Dr. Siw Tone Innstrand is a professor in health science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. She is also the Assistant Director of the NTNU Center for Health Promotion Research. She has a Ph.D. in Health Science, and her main research field is within health promotion in the work life. A year ago, she was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley under the Fulbright program. During her stay in Berkeley, she worked closely with the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces (ICHW) on the Understanding Healthy Workplaces: Cross-cultural Comparisons between Norway and the United States project.
Your work focuses on how to make universities--a workplace for faculty, students, and staff alike--healthy places. How did you become interested in this work, and in the collaboration with ICHW?
The Healthy Workplaces project started when I was asked to make a work environment survey for two different universities in Norway. This made me realize that all universities and university colleges in Norway regularly conduct different work environment surveys, which is imposed by legislation in Norway, and often with no plan on how to use these findings to improve their work environment. Our idea was that it would be more feasible to make one common work environment survey specially adopted to universities and university colleges, for mutual exchange of knowledge and experience. From that request for the survey, we invented something we call the ARK (Norwegian acronym for Work Environment and Climate Survey) project, a holistic intervention program that aims to enhance the psychosocial work environment for faculty staff using a bottom-up approach for the employees to create their own interventions based on the finding from the survey. Currently, the ARK program is conducted in 18 universities and university colleges in Norway, and two in Sweden. All data are stored in a common data bank for benchmarking data and research, which feeds back knowledge to the universities on how to create healthy workplaces. When I came to Berkeley as a visiting scholar, I met Cristina Banks, and she told me that they have a survey for students. Then we figured, why don’t we combine these and create a holistic project on healthy universities together? And that’s why we applied to the Peder Sæther Grant to fund this common project.
What’s the cross-national research process like?
We have a lot of discussions because there are similarities between Norway and the US, but also a lot of differences. So when we do have this common project, we need to make sure that we are actually talking about the same thing, be on the same page, and make sure that anything we decide or do applies to both countries. Moreover, one of the aims of the project is to see if it is possible for us to come up with an index to healthy workplaces that can be applied in both Norwegian settings and American ones. I think it is very fun to do this cross-national project together.
What are the obstacles or difficulties you’ve encountered in this research process?
I’m not so fond of focusing on the difficulties, instead I see a lot of possibilities. We had a lot of discussions about different definitions. But since we both have similar backgrounds in Psychology, we do have a common language, so I think the obstacles are just possibilities for us to solve together, and they are mostly academic arguments. Of course, it might be that we’re not aware of the difficulties of application yet due to the cultural differences. But that’s for the future.
Speaking of the future, what’s next for you?
Next for me… In the Peder Sæther project, we also have a collaboration with the Business School in Stavanger, so I will follow up with them about what we have been doing here. I will also continue my work with the health-promoting workplaces back in Norway, and continuing to work on the ARK project. What we are specifically interested in right now is how to implement interventions, the intervention processes, and how to evaluate these processes. We are also concerned about how we can facilitate the leaders or process leaders in how to translate knowledge and findings from the survey into best practices. We’ll also integrate this as the next step of this project together with the ICHW.
