Cecilia Henning

Affiliated
Department of Social work , School of Health and Welfare
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PhD in Sociology

A European project was established within the ADAPT initiative, with financial support from the European Social Fund, aiming at developing innovative methods for competence upgrading for staff within old age care. The project had partners in Germany and Italy. Cecilia Henning was project leader for this project during the period 1997—2000.

In connection with the Center for Research and Development of Social Welfare in the county of Jönköping (LUPPEN), Cecilia Henning has been responsible for several projects designed to develop practice and improve staff competence in order to enhance the well-being of old people.
One recent project is conducted as one of several case studies directed towards developing a method (Future Workshop) for empowerment of old people. Old people in a defined neighbourhood area are encouraged to participate in a process the goal of which is to improve the conditions of everyday life and facilitate ageing in place. In future research the results of this project will be compared with the results of similar case studies and analysed in relation to social work theories connected to social pedagogy, including theories on empowerment.

A research project is going on in co-operation with researchers from the Department of Behavioural Science and Social Work, the Department of Nursing Science and the Department of Rehabilitation at the School of Health Sciences. This project focuses on different attitudes among different professional groups with regard to factors of importance for old people´s well-being.

Research has been conducted within a range of projects exploring the significance for different groups of people of neighbourhood contacts in relation to other social network domains. Within this frame of research new theories and concepts have been developed concerning the significance of social networks in the neighbourhood. Future research will focus on the presence and significance of different kinds of neighbourhood networks for old people. The results of this research will be analysed in relation to social capital theories within preventive social work. This forthcoming research will be linked to a planned research co-operation with Professor Tokie Anme at the Graduate School of Comprehensive Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tokyo. The planned research cooperation will focus on preventive-oriented community-based elderly care based on a comparative cross-cultural analysis.