The purpose of this master’s thesis is to examine the relationship between mothers and sons in Mustafa Can’s Tätt intill dagarna: Berättelsen om min mor (Close to the days: The story of my mother) from 2006, Theodor Kallifatides’ Mödrar och söner (Mothers and sons) from 2007 and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous from 2019. These novels examine themes of migration and motherhood through the perspective of the sons, who all write semi-autobiographically about their mothers.   This thesis uses a broad theoretical framework, with postcolonial theories of hybridity and double consciousness alongside motherhood studies as the primary sources. Works by Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, Sara Ahmed, and Marianne Hirsch, are, alongside others, used in purpose of creating a nuanced understanding of the relationships between mother, son and place, as these relations are portrayed in the novels.   The analysis is divided into three chapters, where the novels are represented by one chapter each. The final part of the thesis is a comparative discussion, in which the novels are read alongside each other, in order to draw conclusions on the ways in which these authors represent the relations between mother and place, and how this affects the sons’ feelings of identity. In summary, this thesis shows that the mothers play an important role in their sons’ subject formations, and that the sons’ relationships with their home countries are affected by, or correlated to, their relationships with their mothers. This is done using imagery of nature, portrayals of language barriers, and other descriptions of fragmented identities.

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Background: Shifting the healthcare payment system from a volume-based to a value-based model has been a significant effort to improve the quality of care and reduce healthcare costs in the US. In 2018, Massachusetts Medicaid launched Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) as part of the effort. Constructing, assessing, and risk-adjusting quality measures are integral parts of the reform process. Methods: Using data from the MassHealth Data Warehouse (2016-2019), we assessed the loss of community tenure (CTloss) as a potential quality measure for patients with bipolar, schizophrenia, or other psychotic disorders (BSP). We evaluated various statistical models for predicting CTloss using deviance, Akaike information criterion, Vuong test, squared correlation and observed vs. expected (O/E) ratios. We also used logistic regression to investigate risk factors that impacted medication nonadherence, another quality measure for patients with bipolar disorders (BD). Results: Mean CTloss was 12.1 (±31.0 SD) days in the study population; it varied greatly across ACOs. For risk adjustment modeling, we recommended the zero-inflated Poisson or doubly augmented beta model. The O/E ratio ranged from 0.4 to 1.2, suggesting variation in quality, after adjusting for differences in patient characteristics for which ACOs served as reflected in E. Almost half (47.7%) of BD patients were nonadherent to second-generation antipsychotics. Patient demographics, medical and mental comorbidities, receiving institutional services like those from the Department of Mental Health, homelessness, and neighborhood socioeconomic stress impacted medication nonadherence. Conclusions: Valid quality measures are essential to value-based payment. Heterogeneity implies the need for risk adjustment. The search for a model type is driven by the non-standard distribution of CTloss.