Forte grants SEK 348 million to 72 new research projects with significance for society and people’s lives. Within the annual call for project grants, projects are funded that run until 2028 and span all of Forte’s fields of research – health, working life and welfare.

Forte’s annual call for project grants is a researcher-initiated call within Forte’s research fields health, working life and welfare. The researchers may apply for funding based on needs they identify themself. The result is a wide range of research projects that deal with a variety of research questions.

Many of the funded projects respond to major societal challenges – others touch on more specific issues with a focus on certain groups of individuals. In this diversity, certain themes can be discerned among this year’s granted applications.

– In the wide range of research questions in our research fields health, working life and welfare, several funded projects focus on children and young people’s upbringinging and living conditions. The research will provide new knowledge on everything from how we can give our youngest ones a positive development, to how we can support young people in the transition to the adult world, says Jonas Björck, director general at Forte.

Other themes are segregation and social sustainability, as well as the ongoing restructuring of working life with, among other things, digitization, green industries and the challenge of creating inclusive and equal working conditions.

For Forte, collaboration with actors outside academia is an important part of research. In their applications, the researchers describe whether they plan to collaborate and in what way. For example, by including target groups for the research in the project group or in the design of studies.

– Collaboration is part of nearly 90 percent of the funded projects. Forte sees this as a crucial tool to fulfill our mission, and the goal of collaboration is to raise the quality and relevance of research, says Jonas Björck.

Some of the societal challenges that were addressed in the granted projects are described below. A list of all granted applications, including project title and project leader, can be found on the page Grant decisions.

Children and young people’s upbringing and living conditions

  • The importance and potential of preschool for the long-term integration of immigrant children
    Caroline Hall, Institute for Labor Market and Education Policy Evaluation (IFAU)
  • Associations between digital media use and early child development: A longitudinal project from pregnancy to age 2 years
    Lisa Berlin Thorell, Karolinska Institutet
  • Needs-based school funding – a path to improving student achievement and reducing educational inequalities?
    Annika Elwert, Lund University
  • Man up! Open up? Teenage boys’ interpretations of social media content about mental health
    Anette Wickström, Linköping University
  • Reconstructing schoolyards with greenery to increase schoolchildren´s physical activity and health and mitigate climate changes in urban areas
    Daniel Berglind, Karolinska Institutet
  • Children in compulsory care in the long run
    Tove Pettersson, Stockholm University
  • Inequalities in children’s health – a matter of migrant background? A mixed method study of health, lifestyle habits and Child Health Services´ response
    Faustine Nkulu Kalengayi, Umeå University
  • The pivotal transition from adolescence to young adulthood in a turbulent time. What the STARS cohort can tell us about health consequences now – and beyond.
    Yun Chen, Gothenburg University

Working life in transformation

  • The Political Consequences When Jobs Disappear
    Johannes Lindvall, Gothenburg University
  • Who Wants to be a Working Retiree? Prerequisites and Working Conditions for People Combining Work and Retirement in the Temporary Staffing Sector
    Anna Brydsten, Umeå University
  • From recession to success – the effects of the ´new industrialization´ in a small local community in the county of Norrbotten 2007-2026
    Peter Waara, Luleå University of Technology
  • Digital welfare technology and the transformation of care work. New ways of working and leading in elderly care
    Marcus Persson, Linköping University
  • A new era for the Swedish labour law model
    Petra Herzfeld Olsson, Stockholm University
  • Why aren’t you visible on Teams? Digital surveillance in Swedish working life and its effects
    Daniel Lundqvist, Linköping University

Segregation and social sustainability

  • Social dumping between center and periphery: prevalence and extent, policy mechanisms and lived experiences of housing-insecure persons in Sweden
    Maria Persdotter, Linköping University
  • Faces of Inequality: An Empirical Study Using Passport Photos and AI to Assess Appearance-Based Discrimination in Sweden
    Adam Altmejd, Stockholm University
  • Improving health promotion for people living in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas
    Margarita Mondaca, Umeå University
  • Fair and Square: An Interdisciplinary Study of Algorithmic Discrimination in Healthcare
    Anna Nilsson, Lund University
  • Enacting vulnerable areas
    Annika Lindberg, Gothenburg University