied by an increase in employment in low-paying jobs. These findings have important implications for the socioeconomic composition of schools, income inequality dynamics in London boroughs and potentially also for inequality beliefs and political behavior.</p