In the Swedish news-press, loneliness among older people is presented as a severe problem that needs to be solved. The issue of who is responsible for reducing loneliness and how this responsibility is designated is, however, rarely discussed. In this study, we have analysed how responsibility is designated and constructed in articles from the Swedish news-press. Focus has been on identifying responsibility in discourses proceeding from the concept of subject positions. This concept has enabled analysis on how responsibility is negotiated and who is positioned as a responsible actor with the ability to perform actions that reduce loneliness. Three dominating discourses were found. In the discourse of responsibility within politics and the welfare state, the responsibility is both self-taken and designated to other institutions held responsible for not initiating sufficient measures to reduce loneliness. In the discourse of responsibility within societal and evolutionary perspectives on loneliness, developments beyond the individual's control are considered to contribute to loneliness. At the same time ‘we’ in ‘society’ are considered capable of reducing loneliness, thereby constructing individuals as responsible actors. Within the discourses of responsibility within senior organisations, both senior organisations and people who participate in activities are constructed as responsible actors. In conclusion, the responsibility for reducing loneliness is, apart from the discourse on senior organisations, designated to those working with older people.

Aim: Physical activity has been described as important for the well-being of all individuals, including the very old. The aim of this study was to investigate how physical activity is performed at assisted living facilities, the situations in which older people were and wanted to be physically active and the role of the physiotherapist at each facility.

Methods: To achieve this aim, an ethnographic study including observations and interviews was conducted at four assisted living facilities.

Results: The results show that physical activity neither was an issue in focus at any of the assisted living facilities, nor were recommendations on physical activity followed. Individuals that were able to exercise themselves could do so, whereas those in need of assistance had but limited possibilities to be physically active. There was a need for physical activity that the staff do not necessarily and sufficiently identify.

Conclusion: The study illustrated that there were major variations in how older people engaged in physical activity and how physical activities were part of everyday life. Physiotherapists played no clear role at the facilities, especially with regard to preventive exercise. Older individuals were not involved in determining which activities should be made available to the residents.

Spelling it out for the children’s sake – Family intervention as professional practiceThis article presents an analysis of 21 video-recorded family intervention sessions with children and parents in families where one or both parents are diagnosed with mental illness. The starting point for such family interventions is awareness of the risks that children run due to parental mental illness, e.g. development of mental health problems of their own. Previous studies have shown that openness about parents’ mental problems can reduce such risks. Family-intervention sessions are developed to assist children and their parents to talk about mental illness and related difficulties. Based on a dialogical and micro-sociological perspective, our objective is to analyse family-intervention sessions as professional practice and to illuminate various communicative means used by social workers to support children and parents in their talk about parents’ mental illness and its meaning for the children and the family. The analysis shows how professional prac-tice is formed based on how the social workers solve communicative challenges in conversations with families about mental health problems: to create and maintain family support as a child-focused process; creating and maintaining family support as a child-focused process; spelling out parents’ mental problems; and confirming and normalizing.

Fysisk aktivitet för äldre beskrivs i litteraturen som något positivt och viktigt och har kommit i fokus under senare år. I svensk äldreomsorg dominerar ett aktivitetsteoretiskt synsätt och det finns även internationella rekommendationer om fysisk aktivitet för äldre. Få studier har dock undersökt hur behovet av fysisk aktivitet tillfredsställs i det särskilda boendet.

Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka hur äldreomsorgens personal tänker och agerar när det gäller fysisk aktivitet för äldre. Det empiriska materialet består av observationer och intervjuer på fyra särskilda boenden i två olika svenska kommuner.

Resultaten visar betydelsen av rådande kulturer och normer för hur personalen tänker och agerar kring fysisk aktivitet. Det finns en motsättning mellan hur personalen diskuterar äldres önskemål om stöd för fysisk aktivitet och hur hänsyn tas till fysisk aktivitet i det dagliga arbetet. Denna motsättning visar sig genom att personalen beskriver vikten av fysisk aktivitet för de äldre personerna samtidigt som denna prioriteras bort till förmån för andra arbetsuppgifter. Det förefaller ha skapats en acceptans för att äldres individuella önskemål inte kan tillgodoses om personalen har andra uppgifter att utföra.

Physical activity is described in the literature as positive and important, and has come into focus in recent years. An activity-based theoretical approach dominates in Swedish eldercare, and there are also international recommendations on physical activity for older people. Nevertheless, few studies have explored how the need for physical activity is satisfied at assisted living facilities.

The aim of this study was to investigate how professionals working in eldercare think about and act to promote physical activities for elderly people. The empirical data consists of observations and interviews conducted at four assisted living facilities in two different Swedish municipalities.

The results show how cultures and norms are important for how professionals think and act regarding physical activity. There is a contradiction between how professionals discuss elderly people’s need for support for physical activity and how they act in their day-to-day work. There seems to be an acceptance that elderly people’s individual needs cannot be met if professionals have other tasks to perform.

Increased care worker knowledge has been emphasized for improving quality of care for older persons in organized elder care in Sweden. However, care workers and national policies are not always corresponding, with observations suggesting that care workers emphasize tacit knowledge. The aim of this article is to explore the nature of this kind of knowledge and how it can be identified and described. Field notes from participant observations at two elder care units in Sweden serve as the empirical material. Knowledge use for staff in elder care is part of a process of knowledge making and knowledge shaping. Analysis of the field notes identified the themes of “feeling for work” and “acting and artistry” as parts of a tacit knowledge in elder care. The processes of knowledge and job execution are closely intertwined, making them difficult to separate or even understand without a deeper insight.

This article examines the co-production of narratives based on an analysis of audio recordings from 12 statutory lay–interprofessional meetings involving clients and concerning rehabilitation for return-to-work. Using Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of voice in a similar vein to Mishler (1984), it is argued that a voice represents a specific normative order, displayed in the way of speaking. The premises of the approach taken is that citizens’ problems and needs are often presented as stories and that this particular type of meeting opens up the possibility for what Wertsch (1991) calls multi-voicedness. Three patterns of co-narrating the client’s story of illness and the process of rehabilitation were found. In the most frequently recurring form, there was one primary storyteller and another participant who joined in as a co-teller. Another pattern was that dyadic co-narrated episodes commonly drew on prior contacts between the two storytellers. A third salient feature was how storytelling episodes involved revoicing an absent expert – that is, the interactional move when a speaker makes use of someone else’s words, and what Bakhtin (1981) calls rhetorical double-voicedness. Due to the multi-voicedness character, co-narrated stories in lay–interprofessional meetings often represent two or more perspectives and are founded on the blending of voices.

This article has a focus on how discursive positioning is carried out during encounters between people in the daily routine of social work, and how a basis for “otherness” can be created through positioning during the social work encounters.  Social work practice includes discursive activity between social workers and clients, and the occurrence of stories is seen as a central element in this activity. Narratives have in earlier studies been described as tools used in social work practice, and parts of the narrative are often documented and compiled with the rest of the information gathered to serve as a basis for professionals’ actions. Theories relating to the narrative relayed during the encounter between social worker and client have evolved over the past few decades, and this development is also reflected in social work research. One key theme that has emerged in this research is the use of narratives to categorize the clients in the social services. Analyses carried out in recent years, however, have gradually become ever more refined, and show how people position themselves in relation to others on the basis of words such as “we” and “them”. This article gives an overview of this development in social work research with the use of empirical examples from social work practices in different fields of social services, from the encounters in social work offices, and assessment meetings in eldercare, and from team talk among professionals.

The aim of this paper is to explore how school staff members involved in Student Health and Welfare conferences reflect on individual students with high levels of truancy based on their personal relationships. Using positioning analysis, the transcriptions of 15 interviews with staff were analysed. The school staff’s reflections on the individual students covered three areas: health, social well-being and education. The results show the ways in which positions were shaped and illustrate a reflexive process that developed continually throughout the staff’s relationships with the students. The staff positioned the students and indicated attributions of the students; however, the attributions were predominately negative. With each position, the staff’s view of students as subjects or objects and their relationships to the students are described in terms of mutual or one-way dialogue.