ABSTRACT
This article examines how representatives of Swedish civil society organisations (CSOs) reflected on and acted to provide daily functional social work to people living precarious lives during the early phase (March-April 2020) of the Covid-19 pandemic in Sweden. The empirical material consists of 20 qualitative interviews with representatives of CSOs. The results highlight how the CSOs, and their venues, constituted a safe place where visitors were considered grievable and that working face-to-face with the visitors was deemed necessary. However, the pandemic posed challenges for how the CSOs were used to organise their social work, while many visitors lacked other alternatives. When Covid-19 hit, it meant adapting and responding to deliver well-functioning social work and a place for people lacking other alternatives despite the pandemic. The measures taken implied possible challenges to the relationship between the CSOs and their visitors. Still, there were indications that the visitors saw the measures as a protection, as rituals of grievability. However, not all measures were welcomed by the representatives or visitors. Turning people away or prioritising among visitors were challenging and cannot always be said to frame people as grievable. Regardless, it seems that the challenging measures taken during the pandemic were already embedded in everyday practices where the visitors were treated relationally and considered grievable before the pandemic. This embeddedness made it possible to extend grievability throughout the pandemic, even when social distancing measures were used, thus emphasising the importance of places of grievability being accessible to people before societal crises occur. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to examine the effects of home-based exercise programmes on measures of physical-fitness in healthy older adults. Seventeen randomized-controlled trials were included with a total of 1,477 participants. Results indicated small effects of home-based training on muscle strength (between-study standardised-mean-difference [SMD] = 0.30), muscle power (SMD = 0.43), muscular endurance (SMD = 0.28), and balance (SMD = 0.28). We found no statistically significant effects for single-mode strength vs. multimodal training (e.g., combined balance, strength, and flexibility exercises) on measures of muscle strength and balance. Single-mode strength training had moderate effects on muscle strength (SMD = 0.51) and balance (SMD = 0.65) while multimodal training had no statistically significant effects on muscle strength and balance. Irrespective of the training type, >3 weekly sessions produced larger effects on muscle strength (SMD = 0.45) and balance (SMD = 0.37) compared with ≤3 weekly sessions (muscle strength: SMD = 0.28; balance: SMD = 0.24). For session-duration, only ≤30 min per-session produced small effects on muscle strength (SMD = 0.35) and balance (SMD = 0.34). No statistically significant differences were observed between all independently-computed single-training factors. Home-based exercise appears effective to improve components of health- (i.e., muscle strength and muscular endurance) and skill-related (i.e., muscle power, balance) physical-fitness. Therefore, in times of restricted physical activity due to pandemics, home-based exercises constitute an alternative to counteract physical inactivity and preserve/improve the health and fitness of healthy older adults aged 65-to-83 years.