Factors associated with internalizing or somatic symptoms in a cross-sectional study of school children in grades 1-10

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>School related factors that may contribute to children's subjective health have not been extensively studied. We assessed whether factors assumed to promote health and factors assumed to have adverse effects were associated with self-reported internalizing or somatic symptoms.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In a cross-sectional study, 230 boys and 189 girls in grades 1-10 from five schools responded to the same set of questions. Proportional odds logistic regression was used to assess associations of school related factors with the prevalence of sadness, anxiety, stomach ache, and headache.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In multivariable analyses, perceived loneliness showed strong and positive associations with sadness (odds ratio, 1.94, 95% CI 1.42 to 2.64), anxiety (odds ratio, 1.78, 95% CI 1.31 to 2.42), and headache (odds ratio, 1.47, 95% CI 1.10 to 1.96), with consistently stronger associations for girls than boys. Among assumed health promoting factors, receiving necessary help from teachers was associated with lower prevalence of stomach ache in girls (odds ratio, 0.51, 95% CI 0.30 to 0.87).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These findings suggest that perceived loneliness may be strongly related to both internalizing and somatic symptoms among school children, and for girls, the associations of loneliness appear to be particularly strong.</p

"We own the illness”: a qualitative study of networks in two communities with mixed ethnicity in Northern Norway

Background: When people in Northern Norway get ill, they often use traditional medicine. The global aim of this study was to examine the extended family networks’ function and responsibility in cases of illness in the family, in two Northern Norwegian communities with a population of mixed ethnicity. Methods: Semi-structured individual interviews with 13 participants and 4 focus group interviews with total 11 participants were conducted. The text data was transcribed verbatim and analysed based on the criteria for content analysis. Results: The participants grew up in areas where it was common to seek help from traditional healers. They were organized in networks and shared responsibility for the patient and they provided practical help and support for the family. According to the networks, health-care personnel should make room for the entire network to visit the patient in severe and life-threatening situations. Conclusion: Traditional networks are an extra resource for people in these communities. The networks seem to be essential in handling and disseminating hope and manageability on an individual as well as a collective level. Health personnel working in communities with mixed ethnicity should have thorough knowledge of the mixed culture, including the importance of traditional network to the patients

Unplanning research with a curious practice methodology:emergence of childrenforest in the context of Finland

Abstract This chapter explores the notion of curious practice and the methodology of its application in the context of primary school education in Finland. The concept of curious practice encourages us — researchers and educators — to ask “How does curious practice help us to address children’s relations to forests beyond the child (in) nature dualism?” Curious practice challenges the existing environmental education methodologies employed in recent years that draw heavily on research planning, the child’s representation of nature, and the results of a completed study. Despret’s (Domesticating practices: The case of Arabian Babblers. In G. Marvin and S. McHugh (Eds.), Routledge handbook of human–animal studies (pp. 23–38). New York: Routledge, 2014) approach of curious practice encourages researchers to unplan and make themselves available to the yet unknown, for every single encounter with the other is a mixture of unpredictability, the researcher’s attentiveness, and imagination. The rationale behind curious practice is in learning more about what is seen and heard via questioning the encounters that accept various absences of a preconceived framework of research. As a necessary complement to such a methodology, the chapter also presents a semiotic approach, employed by Eduardo Kohn (How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), to inform the method of studying the logic of the world beyond human symbolism. The data used reveal an interdependency of children and forests that will be referred to as childrenforest in that it continuously generates a network of signs which adults and children themselves often are unable to access or represent. These present absences found in curious practice are crucial for our understanding of what we have overlooked while claiming that the other is known. With that, however, childrenforest cannot be fully grasped. Andrew Pickering’s (Natures Sciences Sociétés, 1(21), 77–83, 2013) notion of islands of stability is utilized to elaborate the ways that childrenforests signal the presence of the seemingly stable configurations of their dynamic becoming. The chapter concludes with a short discussion of the potential areas of curious practice application beyond the ethological and childhood research