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The purpose of this paper is to examine how repatriates’ emotional support network affects their experience of re-entry.

This inductive, qualitative study is based on 27 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Belgian organizational repatriates.

The analyses suggest that expatriation empathy is a key attribute of organizational repatriates’ main emotional support providers. In addition, the results show that although partners are a main source of emotional support on re-entry, they are also important potential causes of distress. Lastly, the results suggest that the cultural diversity of a repatriate’s emotional support network is linked with characteristics of the assignment and that it affects the experience of repatriation.

The results provide empirical evidence that the expatriation empathy of repatriates’ support providers is a more informative characteristic to consider compared with whether they have personal experience of expatriation. In addition, the results suggest that research should also take into account the negative side of social support, and, for example, consider the influence of crossover distress of partners who experience relocation difficulties themselves.

This study points to the possible benefits of organizing social activities or training for repatriates and their partner and any children, as well as the advantages of encouraging expatriates to invite home-country friends to visit.

Although most scholars agree on the importance of support for expatriates’ well-being, the sources of relevant emotional support have received little research attention so far, as has how this influences the repatriation experience.

Previous research shows differences between women and men in utilization of facilities of health care (FHC) across the general population in a number of countries. In this chapter, we focus on the capability to use FHC, because it refers to an individual freedom to choose between alternative FHC directed to restore or to improve own health in situations of health needs. Based on several empirical studies and on the insights of the capability approach, we propose that there are cross-national differences between women and men in the capability to use FHC, and that these differences are due to gender differences in the extent of educational skills, and due to differences in the extensiveness of social security policies across countries. The objective of this study was to question these propositions.

We tested the hypotheses using the data from the European Social Survey (in a sample of 38,992 respondents from 22 countries) which we analyzed performing multilevel analyses.

The findings show that in Central, North, West, and East European countries, women have more capabilities to use FHC than men. They suggest that the low-skilled women in Central, North, and West European countries have higher level of the capability to use FHC than women with more educational skills.

The findings do not specify which particular social program or policy is more effective in enhancing women’s capability to use FHC.

This chapter focuses on women’s freedom or the capability to use FHC.

This chapter focuses on health information-seeking (HIS) which reflects people’s search of information about health issues via the use of mass media resources. Several empirical studies report that consumption of such resources is not randomly distributed across demographic groups and countries. We aim to explain differences in HIS using the perspectives of sociological theories which state that individuals are rational beings who strive to reach their goals by means of available resources. Based on these theories, we hypothesize that variation in the extensiveness of social security policies explains cross-national differences in HIS and in relationship between education and HIS.

Our results are obtained using hierarchical multilevel analysis of the data from the Eurobarometer 58.2, in a sample of 14,835 respondents from 15 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

We found that social security policies matter for the relationship between education and health information-seeking. The results indicate that in Southern European countries, the better educated use more mass media for getting health information than the less educated. However, in Central, Northern and Western European countries, the negative impact of low education is absent. This might suggest that social security policies in these countries have a favorable impact on health information-seeking behavior of the low educated.

Further research is needed to find which specific social security policies are more effective in reduction of the negative impact of low education on HIS. The findings of this chapter offer suggestions for social policy initiatives to reduce educational differences in HIS or to keep the reduction reached stable over time.

In this chapter, we have used a more sophisticated method of multilevel analysis to examine the combined impact of social security policies and individual education on the use of mass media resources for search of health information. This has not yet been studied in the previous research.