The chapter presents a multi-level framework for workplace mental health disability management in line with best practice employment initiatives. By presenting an interdisciplinary disability research overview, workers with mental health disability (WMHD; MHD) are discussed and presented in relation to their work environment or lack thereof. By taking a health promotion framework, several evidence-based recommendations for organizations that structure employment plans are also presented in order to facilitate needs-driven accommodation strategies, promote inclusion, and implement employment sustainability. These recommendations outline an approach to mental health disability that seeks to better meet the needs of workers with a focus on improving health and well-being through more sustainable and inclusive working conditions that center the whole organization around mental health initiatives as opposed to an individualistic approach. By implementing both promotive individual and organizational practices in the workplace, organizations can act to promote diversity as well as counter stereotypes and unconscious bias in the organization.

Background: Sweden is in transition when it comes to the immigrant experience. More research is needed to document the life circumstances and adjustment of those with foreign background living in Sweden.

Objective: This study investigated the lived experiences of parents of youths and young people themselves who have an Iraqi or Syrian background and are living in Sweden.

Method: This cross-sectional qualitative interview study focused on a sample of parents of youth and youth (N = 26) with a foreign background. Participants were either born in Syria or Iraq or had one or both parents born in these countries and had migrated to Sweden. Participant interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis.

Results: In relation to the study aim, the analysis indicated three main themes in participants’ responses which concerned life in Sweden, feeling at home, and coping.

Conclusions: Overall, these themes reflected how the perception of everyday experiences relates to adjustment within a multi-cultural urban Swedish context. This study showed how participants with a foreign background are rich in their own diversity of experiences and viewpoints. Results also pointed towards the promise of social policy and services aimed at benefiting those with a foreign background if such efforts are situated in the microsystems that provide life daily structure, as well as in contexts that offer socialization and networking opportunities (e.g., training, education, work, and school). Further, such action should consider the importance of the extended family as part of family-focused initiatives.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the convergent and discriminant validity of adolescent and parent ratings of family interaction. Adolescent and parent ratings of democratic parenting, parental warmth, and adolescent free disclosure were measured using a multitrait–multimethod confirmatory factor analytic approach. Participants included 3,959 Swedish youth in seventh grade (average age 13 years), with follow-up measurements in eighth and ninth grades. At each grade, findings provided support for trait discriminant validity and discriminant validity of methods. However, findings failed to provide support for convergent validity. Overall, the present findings suggest that measurement of family interactions should include the perspectives of both parents and adolescents because their perceptions of family interactions may represent different family interaction constructs.

The present cross-sectional study aimed to examine whether characteristics of the parent-child relationship in adolescence are important for adjustment and identity development. Participants were recruited from schools in central Sweden for a larger longitudinal study when the cohort was 13- to 14-year-olds (N = 3,667). Characteristics of the parent-child relationship, like parental warmth, democratic parenting, and child communication, and adolescent adjustment problems and identity coherence were studied. It was found that democratic parenting was positively linked to child communication but negatively associated with problematic peer relationships and behavioral problems. Parental warmth was linked to other parenting characteristics as well as identity cohesion. Democratic parenting was linked to greater school engagement and identity coherence for boys and girls. Gender differences were found. The findings support the notion that democratic and warm parenting may provide support for adolescent identity development and adjustment.

Background: Fathers can have a critical role to play in supporting the well-being of youth. However, little is known about how fathers perceive youth well-being. The Five Cs model of positive youth development was the theoretical starting point of this study, in part due to this framework’s focus on the importance of bi-directional, person–context relations (Geldhof et al., in: Molenaar, Lerner, Newell (eds) Handbook of developmental systems theory and methodology, Guilford Press, New York, 2014). Questions posed in the present study were derived from the 4-H study of positive youth development (Lerner et al. in J Early Adolesc 25(1):17–71, 2005), which is rooted in the Five Cs model.

Objective: The present study explored themes and patterns of meaning in descriptive information from fathers about youth well-being.

Method: An inductive–deductive approach to thematic analysis was used to examine responses to open-ended survey questions from 201 Swedish fathers regarding youth well-being.

Results: Based on the fathers’ reports four themes were identified: cognitive well-being, emotional and psychological well-being, physical well-being, and social well-being. While some sub-components of these themes have been identified in earlier literature, new sub-components were also found in each domain of youth well-being (i.e., cognitive, emotional/psychological, physical, social).

Conclusions: These findings suggest that the understanding of youth well-being is contextual and multi-faceted, and that fathers’ perceptions can be important to consider in future research as they may further our insight into the rich and nuanced characteristics of positive youth development in diverse contexts.

Much research exists on the importance of risk factors within individual contexts of parenting, neighborhood, school, and peers for adolescent development. However little exists on whether risks in certain contexts may be more or less likely for risk accumulation across contexts – referred to as the Weighted Risk Phenomenon (WRP). One way to study WRP is to study adolescent patterns of co-existing risk characteristics across domains and over time. The present study focuses on studying information about parenting, neighborhood, school, and peers in order to understand how risk can have different patterns over time. Participants were all girls recruited from junior high schools in rural and metropolitan areas of Sweden. The results illustrate that there are stable structural and individual pathways across four contexts of adolescent girls which may represent risk over time. Structurally, patterns which emerged at grade 7 reappeared again a year later and again a year after that in grade 9. In general, the same individuals seem to re-emerge in the same or similar patterns over time. Those who showed risk accumulation patterns tended to report prior risk factors in the parenting context. Such trends are supported in the literature and give support to the postulation that parenting is one of the strongest risk factors for adolescents. The findings indicate possible underpinnings of WRP.

This study investigated the links between parental worry, parental over-control and adolescent social anxiety in parent-adolescent dyads. Using a longitudinal sample of adolescents (M-age=14.28) and their parents (224 mother-daughter, 234 mother-son, 51 father-daughter, and 47 father-son dyads), comparisons were conducted using cross-lagged path models across two time points. We used adolescent reports of social anxiety and feelings of being overly controlled by parents, and mother and father self-reports of worries. Our results show that boys' social anxiety predicted higher perceived parental overcontrol, whereas girls' social anxiety predicted higher paternal worry over time. In addition, girls' reports of feeling overly controlled by parents predicted higher maternal worry but lower paternal worry over time. For boys, feeling overly controlled predicted less social anxiety instead. The study illustrates how mothers and fathers might differ in their behaviors and concerns regarding their children's social anxiety and feelings of overcontrol.

Many Swedish parents report that they tend to employ moderate control as well as frequent use of democratic parenting practices (Trost, 2012). This approach to parenting combined with policy and institutional supports for child and family welfare make the Swedish parenting context in some ways unique and in need of further investigation (e.g., Trost, El-Khouri, & Sundell, 2015). From a measurement perspective, when parents and children in the same family report on the same construct, one is faced with several questions such as are the child and parent reports reflective of the same construct? If yes, then child and parent reports can be modelled or conceptualized as indicators of the same construct. Another possibility is that adolescents’ and parents’ perceptions of a given construct are fundamentally different from one another. A number of options exist in terms of how to conceptualize measurement when parents and children report on the same construct (Bank, Dishion, Skinner, & Patterson, 1990).

The results presented in this poster are from a longitudinal study of school climate and mental health (study name and citation blinded for peer review). The sample consists of a cohort of Swedish 7th graders (N=3,932, aged 13-14 years old, 51.8% =female, from 101 schools in eight Swedish regions). At grade 7, using structural equation modelling (SEM), different measurement models of family-related factors were tested, namely democratic parenting (Wray-Lake & Flanagan, 2012), parental warmth (Trost, et al, 2007; Tilton-Weaver et al., 2010), and child-parent communication (Kerr & Statin, 2000). Adolescents in the cohort and one of their parents reported on these constructs at grades 7, 8, and 9. The results presented here are for grade 7. Analyses were conducted with Mplus 7.4 (using Mplus’s robust maximum likelihood estimator, TYPE = COMPLEX in Mplus, to account for the nested nature of responses by school building, and FIML estimation for missing data). Three SEM models were tested, including (1) a three-factor model in which parallel child and parent reports were indicators of the same family factors, (2) a six-factor model in which parallel child and parent reports were indicators of separate family factors, and (3) a multi-trait multi-method model with three family factors and two method factors (parent and child report; Model 3). Two models showed good fit to the data: the six-factor model, χ2(89) = 164.873; CFI = .997; RMSEA = .015 [.011, .018], and the multi-trait multi-method model, χ2(84) = 533.735; CFI = .982. RMSEA = .037 [.034, .040]. While both models evidenced good fit, the six-factor model provided the more parsimonious solution. This result indicates that adolescents and parents in this sample may be viewing the family-related factors in different ways. In the poster, other analyses will be reported on the utility of the models identified in grade 7 at the other study time points, such as at grades 8 and 9. Study findings will also be discussed in terms of culture and parenting.

The present study investigates academic stress in two different cultures, the Iranian as a collectivist culture, and the Swedish as an individualist culture. A total of 616 university students (312 Iranian and 304 Swedish) participated in the study. The results show that Swedish students experience more academic stress than Iranian students. Academic stress was found to be related to difficulties in and outside class, and managing work, family and leisure activities. There was no cultural difference in terms of interacting with the university administration, teachers and friends. There was a gender difference, with females experiencing more academic stress than males, an effect that was more pronounced in Sweden than in Iran. Subset analyses (92 Swedes and 100 Iranians) revealed a tendency of Iranian students to balance positive and negative emotions in comparison to students from Sweden. Partial correlations showed that negative affect was the sole affect to significantly correlate with academic stress in Sweden. Negative and positive affect correlated in unison with academic stress in Iran. These results are discussed on an individualist-collectivist dimension. Cultural differences between the educational systems in the two countries may also explain the differing emotion/affect-health relationships.

In the psychological literature pertaining to parenting, parents’ warmth, control, and communication are vital for positive adjustment of adolescents where high levels are considered to be the most prevalent and beneficial. Previous cross-cultural studies have however found the effects of other parenting patterns during adolescence to be equally prevalent as well as beneficial for adolescent adjustment which puts into question whether high on all three aspects of parenting could be more represented in some cultures than in others. In the present study, we question the representativeness of the pattern in the Swedish context. In the present study, we examined 888 adolescents’ reports on parenting. For boys, a neglecting, average but low communication, average but low control, average, average with warmth and authoritative patterns of parenting was found. For girls, a neglecting, average but low communication, average but high control, average, and authoritative patterns of parenting was found. The most prevalent parenting pattern found for both girls and boys was marked by moderate levels of parental control, warmth, and communication followed by authoritative (high levels of control, warmth, and communication). Of the 456 girls, the vast majority (41%) reported their parents as being average on parental warmth, control, and communication. Of the 432 boys, nearly half (46%) reported their parents as being average on parental warmth, control, and communication. Future directions on parenting research in Sweden are discussed.