Nordic Sociological Association Conference 2018

Beskrivelse

It may be a long haul - Longitudinal approaches to understanding hard-to-place unemployed clients and their interaction with the frontline of the welfare state (co-chairing - with Helle Bendix Kleif - a stream with 8 papers) Since the 1990s, a vast amount of reforms of the social and employment services have swept across most of the developed world. These have enormously expanded the groups of citizens receiving active employment measures (Lindsay & Houston 2013). Nevertheless, up until now, most countries have only seen limited results from enhancing the labour market participation of the most vulnerable groups (Bredgaard et al. 2015). Parallel to these developments, in recent years, we have seen a surge in the demand for evidence based practice and policy (Pearce & Raman 2014). The preferred knowledge documenting the effects of a more disciplinary and regulatory approach and legitimating it, has placed evidence-based studies – defined as studies conducted by Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT) or other (quasi) experimental methods – at the top of the knowledge hierarchy. However, the transfer of evidence-based knowledge from easy-to-place unemployed to vulnerable unemployed rests on a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that disregards the specific problems and challenges faced by the vulnerable unemployed (Eskelinen & Olesen 2011, Danneris 2016). This session takes it point of departure in the argument that this knowledge base is insufficient (Andersen et al. 2017, Danneris 2016), and that there is a need for more research from qualitative, quantitative and mixed studies with a longitudinal approach. We invite research on trajectories of clients, processes of contact between client and welfare system, on consecutive activation or social measures, on policy developments over time, etc. The session aims to facilitate discussion across research methods. The longitudinal approach enables numerous perspectives and enabling knowledge exchange from one type of research to another holds potential. The session will include the following papers (and more are invited) • A quantitative longitudinal approach, that permits the inclusion of several within the same individual trajectory (e.g. from further education to unemployment, to inactivity and back to unemployment). This approach allows for different types of exploration of timing, duration and ordering within the sequence of successive events (Helle Bendix Kleif). • A study of ‘positive deviance’ analysis of trajectories from unemployment to employment of a group of former hard-to-place jobseekers with qualitative interview based empirical material from both the perspective of the client and the professionals involved in the process (Sophie Danneris & Dorte Caswell). • A qualitative study of the experiences of clients who receive resource benefit with an institutional interactionist approach that asks the question: ”How can we study clients’ (and professionals’) talk on development? And how can we study development through talk?” This paper will be an explorative mapping of the potentials of discursive approaches to longitudinal research (Tanja Dall and Søren Peter Olesen).

Periode	8 aug. 2018 → 10 aug. 2018
Begivenhedstype	Konference
Placering	Aalborg, DanmarkVis på kort