Frontline workers play a crucial role in implementing activation policies. Nevertheless, research on what competencies are required for activation work is limited. We explored activation competency based on a survey of 1,735 frontline workers in the Norwegian labour and welfare administration. Factor analysis revealed two distinct underlying dimensions in activation competency: market competency and user‐oriented competency. We found that the social workers in the study viewed themselves as having significantly less market competency and slightly more user‐oriented competency than non‐social workers have, but the differences were small. The results also indicate that these effects are partially mediated by attitudes towards conditionality. The results give reason to treat activation competencies as twofold and raise the question of whether social work education improves frontline workers' competency in activation work compared with frontline workers with other educational backgrounds.

The aim of this study was to explore associations between self-esteem, general self-efficacy, and the deep, strategic, and surface approaches to studying. Norwegian occupational therapy students (n = 125) completed questionnaires measuring study approaches, self-esteem, and general self-efficacy. Regression analyses were used to explore the direct relationships between self-esteem, general self-efficacy and the approaches to studying, after controlling for age, gender, prior higher education, and time spent on independent studying. General selfefficacy displayed positive associations with deep and strategic approaches to studying and a negative relationship with a surface approach to studying. Self-esteem was not significantly associated with approaches to studying.

Public discourse often portrays Islam as the main obstacle for Muslim minorities' integration, paying little attention to the contextual factors hindering this process. Here, we focus on islamophobia as one destructive factor that hinders the mutual integration between Muslim minority and Western majority members, affecting both groups. In Study 1, the more islamophobic majority members were, the more they expected Muslims to give up their heritage culture and the less they wanted them to integrate. In Study 2, only when Muslims experienced substantial religious discrimination did religious identity negatively relate to national engagement and particularly positively relate to ethnic engagement. Together, the studies suggest that religious prejudice in the form of islamophobia is a major obstacle to Muslims' integration because it increases the incongruity between majority and minority members' acculturation attitudes.

The debate on behavioural conditionality is characterised by abundant controversies. Frontline managers have a particularly important role in implementing these policies because their interpretation of the welfare policies regulates the frameworks of street‐level bureaucrat's discretionary powers. A nationwide survey among frontline managers in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration revealed that 86% of the managers expressed strong normative support towards welfare conditionality. With this as a backdrop, this paper develops a better understanding of managers' perceptions and justifications of the Norwegian type of behavioural conditionality. Analysis of focus group interview data showed that the managers adopted a broad definition of conditionality, meaning promotion of an overall (re)integration of the client into the society as opposed to the narrow definition focusing solely on labour market integration. Furthermore, the implementation of welfare conditionality primarily was perceived as mild and client sensitive. The managers mainly justified welfare conditionality in terms of care and paternalistic defences, arguing that requirement of work and activities are in the client's best interest, understood in terms of social democratic values.

Background: The Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) is a validated brief instrument measuring the five-factor model (FFM) personality dimensions, developed for instances where more comprehensive FFM instruments are impractical to use. The TIPI has been translated into several languages, but psychometric properties of the Norwegian version (N-TIPI) have not been systematically explored.Objectives: This study aimed to explore the psychometric properties of the N-TIPI, in terms of internal consistency and structural validity.Methods: In a cross-sectional study, responses on the N-TIPI were collected from 5,009 Norwegian master graduates. Descriptive statistics for the subscales and correlations between subscales were calculated. Internal consistency was assessed with inter-item correlations, Cronbach’s α and Spearman-Brown coefficients. Structural validity was explored with principal component analysis, parallel analysis, and visual scree plot inspection. Results for the N-TIPI were compared with those previously reported for the original TIPI as well as the German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese versions.Results: Compared with the original and non-English versions of TIPI, results for N-TIPI showed comparable subscale rank order of means, standard deviations, and pattern of correlations between subscales, as well as inter-item correlations and Cronbach’s α. The 10 N-TIPI items were adequately reduced to five components, theoretically corresponding with the FFM personality domains.Conclusion: The N-TIPI demonstrated acceptable internal consistency and satisfactory structural validity. Although further research is warranted, the instrument stands out as feasible when it is essential to minimize participants’ response burden in studies that aim to explore personality as one among several concepts or utilize personality traits as covariates.