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This article places the choice to claim welfare benefits in a social context by studying how neighborhood welfare receipt affects welfare receipt among couples in Stockholm, Sweden. It is expected that the propensity to claim welfare should increase with welfare use in the neighborhood, primarily through stigma reduction and increasing availability of information. I use individual-level panel data (N = 1,595,843) for the Stockholm County population during the 1990s, data that contain a wide range of information and allow extensive controls for observed and unobserved confounding factors, q-he results from pooled and fixed-effects logistic regressions suggest that welfare receipt among people in the same neighborhood substantially increases the number of households entering the welfare system (inflow), but the effects on outfow are negligible., Introduction Despite economic incentives to do so, poor people often fail to claim welfare benefits. Substantial non-take-up of such benefits has been found in Western countries with different welfare state [...]

This article examines how suicides influence suicide risks of others within two interaction domains: the family and the workplace. A distinction is made between dyad-based social-interaction effects and degree-based exposure effects. A unique database including all individuals who ever lived in Stockholm during the 1990s is analyzed. For about 5.6 years on average, 1.2 million individuals are observed, and 1,116 of them commit suicide. Controlling for other risk factors, men exposed to a suicide in the family (at work) are 8.3 (3.5) times more likely to commit suicide than non-exposed men. The social-interaction effect thus is larger within the family domain; yet work-domain exposure is more important for the suicide rate because individuals are more often exposed to suicides of coworkers than family members., As Bearman (1991) noted, an important insight in Durkheim's classic study of suicide was his recognition that the structure of social relations is important for explaining variations in suicide rates. [...]

A study describes the development of ethnic segregation and ethnic diversity in the Stockholm region from 1991 to 2001, a time characterized by a rapid increase in the population share with foreign background and in ethnic variety. Results of the entropy exercise used show that the ethnic diversity among the planning districts of the region remained very stable from 1991 to 2001, but the segregation increased at the regional level as well as in all major geographical sub-areas except the central core.

Little is known about the association between neighborhood social disorganization and coronary heart disease (CHD). This study used the theoretical frameworks of the Chicago school and the Stirling County group in order to analyze the impact of neighborhood violent crime and neighborhood unemployment on CHD in an urban setting, the capital of Sweden. The entire population of Stockholm County aged 35-64 years on January 1, 1998 was included in the study. All individuals were followed for CHD until December 31, 1998. Small area neighborhood units were used to define neighborhoods. The neighborhood-level variables were calculated as rates of violent crime or unemployment in the small area neighborhood units, categorized in quintiles. Multilevel logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratios and neighborhood-level variance in three different models. When rates of neighborhood violent crime or neighborhood unemployment increased, the risk of CHD increased among both women and men. In neighborhoods with the highest rates of violent crime (quintile 5), the odds ratios were 1.75 (CI = 1.37-2.22) and 1.39 (CI = 1.1%1.63) for women and men, respectively. In neighborhoods with the highest unemployment rates, the corresponding odds ratios were 2.05 (CI = 1.62 2.59) and 1.50 (CI = 1.28 1.75). These average neighborhood effects on CHD (fixed effects) remained almost unaltered after inclusion of the individual-level variables. The neighborhood-level variance indicated significant differences in CHD between neighborhoods, and the neighborhood-level and individual-level variables partly explained the variance between neighborhoods (random effects). Public safety and social stability in socially disorganized neighborhoods need to be improved in order to promote cardiovascular health. Keywords: Coronary heart disease: Chicago school: Neighborhood violent crime: Neighborhood unemployment; Multilevel models; Sweden

There has been much recent attention to the relationship between the construction of place, identity, and the body. This paper examines some of these themes in a presentation of the gay leather scene in Stockholm, Sweden. based on ethnography of Stockholm's only true leather club, it shows how identity and spatial location are implicated in one another. It also looks at social and cultural processes of containment and dispersion within leather culture, the creation of erotic bodies, and forms of erotic interaction. These processes are seen as reflecting features of the wider Swedish gay scene and society in general, which is sometimes less tolerant than it is imagined to be. Aspects of current and possible future transformations of leather culture and style are also briefly considered.

The suicide statistics for two high-income areas and two low-income areas of Stockholm county, with, respectively, low and high proportions of immigrant residents, were compared on health and socioeconomic factors to ascertain whether differences in such indicators might explain the overrepresentation of immigrants previously found by us in cases of definite and undetermined suicide. The findings can be summarised as follows. (1) The suicide rate was higher in the low-income areas, irrespective of ethnicity, and highest in the immigrant population of the low-income areas which accounted for 82% of all immigrants in the areas studied. (2) The suicide rate was inversely correlated with the respective figures for mean municipality-income indices. (3) Over the 4-yr. study period, the annual suicide rate increased among immigrants and decreased among native Swedes. (4) Of all categories investigated, immigrants from the low-income areas were characterised by the highest suicide rate (39 per 100,000) and the lowest mean annual income among the suicide victims (77.7), and native Swedes from the high-income areas by the lowest suicide rate (16.2) and the highest mean income (254.1). (5) The low-income areas manifested also lower mean duration of hospitalisation in primary care and psychiatric facilities, although the frequency of psychiatric consultations was higher in low- than in high-income areas. Interrelations among low income, immigrant status, and poor benefit of psychiatric care suggest that proneness to suicidal behaviour among immigrants may have a social psychiatric explanation.

The level of spatial segregation by race or ethnicity is compared to the level of spatial segregation by household type in Stockholm, Sweden, and San Francisco, CA. These two highly different metropolitan regions have comparable incomes and demographic makeups, although they possess different racial ratios. San Francisco has six major ethnic divisions while Stockholm has a less heterogenous racial composition. Results of the study show that spatial segregation by ethnicity is not large but is increasing in Stockholm. It is also found that spatial segregation by household type is larger than both segregation by income class and segregation by ethnicity in the city. For both San Francisco and Stockholm, racial or ethnic segregation is not related to the pattern of segregation by household type. Likewise, segregation by household type is not found to be related to patterns of ethnicity.

A study reports on outcomes in young adulthood for previous child protection authorities (CPA) clients, by examining the prevalence of teenage parenthood, criminal offences, hospitalizations for psychiatric diagnoses, and self support problems in a Stockholm-based sample study. The results point to the value of including unsubstantiated cases of child maltreatment in follow-up studies of child protection clients.

In this article contemporary city change in Stockholm is first described against a background of theories on global cities. Stockholm cannot be seen as a global city, but displays many typical signs of the ongoing development in global cities. In the article this is shown by examining the situation in Stockholm regarding the economic structure, especially the expanding IT-sector, social and economic polarization, local politics and the efforts to improve the infrastructure. In the change of the city social movements have been very active. Since the 1960s three different kinds of movements have existed, which are described and analysed against a background of theories on social movements. The first of these, the so-called neighbourhood movement, emerged at the end of the 1960s and had all the typical signs of the so-called 'new' social movements of that time. In the 1990s a new environmental movement acted mainly against proposed big traffic-routes. This movement reflected in its structure some important features of today's society: fragmentation, individualization and globalization. At the end of the 1990s a third movement emerged as a reaction against the new competitive urban politics and the ongoing change of the city. Finally, the modifying impact that movements and local factors in Stockholm have had on globalization is discussed, as well as the difficulty in estimating the impact of movements on local politics.

A comparison between Stockholm, Sweden's music industry and that of Kingston, Jamaica show a significant disparity between the two in profits and returns. It is posited that this disparity is due to differences in intrafirm and interfirm connections between local and global arenas, and the effectiveness of regimes governing intellectual property. Suggestions for decreasing this disparity are discussed.

Immigration policy and the origins of immigrants coming to Sweden have changed dramatically during the post-World War Two period. During the same period, changes in housing policy have affected the type of accommodation available to immigrants and refugees. It is within the context of these and other changes that we develop a model of the driving forces behind spatial segregation and housing segmentation in Sweden and document and evaluate shifts in the spatial segregation and housing segmentation of immigrants in the Stockholm region between 1960 and 1995., 1. Introduction Since World War Two, international migration has grown in numbers and complexity. More nations are involved in the migration process and the groups affected by migration have become [...]