Origin of the International Team of Authors

Prior to 1969, Dr. Kleiner was involved in major research funded by American funding sources including the National Institute of Mental Health. During those same years, Drs. Dalgard (now deceased) and Sorensen were also involved in major research funded by Norwegian sources, including the Norwegian Research Council. In 1969, Dr. Kleiner came to Norway as a Research Professor, funded by both American (including Fulbright) and Norwegian (including the Norwegian Research Council) funding sources.

In 1969, the three researchers first met and immediately found that their theoretical and research interests overlapped dramatically; they immediately began forty-one years of collaboration in research and publications. In the l980s and l990s, much of their research was in Norway and funded, in the main, by Norwegian sources. This included Dr. Kleiner working at the Center for Social Network and Health at Ulleval Hospital during the 1990-1991 academic year.

However, during this period, their research has also included, at various times, psychological health, juvenile delinquency, suicide, crime, subjective quality of life (or sense of well-being), general health issues, twin studies and mental disorder, etc. Here they will use the concepts of psychological health status and felt quality of life as the main outcome concepts, and the various operational definitions of the outcome measures used in the intervening years will be subsumed under these concepts.

During the early years, they were primarily concerned with traditional epidemiological studies in which correlation studies were made relating demographic variables such as migratory status, social mobility, and ethnicity to incidence and prevalence of the various individual and social problems of interest to them, individually or collectively at the time. As these efforts developed and expanded, it became more and more evident that their assumptions and others’ assumptions as well about the meanings and importance of such variables were highly questionable.

In the process, variables were defined more precisely which had major implications for their significance and for the task of the researcher. This required the researcher to learn about the social and cultural properties of the locus of socialization, learn about the socialization process itself, and the meaning of the relevant variables and experiences to those experiencing them.. The theoretical origins and influences on their thinking derive from the pioneering and seminal work of Kurt Lewin and Alexander Leighton (a student of Adolph Meyer).