Nadine Reibling

• PhD
• Professor at Fulda University of Applied Sciences

The study investigates whether sick leave for the unemployed is used to address problems of labour market integration – a process that can theoretically be conceptualised as the medicalisation of unemployment. Estimating a multilevel logistic regression model on a sample of N = 20,196 individuals from the German panel study Labour Market and Social...

How can we understand the biopsychosocial welfare state? What empirical indications are there for the increasing influence of medicine and psychology in advanced welfare states? This chapter answers these questions and additionally discusses how current crises have influenced—and will continue to influence—the medicalization and psychologization of...

Medicine and psychology are key disciplines when it comes to childhood, particularly if it is problematized. In this chapter, Reibling, Ariaans, and Hamel argue that both the turn of Western welfare states toward social investment and the resulting new interest in children are paradigmatic examples of the shift toward a biopsychosocial welfare stat...

Medicalization and psychologization have developed as two separate concepts. In this chapter, Reibling and Bleckmann introduce the reader to both bodies of literature and provide a basic introduction to the processes behind the concepts. The authors argue that medicine and psychology should not be subsumed under a therapeutization framework and tha...

In this chapter, Ariaans and Reibling outline how the medicalization and psychologization of social problems in recent decades must be viewed in the context of how contemporary welfare states have been transformed through neoliberal and social investment ideas. Both policy paradigms have shaped social policy discourses and reform agendas since the...

Unemployment is one of the classical social risks that are covered by the welfare state. For cases in which unemployment stems from ill health, welfare states have long provided specific medicalized benefits (e.g., sickness and incapacity benefits). However, the boundary between unemployment and sickness/incapacity has received an increasing level...

How does a welfare state develop into a biopsychosocial welfare state? Ariaans, Bleckmann, and Reibling ask this question and provide a much-needed theoretical construct of the medicalization and psychologizations processes that take place within the welfare state. Although medicine and psychology are disciplines that have always been discussed as...

Background: Self-stigmatization in the context of infectious diseases can be a psychosocial burden and reduce the cooperation with infection control measures. This study investigates for the first time the level of self-stigmatization among individuals with different social and medical vulnerabilities in Germany. Methods: Data are derived from a...

Zusammenfassung Hintergrund Obwohl die COVID-19-Schutzimpfung schwere Krankheitsverläufe sowie Hospitalisierungen und Todesfälle reduziert, ist jede vierte bis fünfte Person in Deutschland nicht gegen COVID-19 geimpft. Um diese Menschen zu erreichen, werden effektive Informations- und Kommunikationsmaßnahmen benötigt. Dafür ist es wichtig, den sub...

Medizin- und gesundheitssoziologische Fragen haben Soziolog:innen seit der Entstehung der Disziplin intensiv beschäftigt und finden sich in vielen Texten der ersten Generationen deutscher Soziologieprofessoren bereits im 19. Jahrhundert. Seit der Gründung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) im Jahr 1909 spielt die Gesundheits- und Mediz...

The literature on the social legitimacy of welfare benefits has shown that sick persons are perceived more deserving than unemployed individuals. However, these studies examine sick and unemployed persons as distinct groups, while unemployment and sickness are in fact strongly related. Policymakers across Europe have been increasingly concerned wit...

Active labour market policy (ALMP) reforms have fundamentally changed welfare states over the last decades. Their objectives are quite diverse: workfare reforms have increased conditionality and sanctioning of benefits, while enabling reforms have extended education and training opportunities for the unemployed. Little is known about the political...

Background Wearing face masks in public is recommended under certain circumstances in order to prevent infectious diseases transmitted through droplets.AimThe objective was to compile all German and English research results from peer-reviewed journal articles using a sensitive literature search on the effects of mask-wearing for preventing infectio...

Mit der Veröffentlichung der Armuts- und Reichtumsberichte der Bundesregierung seit 2001 hat sich ein politischer Armutsdiskurs in Deutschland verstetigt. Gesundheit ist in allen bisherigen fünf Berichten eine zentrale Dimension. Jedoch ist für Deutschland bis heute wenig erforscht, welche Rolle Gesundheit in der politischen Debatte zu Armut einnim...

Nicht nur in der aktuellen Pandemie sind Akzeptanz und Inanspruchnahme von Impfangeboten eine Grundvoraussetzung für den bevölkerungsweiten Infektionsschutz (1, 2). Laufende Studien zeigen, dass ein wesentlicher, aber je nach Studie und Zeitpunkt variierender Teil der Bevölkerung bereit ist, sich gegen SARS-CoV-2 impfen zu lassen (3, 4). Dieser Bei...

Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über den internationalen Vergleich von Gesundheitssystemen. Nach einer Einführung in den Terminus Gesundheitssystem werden zwei Perspektiven des Systemvergleichs vorgestellt: der Vergleich politischer Akteure und Institutionen des Gesundheitssystems und der Vergleich von Systemcharakteristika in den Bereichen Finanz...

We report the results of a representative vignette study that investigates how citizens assess benefits, conditions and sanctions of SGB I and SGB II, when unemployed persons are physically or mentally ill. The respondents recognize that health problems make it more difficult to take up work. They are therefore less willing to sanction sick unemplo...

This poster was presented at the 40th Congress of the German Sociological Association (GSA) on September 18th.

Recent social science scholarship has argued that poverty is increasingly discussed as a problem that can have medical or psychological causes and could be tackled through therapeutic and health-related interventions. The aim of this study is to investigate if such a trend towards the medicalisation and psychologisation of poverty is present in the...

In this paper, we present an extended typology of OECD healthcare systems. Our theoretical framework integrates the comparative-institutional perspective of existing classifications with current ideas from the international health policy research debate. We argue that combining these two perspectives provides a more comprehensive picture of modern...

Die Integration von (langzeit-)arbeitslosen Personen ist eine zentrale Herausforderung für Arbeitsmarkt- und Sozialpolitik. Aktivierung und die damit verknüpfte Konditionalität von Sozialleistungen haben bedeutende Implikationen für die Wahrnehmung von arbeitslosen Personen, die immer häufiger Stigmatisierungen erleben. Gesundheitliche Einschränkun...

This study investigates how women’s and men’s fertility history affect their health in later life and if this relationship varies across countries and cohorts. We use life history data and current health status of persons aged 50 and over from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) for 13 countries. Country-fixed effects regr...

Das deutsche Gesundheitssystem hat das Ziel, für seine Bürger universellen Zugang zu einer ausreichenden und zweckmäßigen, d. h. patienten- und bedarfsgerechten, medizi- nischen Versorgung sicherzustellen (SVR 2014). Unter gegebener Ressourcenknappheit befasst sich die deutsche Gesundheitspolitik daher seit Jahren mit der Vermeidung von Über-, Unte...

Background: Socioeconomic inequalities in the prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are evident across European populations. Several previous studies have addressed the question of whether occupational inequalities in health differ across European regions. It is uncertain however, the degree to which occupational inequalities in NCDs are...

Background: Within the European Union (EU), substantial efforts are being made to achieve economic and social cohesion, and the reduction of health inequalities between EU regions is integral to this process. This paper is the first to examine how self-reported conditions and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) vary spatially between and within count...

Background: Previous studies examining physical and mental non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in Europe have so far largely either focused on limited numbers of countries or on fairly limited ranges of NCDs, with mental health in particular often being ignored. This article has three aims: (i) To provide a recent, comprehensive overview of a broad ra...

Background: Previous studies comparing the social and behavioural determinants of health in Europe have largely focused on individual countries or combined data from various national surveys. In this article, we present the findings from the new rotating module on social determinants of health in the European Social Survey (ESS) (2014) to obtain th...

Background: It has been suggested that cross-national variation in educational inequalities in health outcomes (e.g. NCDs) is due to cross-national variation in risky health behaviour. In this paper we aim to use highly recent data (2014) to examine educational inequalities in risky health behaviour in 21 European countries from all regions of the...

Background: Economic crises constitute a shock to societies with potentially harmful effects to the mental health status of the population, including depressive symptoms, and existing health inequalities. Methods: With recent data from the European Social Survey (2006–14), this study investigates how the economic recession in Europe starting in...

Die Lebenserwartung in Deutschland ist auf einem historischen Hoch und neben einer verbesserten Ernährung und medizinischen Versorgung ist für diesen enormen Anstieg auch die Verbesserung der Wohnbedingungen breiter Bevölkerungsschichten verantwortlich. Dennoch zeigen sich in allen Industrieländern und auch in Deutschland bedeutsame Unterschiede in...

Objective To assess a comprehensive multicomponent intervention against a low intensity intervention for promoting physical activity in chronic low back pain patients. Design Randomised controlled trial. Setting Inpatient rehabilitation and aftercare. Subjects A total of 412 patients with chronic low back pain. Interventions A multicomponent in...

This study investigates whether patient-reported characteristics of the medical home are associated with improved quality and equity of preventive care, advice on health habits, and emergency department use. We used adjusted risk ratios to examine the association between medical home characteristics and care measures based on the 2010 Medical Expen...

Background: Disparities in health care and health outcomes are a significant problem in the United States. Delivery system reforms such as the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) could have important implications for disparities. Objectives: To investigate what role disparities play in current PCMH initiatives and how their set-up might impact...

Background: Since 2001 the Netherlands has shown a sharp upturn in life expectancy (LE) after a longer period of slower improvement. This study assessed whether changes in healthcare expenditure (HCE) explain this reversal in trends in LE. As an alternative explanation, the impact of changes in smoking behavior was also evaluated. Methods: To qu...

One central aim of climate change mitigation in the European Union is to reduce energy consumption in the housing sector. In order to ensure effectiveness of policies targeting household energy conservation, it is important to investigate existing energy practices of different social groups. This article describes and explains energy practices in t...

Illness has a major influence on people’s lives. Studying healthcare-seeking is therefore of vital importance. Patients’ decisions about healthcare fundamentally influence the performance of the overall healthcare system in terms of a population’s health, the quality of healthcare services, and the level of expenditures. Even though illness behavio...

Although some healthcare systems have introduced gatekeeping that forces patients to choose a general practitioner for a longer period, other systems rely on a free choice of doctors. This paper analyzes how these instruments affect differences in healthcare utilization in European countries. Using data from the first wave of the Survey of Health,...

This paper outlines the capabilities of pooled cross-sectional time series methodology for the international comparison of health system performance in population health. It shows how common model specifications can be improved so that they not only better address the specific nature of time series data on population health but are also more closel...

Although some healthcare systems have introduced gatekeeping that forces patients to choose a general practitioner for a longer period, other systems rely on a free choice of doctors. This paper analyzes how these instruments affect differences in healthcare utilization in European countries. Using data from the first wave of the Survey of Health,...

Gatekeeping and provider choice have become central in health policymaking within the last two decades. This article contributes to the debates in two ways: first, it provides an extended review of evidence on the impact of gatekeeping and provider choice on efficiency, costs, quality, equality and patient empowerment; and second, it empirically an...

People need to trust that necessary care will be provided in the case of serious illness or injury, but negative experiences with the healthcare system reduce confidence. In this article, we discuss the effect of cost barriers on people's confidence in receiving safe and quality medical care when falling seriously ill in seven countries: Australia,...

This paper examines how negative experiences with the health-care system create a lack of confidence in receiving medical care in seven countries: Australia, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The empirical analysis is based on data from the Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey...

The core of existing healthcare typologies is the public—private mix in the three areas of funding, provision and regulation of healthcare services. This article aims to contribute to the debate by adding ‘healthcare access’ as an important dimension for comparing healthcare systems. In contrast to previous analyses, I extend the concept of access...

Zusammenfassung Aufgrund hoher und steigender Gesundheitskosten gewinnt eine effiziente Gestaltung der Gesundheitsversorgung an Bedeutung. Aktuelle Reformen der europäischen Gesundheitssysteme sehen einen wesentlichen Ansatzpunkt zur Erreichung dieses Ziels darin, über eine bessere Koordinierung des Zugangs zur Gesundheitsversorgung die teilweise b...

Equal access to health care is a central goal of all European health-care systems. International studies, however, show that this goal has not been accomplished yet. The aim of this study is to investigate if there are inequalities across patients with different levels of education and if these differences vary with the institutional set-up of heal...

"Regulating patients' access to healthcare has been used in several countries as a way of controlling patients' consumption levels. In some countries, provider choice is directly limited through legal regulations such as gatekeeping, whereas in other countries patients' behavior is primarily governed by financial incentives like co-payments to doct...