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Background and purpose In Italy, three main factors set the scene of social work practices with disabled people. (1) Population is aging even more than that in other European countries, with an increasing number of elderly people with high care needs. (2) Italian social policies for elderly and adult disabled people are community- care oriented, but, within this framework, two different directions are followed. At local level, social services units are engaged in planning and providing personal care. But they struggle because of welfare funding cuts, which particularly affect local authorities. At a state level, dependent persons are eligible for economic benefits, without restrictions on how they can use that money. (3) This, combined with wider international dynamics, encourages private recruitments of unqualified paid caregivers, usually from Eastern Countries. So, the problems that social workers are daily coping with are progressively changing, and so should the practices needed to address them. The study explored these changes. Our hypothesis was that, in addition to traditional social work practice for standard provisions delivery, social workers are making other important and delicate contributions to maintain and improve the life quality of disabled elderly people. The purpose of this research was to identify these changing practice areas. Method The research was carried out in a district of Northern Italy of 72.000 inhabitants. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the five district social workers assigned to assist people with disability: each one was asked to describe some cases which s/he thought are examples of good practice. 32 case stories were collected, transcribed and processed through a thematic analysis. In a second step, 10 cases were chosen and 10 group interviews were conducted for each one of them, with the participation of the main people involved (for example: the service user, his/her caregiver, other family’s members, health and

Background and purpose Children’s foster care is practiced and studied in many parts of the world, but little attention is paid to foster parents’ birth children, despite their right to participate in a process that concerns their lives and despite the role they play in foster care. Italian law provides a kind of ‘order of preference’ to be followed when placing a child in foster care. The first choice is ‘a family, preferably with children’. The second choice is a single person, and the last choice is children’s homes. One could therefore expect foster parents’ sons and daughters to be carefully considered, since they are explicitly named in the law; however, this is not so. The national and regional laws and Foster Units Official Guidelines contain no indication of foster parents’ birth children. This may be linked to the sceptical attitude of Italian social services professionals regarding the participation of children. As far as we know, this is the first research about Italian foster siblings. The purposes were to explore the experiences of sons and daughters of foster parents, and to draw on their views in order to grasp how their satisfaction in foster care processes could be improved Methods The data were gathered from 15 birth children, from 6 to 19 years old, and 14 foster parents. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, transcribed and processed through a thematic analysis. The birth children were asked four questions, about their experience and their suggestions. Children under ten were asked to make a drawing about foster care, and the interview was conducted based on their spontaneous narratives about their sketches. Results Birth children considered themselves as caregivers and “active part of the foster care”, and they explained in detail the ways in which they helped: to collaborate in everyday life; to advocate for their foster sibling or to mediate between them and other people, such as family friends, schoolmates, or relatives; to not create p

The relationship between polar mesosphere summer echoes (PMSE) and geomagnetic disturbances (represented by magnetic K indices) is examined. Calibrated PMSE reflectivities for the period May 2006-February 2012 are used from two 52.0/54.5 MHz radars located in Arctic Sweden (68 degrees N, geomagnetic latitude 65 degrees) and at two different sites in Queen Maud Land, Antarctica (73 degrees/72 degrees S, geomagnetic latitudes 62 degrees/63 degrees). In both the Northern Hemisphere (NH) and the Southern Hemisphere (SH) there is a strong increase in mean PMSE reflectivity between quiet and disturbed geomagnetic conditions. Mean volume reflectivities are slightly lower at the SH locations compared to the NH, but the position of the peak in the lognormal distribution of PMSE reflectivities is close to the same at both NH and SH locations, and varies only slightly with magnetic disturbance level. Differences between the sites, and between geomagnetic disturbance levels, are primarily due to differences in the high-reflectivity tail of the distribution. PMSE occurrence rates are essentially the same at both NH and SH locations during most of the PMSE season when a sufficiently low detection threshold is used so that the peak in the lognormal distribution is included. When the local-time dependence of the PMSE response to geomagnetic disturbance level is considered, the response in the NH is found to be immediate at most local times, but delayed by several hours in the afternoon sector and absent in the early evening. At the SH sites, at lower magnetic latitude, there is a delayed response (by several hours) at almost all local times. At the NH (auroral zone) site, the dependence on magnetic disturbance is highest during evening-to-morning hours. At the SH (sub-auroral) sites the response to magnetic disturbance is weaker but persists throughout the day. While the immediate response to magnetic activity can be qualitatively explained by changes in electron density resulting

The Hygrosonde-2 campaign took place on 16 December 2001 at Esrange/Sweden (68° N, 21° E) with the aim to investigate the small scale distribution of water vapour in the middle atmosphere in the vicinity of the Arctic polar vortex. In situ balloon and rocket-borne measurements of water vapour were performed by means of OH fluorescence hygrometry. The combined measurements yielded a high resolution water vapour profile up to an altitude of 75 km. Using the characteristic of water vapour being a dynamical tracer it was possible to directly relate the water vapour data to the location of the polar vortex edge, which separates air masses of different character inside and outside the polar vortex. The measurements probed extra-vortex air in the altitude range between 45 km and 60 km and vortex air elsewhere. Transitions between vortex and extra-vortex usually coincided with wind shears caused by gravity waves which advect air masses with different water vapour volume mixing ratios. From the combination of the results from the Hygrosonde-2 campaign and the first flight of the optical hygrometer in 1994 (Hygrosonde-1) a clear picture of the characteristic water vapour distribution inside and outside the polar vortex can be drawn. Systematic differences in the water vapour concentration between the inside and outside of the polar vortex can be observed all the way up into the mesosphere. It is also evident that in situ measurements with high spatial resolution are needed to fully account for the small-scale exchange processes in the polar winter middle atmosphere., Part of urn:nbn:se:su:diva-8167