"Only volunteers"? Personal motivations and political ambiguities within Refugees Welcome to Malmö civil initiative

Between 7 September and 12 November 2015, approximately 800 volunteers met up to 1000 refugees a day under the banner of Refugees Welcome to Malmö, at Malmö Central train station as the first point of the asylum seekers’ arrival in Sweden. Based on in-depth interviews, this chapter analyzes the volunteers’ motivations, experiences and ambiguities, against the background of a specific historical, organizational and local context in which this grassroots initiative emerged. Special attention is paid to the volunteers’ perceptions of their work and to collaborations and conflicts with other actors in the field. The analysis of the volunteers’ positions toward the politicization of a civil initiative points to the need for city context-sensitive research on the changing constellations of actors who provide support to refugees

Measurement invariance of the Brief Multidimensional Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale among adolescents and emerging adults across 23 cultural contexts

Abstract: There is hardly any cross-cultural research on the measurement invariance of the Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scales (BMSLSS). The current article evaluates the measurement invariance of the BMSLSS across cultural contexts. This cross-sectional study sampled 7,739 adolescents and emerging adults in 23 countries. A multi-group confirmatory factor analysis showed a good fit of configural and partial measurement weights invariance models, indicating similar patterns and strengths in factor loading for both adolescents and emerging adults across various countries. We found insufficient evidence for scalar invariance in both the adolescents’ and the emerging adults’ samples. A multi-level confirmatory factor analysis indicated configural invariance of the structure at country and individual level. Internal consistency, evaluated by alpha and omega coefficients per country, yielded acceptable results. The translated BMSLSS across different cultural contexts presents good psychometric characteristics similar to what has been reported in the original scale, though scalar invariance remains problematic. Our results indicate that the BMSLSS forms a brief measure of life satisfaction, which has accrued substantial evidence of construct validity, thus suitable for use in cross-cultural surveys with adolescents and emerging adults, although evaluation of degree of invariance must be carried out to ensure its suitability for mean comparisons