Swedish-speaking Minority In Finland Research Articles

Better perceived health among the Swedish-speaking minority as compared with the Finnish-speaking majority in Finland: a cross-sectional study with an intergenerational perspective.

Previous research has shown that the Swedish speaking minority in Finland has slightly but significantly better health compared with the Finnish speaking majority. However, a clear explanation for this is lacking. The aim of the study was to explore differences of perceived health comparing three groups: Swedish speakers with reported dominance of Swedish also in the preceding generation; contemporary Finnish speakers with reported dominance of Finnish in the preceding generation and a group with a reported mixed-language structure of Finnish and Swedish between generations. Health and Social Support is an on-going population-based survey initiated in 1998 (N = 64,797), aimed at working-age adults. The present study is based on the 2012 follow-up survey, which included a question on the dominating language (Swedish or Finnish) of the respondents and their parents. The outcome was perceived health, which in this study was dichotomized to very good/good and intermediate/poor/very poor. The statistical analysis was carried with logistic regression, using SAS software. Age, gender and occupational training were included as covariates in the multivariable analysis. This study found that the Swedish-speaking group in Finland report better perceived health compared with the Finnish-speaking group (odds ratio 1.28, 95% confidence interval 1.04-1.57, p < 0.001). The health of the mixed language-speaking group fell between the other two groups. The results gave some support to a culturally mediated mechanism for the health advantage of Swedish speakers. Cultural features of Swedish-speaking groups in Finland may also support health promotion of the Finnish-speaking majority.

Intra-minority welfare in the post-war period: new expertise on private and public solutions to Finland-Swedish population and welfare problems

ABSTRACT This article introduces the concept of intra-minority welfare and investigates the formation of intra-minority welfare in the post-war period by focusing on the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, the Finland-Swedes. The post-war era saw a rapid decline in both the percentage of Swedish speakers in Finland and their political influence. To tackle these issues, new organizations were formed to boost the birth rate and secure the welfare of the Finland-Swedish minority. With the expansion of the welfare state, a new generation of Finland-Swedish experts within the fields of social work and demographics also played a prominent role in the intra-minority debate on how public welfare could cater to different segments of the minority. In the article the authors focus on the work conducted in connection to the organizations Svenska Befolkningsförbundet i Finland (The Swedish Population Federation in Finland) and Kårkulla vårdanstalt för sinnesslöa (Kårkulla Care Institution for the Mentally Deficient). By analysing material produced by or about the organizations and experts who worked within them from the 1940s to 1960, they demonstrate how ideas and practices around intra-minority welfare, in particular the demographic future of the Finland-Swedes and care for vulnerable members of the minority, were conceptualized and framed in the post-war period.

A comparison of WPPSI-IV performance between Finland-Swedish minority children and the Scandinavian test norms: Findings from The FinSwed Study.

The Swedish Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI-IV) is commonly used for assessing young children belonging to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland (Finland-Swedes), but there is no information about the generalizability of this test and its norms to this minority. Cross-cultural comparisons of WPPSI-IV are also scarce. We compared the performance of Finland-Swedish children to the Scandinavian norms of the Swedish WPPSI-IV and explored the relationship between sociodemographic factors (age, sex, parental education level, bilingualism) and the performance. The Swedish WPPSI-IV was administered to 79 typically developing 5-6-year-old Finland-Swedish children assessed for The FinSwed Study. Their performance was compared to the Scandinavian norms using MANOVA, t-test, and confidence interval comparisons. Associations with sociodemographic variables were explored using regression analyses. Finland-Swedish children performed, on average, 1/3 SD higher than the Scandinavian norms, a difference which was statistically significant with medium-sized effects. However, individual subtests and indexes did not differ significantly from the norms. Significant associations with sociodemographic factors were found for some but not all index scores. This study provides clinically important information for using the Swedish WPPSI-IV with the Finland-Swedish minority and demonstrates aspects that clinicians working with this minority should take into account. The results are presumably partly explained by characteristics of the present sample, and partly by cultural and linguistic differences between the Finland-Swedish population and the Scandinavian countries. The findings also illustrate that cross-cultural differences in cognitive performance may be present even between similar cultures with the same language.

Voicing the Subaltern? The Sámi Child Enters Zacharias Topelius's Mid-nineteenth-Century Fairy Tales

Voicing the Subaltern?The Sámi Child Enters Zacharias Topelius's Mid-nineteenth-Century Fairy Tales Olle Widhe (bio) Tales of Lapland The Sámi have constituted an important motif in Nordic children's literature since Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "Snedronningen" ("The Snow Queen," 1845). Andersen's fairy tale unfolds in Lapland, and recently won renewed fame in the Walt Disney Pictures film Frozen (2013). This article, however, is not about Andersen's famous fairy tale. Instead I want to focus on fairy tales portraying the Sámi written and published by the Fenno-Swedish author Zacharias Topelius in the mid-nineteenth century. Besides Andersen, Topelius is the most important writer for children in the Nordic countries during the romantic period. Even though he is seldom read by young people today, his importance to the history of Nordic children's literature is nonetheless comparable to that of Astrid Lindgren's in the second half of the twentieth century (Svensson 76). Topelius is considerably less known internationally than Andersen; however, he is often said to be the creator of Swedish-language children's literature, and his first collection of stories was published in 1847 (Westin; Zipes; Kümmerling-Meibauer). Topelius belonged to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland and thus contributed to the genre in both Sweden and Finland. In addition to a variety of texts for adults that feature the Sámi, he published a wide range of Sámi stories for children (Widhe, "Trollkarlar och små barn"; Conrad). Portrayals of the Sámi are already present in "Skeppet Rephanut" ("The Ship Rephanut," 1847), which was included in Topelius's first book for children. A Sámi wizard has a crucial function, helping a greedy rich merchant become even richer, before his luck [End Page 302] runs out and he ends up a poor beggar. Another of Topelius's fairy tales for children in which the Sámi play a significant role is "Prinsessan Lindagull" (1848), which recalls the One Thousand and One Nights. These two early fairy tales are followed by a range of others, among which "Sampo Lappelill: En saga från Lappland" ("Sampo Lappelill: A fairy tale from Lapland," 1860) and "Stjernöga" ("Stareye,"1873) are the most distinguished. In both tales, probably for the first time in the history of children's literature, the hero of the story is a Sámi child. The Sámi are one of the largest indigenous groups in Europe, and their ancestral land, Sápmi, or Lapland, spans an area the size of Sweden in the Nordic countries. The Sámi were up till recently known as "Lapps" or "Fenni." In nineteenth-century Finland, the Sámi were largely a repressed people who occupied a silenced, marginalized, and subaltern subject position (Junka-Aikio). The term "subaltern" was promoted by Gayatri Spivak (1988) in her seminal article, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in which she maintained that the subaltern cannot speak if there is no opportunity for authentic exchange between speaker and listener. The term subaltern is not just another word for the oppressed or the discriminated. The subalterns are refused a space where they can express themselves, and they are silenced through a discursive and structural exclusion from communication. In the case of children's literature, however, it seems like Topelius's romantic appraisal and elevation of the child during the mid-nineteenth century involves, at least to some degree, a countering of the inferior status ascribed to the Sámi. Elaborating on the role of the Sámi in Topelius's thinking and writing, Jens Grandell convincingly argues that he upholds a Eurocentric discourse that regards them as a cultural other. According to this view the Sámi people were important to Topelius only because they helped him to define the Finns, in contrast, as superior, and thus Sámi were vital for his efforts to build a Finnish identity and establish Finland as a nation. In this essay, however, I want to point to a certain ambivalence in the attitude toward the Sámi people in Topelius's writing for children that has yet to be properly discussed. In his fairy tale about the Sámi boy...

Introduction

Introduction Maria Nikolajeva This special issue marks the centenary of the Finno-Swedish author Tove Jansson (pronounced TOO-vee YAA-nsson), best known internationally as the creator of the Moomin figures, but also a renowned novelist and short-story writer, painter, and cartoonist, one of the most prominent twentieth-century cultural figures in Finland. When you travel from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, the last Finnish town before you cross the border is called Hamina. Perhaps you have lunch at the town hotel, Seurahuone. You go upstairs to the splendid Marshal Hall to see a huge mural painting by Tove Jansson. It is a peaceful, decorative painting showing the life of ordinary people in the little garrison town where thousands of young men of Finland were trained to become officers in the Russian Czars’ army at the time when Finland was the Czar’s personal Grand Duchy, formally not a part of Imperial Russia. When you cross the border into Russia, you enter the beautiful landscape of old Karelia, which Stalin forcibly annexed from Finland. This is the magnificent landscape that Sibelius evokes in “Alla marcia” in his famous Karelia Suite. Then you continue through the squalid city of Viborg, once the legendary, affluent second-largest city of Finland. Finally, you arrive in one of the world’s most illustrious cities, St. Petersburg. You will have thus experienced Tove Jansson’s world and the story of her life. The mural at the hotel in Hamina is a reminder that, although she certainly was a decent painter, her name would hardly have become known outside Finland if she hadn’t developed her art as a cartoonist and created the ingenious world of the Moomins. Finland’s young military trainees in Hamina, Alvar Aalto’s internationally acclaimed Modernist library building in Viborg, and the literary heyday in Czarist St. Petersburg, all remind us that Tove Jansson’s background is not just a small country far away in the north. This country was culturally a part of one of the world’s largest empires, and this heritage differs from [End Page v] what we find in the other Nordic countries. Finland shared the same cultural bonds with Western Europe, but it was also influenced by the radical Russian culture in the beginning of the twentieth century. Literary modernism thus entered Finland earlier than the rest of Scandinavia. The ancient Swedish speaking minority in Finland constitutes merely 300,000 of the country’s population of five million, but it has played a significant role in its history. Most of the Finno-Swedes do not differ socially from the rest of the country’s population, but of tradition the economic and cultural elite had its roots there, and to a certain extent it is still the case. Tove Jansson’s mother was an artist, and her father was a famous sculptor. When Tove Jansson was born, Finland still belonged to the czar. During her lifetime, she experienced the Finnish renaissance as an independent republic, followed by two wars when everyone knew that loss implied the same dreadful fate as the three Baltic states: terror, dictatorship, mass deportations—including young children—to Siberia, and extermination of the country’s intellectuals. The author of the idyllic Moomin books lived through five years of this concrete threat over her and her people. Misery and war sometimes provide good soil for the creation of an idyll. After the war, Finland observed the economic catastrophe of its closest neighbor, Estonia, while Finland itself gradually joined the wealthy Western Europe. All this was a part of Tove Jansson’s life experience. Many Swedes of the older generation first encountered the Moomin world through comics, which were published both in major newspapers and in those of small provincial towns. Tove Jansson, the painter, placed her characters in a seemingly simple, but in fact sophisticated visual world that conquered country after country and paved the way for her books. Moomin Valley is accessible through the world’s major languages. Yet Tove Jansson’s versatility as a verbal artist is perhaps easiest to perceive for Swedish-speaking readers. The Exploits of Moominpapa (1950), for instance, is full of linguistic playfulness that not even the most...

Matters of taste? Conceptions of good and bad taste in focus groups with Swedish-speaking Finns

The Swedish-speaking minority in Finland does very well in most welfare studies. Swedish-speakers, for example, live longer, have fewer difficulties at school and divorce less than the majority. The aim of this article is to examine whether there are significant internal differences within the minority when it comes to culture, lifestyle and taste. The data was gathered from 20 focus group interviews conducted with the Swedish-speaking minority in different parts of Finland. High, medium and low-status groups react to the discussion on taste very differently: high-status groups are very willing to define good and bad taste; medium-status groups try to make a good impression on the moderator, and low-status groups laugh or stay silent. Even if the interviews focused on culture, taste was discussed mainly in the frame of excluding other social groups by building a very rigid image of what good and acceptable taste is.

Elderly People, Health Information, and Libraries: a Small-scale Study on Seniors in a Language Minority

Increased needs for information about health have been observed among elderly people, who constitute a growing group. This paper will present a small-scale study on elderly people and health-related information, and take a closer look at the role of libraries as a source. The study was conducted in order to test a questionnaire. The respondents are 65 years or older and belong to the small Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. The health information behaviour of the respondents is approached through the concept of health information literacy (HIL), meaning the abilities to recognize a need for health information, to identify and use likely information sources, and to evaluate, understand, and use the information in order to make good health decisions. Fifty-five self-administered questionnaires were distributed through a snowball-sampling method. Forty-six questionnaires were returned by mail. Descriptive statistics and a One-way ANOVA were used for the analysis. The results show that libraries and library staff were fairly little used, and even less as sources for health information. When the respondents needed health information, they usually turned to medical expertise. The HIL of the respondents seemed sufficient in some respects, but weaker in others. Needs were identified and sources chosen seemingly easily, but some problems were found in understanding. Also quality assessment seemed to be difficult for many respondents. There might, thus, be room for a broadening of the information environment of the respondents, as well as of other elderly seekers of health information. Enhancing people's (health) information literacy is often suggested to be the information profession's responsibility. As long as there is only little or no interaction between elderly people and libraries, this task is difficult, and more research is needed to find out how libraries could reach out to the growing group of elderly people.

Language-group mortality differentials in Finland: The effects of local language composition

BackgroundThe higher mortality rate among the Finnish-speaking majority than among the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland is well established. The reasons for this phenomenon are only partially known. We aim to find out whether the social resources associated with the proportion of Swedish speakers in a locality result in lower mortality due to external and alcohol-related causes, and whether or not this also affects the Finnish-speaking residents. MethodsThe register data are based on an 11% sample of Finns aged 30 years or more at the end of 1995 – with an over-sample of deaths covering 80% of all deaths in the period 1996–2005. ResultsLiving in areas in which Swedish speakers are more prevalent has a favourable effect on mortality among Swedish-speaking females. Among the males the large difference in relative mortality between the language groups did not generally vary by area type. ConclusionWe found indications that a higher concentration of Swedish speakers resulted in lower mortality in Swedish-speaking females and, to a lesser extent, in older males. The local environment is evidently an important factor and deserves attention in future research.

The differences in drinking patterns between Finnish-speaking majority and Swedish-speaking minority in Finland

This study aims to examine whether the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland differ from the Finnish-speaking majority in respect to alcohol consumption and, whether such differences could be explained by aspects of social capital measured by both individual and area level variables. This cross-sectional dataset consisted of 17,352 Finnish speakers (baseline response rate 40%) and 2018 Swedish speakers (baseline response rate 37%), aged 25-59 years. Multilevel logistic regression models were used to analyse the differences in alcohol consumption between the language groups, and to adjust for several potential individual and area level confounders. Finnish-speaking men and women reported more frequent drunkenness, suffered more frequent hangovers, and had alcohol-induced pass-outs significantly more often than men and women in the Swedish-speaking population. Demographic, social, or environmental factors did not explain the observed differences in drinking patterns between these groups. Active social participation, social engagement, and trust in others were significantly related to drinking patterns only among Finnish speakers, but not among Swedish speakers. Drinking patterns are likely to have a direct impact on the health differences between the two populations, especially in relation to alcohol-related acute harm. It seems unlikely that the effect of social capital on the health differences between the two populations would be mediated through drinking patterns.

Sense of coherence and its determinants: A comparative study of the Finnish-speaking majority and the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland

Despite similar living conditions among the Finnish-speaking majority and the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, the latter is a more advantaged group e.g. in terms of socioeconomic status and health. This study investigated (1) the level of sense of coherence (SOC), (2) the structure of generalized resistance resources (GRRs), and (3) associations of GRRs with SOC among Finnish- and Swedish-speaking Finns. The data derived from the Health and Social Support (HeSSup) Study. The sample comprised 22,937 Finnish men and women aged 20-54, including an additional sample from the Swedish-speaking population (n = 2,967). The response rate was 40%. Ordinary regression analysis was used. Swedish-speaking women scored 0.9 (p = 0.005) and men 0.6 (p = 0.05) points higher on SOC scale compared with Finnish-speaking respondents. The minor difference in the SOC level between the language groups was explained by Finnish speakers' worse psychosocial living conditions in childhood and working conditions in adulthood. Only one interaction was found: parents' divorce during childhood was associated with a significant decrease of SOC scores only for Finnish speakers. Otherwise the same GRRs had similar effects on both Finnish- and Swedish-speaking men's and women's SOC. The only key difference between Finnish- and Swedish-speaking Finns concerned the unequal distribution of GRRs. An increase in GRRs among Finnish speakers would probably strengthen their SOC. However, the slightly stronger level of SOC among Swedish-speaking compared with Finnish-speaking Finns is unlikely to explain the possible differences in well-being between the two language groups.

Why is Mortality Low among the Swedish-Speaking Minority in Finland?

Life expectancy has been substantially longer among the Swedish-speaking Finnsthan in the rest of the population. The relative mortality difference appears to beparticularly marked among the middle-aged. This study examines the possible reasonsfor this mortality difference.The mortality advantage of the Swedish-speaking Finns is connected with their morefavorable geographic location and socioeconomic position. For women these factorsexplain all of the mortality difference but among men two-thirds of the original difference,a 20% excess mortality of the Finnish-speaking majority, persists after adjustingfor the structural differences. In men, the main part of the mortality differenceresults from factors responsible for excess mortality of the Finnish-speaking populationfrom cardiovascular diseases and non-natural causes of death. A similar mortalitycontrast is seen in women as well, but it is compensated by other causes of deathwhich are more common among Swedish-speaking than among Finnish-speakingwomen.

Ethnicity and Unemployment in Finland

This research note provides the general findings from a research project analyzing the reasons behind the lower unemployment rate of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, compared with the Finnish-speaking majority. The main conclusion is that the unemployment gap cannot be attributed to ethnic-group differences in age, education, place of residence, or industrial structure. We believe that two latent factors are highly relevant in this context: language proficiency and social integration, although no data presently available provides information about such issues.

Minority status and perceived health: a comparative study of Finnish- and Swedish-speaking schoolchildren in Finland

Results of earlier studies suggest that the health of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland is better than that of the sociodemographically similar Finnish-speaking population. The causes of differences are unknown. The main aim of the study referred was to investigate whether differences in perceived health according to linguistic group were present in a nation-wide representative sample (n=5,230) of schoolchildren aged 11, 13 and 15 years. A further aim was to determine whether differences could be attributed to socioeconomic background, social relationships or health behaviour. The study is part of the international Health Behaviour in School-aged children (HBSC) survey. The perceived health of Swedish-speaking children (n=1,699) proved to be better than that of Finnish-speaking children (n=3,531). In multivariate logistic regression models the differences could not be attributed to underlying associations with any variable studied. The health advantage of Swedish-speaking children essentially could not be related to known risk factors.

Public Service Radio Programming for Minority Language Audience(s) in a Competitive Market

With the arrival of commercial radio, attracting a younger audience, it becomes a challenge for minority radio stations to keep their audiences. The size of the minority, its location with respect to state borders, its dispersion into the majority population and the strength of the commercial and public service broadcasters in the area shape the possibilities for commercially based radio services. The focus of this study is on the recent development in radio services for the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. The article concludes that if competitive programming is available in their own language, even bilingual speakers who form local minorities in regions with a highly competitive radio market will seek to strengthen their cultural identification by using radio services in their mother tongue.