School Neighborhood Disadvantage as a Predictor of Long-Term Sick Leave Among Teachers: Prospective Cohort Study

This ongoing prospective study examined characteristics of school neighborhood and neighborhood of residence as predictors of sick leave among school teachers. School neighborhood income data for 226 lower-level comprehensive schools in 10 towns in Finland were derived from Statistics Finland and were linked to register-based data on 3,063 teachers with no long-term sick leave at study entry. Outcome was medically certified (> 9 days) sick leave spells during a mean follow-up of 4.3 years from data collection in 2000-2001. A multilevel, cross-classified Poisson regression model, adjusted for age, type of teaching job, length and type of job contract, school size, baseline health status, and income level of the teacher's residential area, showed a rate ratio of 1.30 (95% confidence interval: 1.03, 1.63) for sick leave among female teachers working in schools located in low-income neighborhoods compared with those working in high-income neighborhoods. A low income level of the teacher's residential area was also independently associated with sick leave among female teachers (rate ratio = 1.50, 95% confidence interval: 1.18, 1.91). Exposure to both low-income school neighborhoods and low-income residential neighborhoods was associated with the greatest risk of sick leave (rate ratio = 1.71, 95% confidence interval: 1.27, 2.30). This study indicates that working and living in a socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhood is associated with increased risk of sick leave among female teachers.

General practitioners’ management of the long-term sick role

In this paper, we use qualitative research techniques to examine the role of general practitioners in the management of the long-term sickness absence. In order to uncover the perspectives of all the main agents affected by the actions of general practitioners, a case study approach focussing on one particular employment sector, the public health service, is adopted. The role of family physicians is viewed from the perspectives of health service managers, occupational health physicians, employees / patients, and general practitioners. Our argument is theoretically framed by Talcott Parsons’s model of the medical contribution to the sick role, along with subsequent conceptualisations of the social role and position of physicians. Sixty one semi-structured interviews and three focus group interviews were conducted in three Health and Social Care Trusts in Northern Ireland between 2010 and 2012. There was a consensus among respondents that general practitioners put far more weight on the preferences and needs of their patients than they did on the requirements of employing organisations. This was explained by respondents in terms of the propinquity and longevity of relationships between doctors and their patients, and by the ideology of holistic care and patient advocacy that general practitioners viewed as providing the foundations of their approach to patients. The approach of general practitioners was viewed negatively by managers and occupational health physicians, and more positively by general practitioners and patients. However, there is some evidence that general practitioners would be prepared to forfeit their role as validators of sick leave. Given the imperatives of both state and capital to reduce the financial burden of long-term sickness, this preparedness puts into doubt the continued role of general practitioners as gatekeepers to legitimate long-term sickness absence.

Work-family characteristics as determinants of sickness absence: A large-scale cohort study of three occupational grades

This study examined the previously unexplored occupational grade-specific relationships of domestic responsibilities, the age of children, and work-family spillover, with registered sickness absence (>3 days' sick leave episodes, a mean follow-up of 17 months; n = 18,366 municipal employees; 76% women). The results showed that negative spillover from work into family life predicted a heightened rate of sickness absence spells among both women and men in all occupational categories (except upper white-collar men), but especially among blue-collar and lower white-collar employees. Furthermore, among all white-collar employees (except upper white-collar men), having young children (

Six ways to leave unemployment

This paper uses a unique Portuguese dataset to examine the effect of access to unemployment benefits (UBs) and their maximum potential duration on escape rates from unemployment. In examining the time profile of transitions out of unemployment, the principal contributions of the paper are twofold. First, it provides a detailed state space of potential outcomes: open-ended employment, fixed-term contracts, part-time work, government-provided jobs, self employment, and labour force withdrawal. Second, it is able to exploit major exogenous discontinuities in the maximum duration of unemployment benefits to identify disincentive effects. While confirming strong disincentive effects, it is shown that use of an aggregate hazard function regression model compounds very different and even contradictory effects of the determinants of unemployment.

Parental leave regulations and the persistence of the male breadwinner model: Using fuzzy-set ideal type analysis to assess gender equality in an enlarged Europe

his paper uses fuzzy-set ideal type analysis to assess the conformity of European leave regulations to four theoretical ideal typical divisions of labour: male breadwinner, caregiver parity, universal breadwinner and universal caregiver. In contrast to the majority of previous studies, the focus of this analysis is on the extent to which leave regulations promote gender equality in the family and the transformation of traditional gender roles. The results of this analysis demonstrate that European countries cluster into five models that only partly coincide with countries’ geographical proximity. Second, none of the countries considered constitutes a universal caregiver model, while the male breadwinner ideal continues to provide the normative reference point for parental leave regulations in a large number of European states. Finally, we witness a growing emphasis at the national and EU levels concerning the universal breadwinner ideal, which leaves gender inequality in unpaid work unproblematized.