This two years master?s thesis is about book circles for children, arranged by the public libraries in Sweden. The purpose is to gain knowledge about how children experience their participation in book circles, and how they experience their own reading. It focuses on children aged 10 to 12 years, and their leisure reading. The research questions are: What are the book circles? function for the participants? How and why do the children read? What kind of literature do they like? Do the children experience that their reading has developed through their participation in the book circles? What parts of the reading process do the book circles influence?The theoretical framework is threefold.

The purpose of this study is to see how preschool teachers can support multilingual children and promote their development in their first languages. It was chosen to look at a specific municipality to see how the preschool teachers there work with multilingual children. By using the method of structured interviews, it was learnt that they do, in fact, work actively with multilingual children. The preschool teachers interviewed received the same questions in order to make the answers as comparable and measurable as possible. The results seem to indicate that more resources are needed to fulfil the needs of children with another first language than Swedish.

Children's library's primary task is to encourage children to read. Promoted readingleads to increased reading skills. A common method for this purpose is booktalk. This studyaims to examine how children?s librarians work with booktalk aimed towards children andhow it can be developed as a working method to support the library's reading promotionactivities.

Background: Anxiety with children before surgery is well known. From the 1950s there are various assessment instruments. Despite that most day surgery units offer preparation for children and parents, there are many children who exhibit a strong anxiety the day of surgery, which can lead to postoperative behavioral changes. Today the nurse estimates the anxiety of a child on personal experience and knowledge, forming the basis for estimation whether the child is in need of sedation or not. The purpose: of this study was to evaluate instruments that the nurse can use in measuring the degree of anxiety of children before fast clinical settings, such as day surgery.

This thesis is a case study that examines what political decisions have been taken and how these policies have been implemented. Further this thesis discusses how legitimacy of local policy makers and implementors is affected. The subject studied have been the social service of Jönköping municipality and the intervention of safe-housing aimed at women who have been, or are subject to violence by person close to them. In our study we have examined local policy within the territory of the intervention and how this policy is implemented. A qualitative method with semi-structured interviews was used in combination with quantitative methods to examine protocols from the social welfare board and an action program named "Skydd och stöd för misshandlade kvinnor och deras barn? [Protection and support for abused women and their children].The purpose of this study has been to highlight how the social services implemented the local policy of safe-house accommodation in Jönköping municipality from the legitimacy and discretion perspectives.

The purpose has been to investigate leisure-time centers actual work on children with attention deficit disorder. In addition, the study strives to make leisure-time centers way of working, in relation to their assignments, visible. The study has also compared how the leisure-time centers work and what the research says. The survey was conducted with the help of three exploratory interviews with pedagogues and three-piece observations at the leisure-time centers. It was carried out at three different schools in two counties in Sweden.The results of the survey show that the schools are trying to create clear procedures, though the centers succeed with this in varied degrees.

ABSTRACTTitel: ?Some kids really love those commercials? -A study of how children experience and construe commercials. (Vissa barn älskar faktiskt sånna dära TV-reklamer? ? En övergripande studie om hur barn upplever och tolkar tv-reklam.)Number of pages: 40Author: Lotta NorbergTutor: Amelie HössjerCourse: Media and Communication Studies CPeriod: Autumn term 2007University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala UniversityPurpose/Aim: The aim of this essay is to make a study of how children experience and construe commercials. Key questions to be answered are; can children distinguish commercials from TV programmes? What do the children think of commercials? How do they watch commercials? What do they think about a ban against commercials directed to children? Do they understand the purpose of commercials? Do their buying habits change?Material/Method: A qualitative method with 18 interviews and 3 observations with 7, 9 and 11 year old children.Main results: The children in my study can distinguish commercials from TV programs.

This work concerns children with reading- and writing difficulties/dyslexia. My purpose is to investigate the practical experience of teachers as well as their everyday work with these children.My questions are:How do teachers work with children aged 4-9 who have reading- and writing difficulties/dyslexia?Which various teaching aids exist for children who have reading- and writing difficulties/dyslexia?Which subjects are affected by reading- and writing difficulties/dyslexia?To answer the above questions I have used the qualitative method. I have performed interviews and observations. Previous research has shown that reading- and writing difficulties/dyslexia is one of our most common disabilities.

Aim: Compare occurrences of first-time-events reported by mothers and fathers with children at high tech NICU according to kangaroo-mother-care method in two university hospitals. Method: Descriptive, quantitative design. Fourty-five couples of parents, with premature children born and cared for at university hospitals in Uppsala or Örebro, answered questionnaires about first-time-events: interaction-events, measures-of-care-events and sleeping-place-events. Results: All differences regarding the children?s age at first-time-events showed Uppsala-children to be younger than Örebro-children. Interaction-events were reported first in children?s lives, measures-of-care-events and sleeping-place-events later.

The purpose of this thesis was to examine if users of digital music games may acquire skills from the games that may be of use in learning to play a real instrument, that is a non-digitally simulated instrument like an acoustic piano. We have used Gee?s theory regarding a possible interconnection between different semiotic domains, and how this connection may enable a transfer of skills between related domains. In this thesis we examine possible skill transfer between the domains ?digital games? and ?non-digital instruments?. To examine our question formulation we chose to conduct a pilot study from which we collected both quantitative and qualitative data.

Because of the situation around the world with war and poorness many people need to leave their homeland and find safeness in other countries. A big amount of this group is children without company of an adult, so called unaccompanied children. The numbers of unaccompanied children who seek safeness in Sweden grow every year. The aim of this study was to investigate how social workers in four municipalities in south of Sweden experience their work with investigating the needs of unaccompanied children. The aim was also to investigate how the social workers experience their opportunities to meet the children?s needs with personalized interventions.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate new knowledge about how children search for library material and which strategies they use, and if the latest research gives any answers whether we should adapt systems and services or teach information seeking in a better way. In this thesis knowledge is understood as research publications but also results from projects in library practise, and studies concerning children 6 to 18 years old are included. The method used is a knowledge survey. We have gathered and evaluated documentation from different sources like citation and reference databases within the field of library and information science. The result implicates that there are, both in old and new documentation, three main search strategies children use in their search for information in a library context; they browse, they search in library catalogues and they use some sort of reference service.

The main purpose of this study is to find out what kind of help social service in one selected municipality in Sweden can provide for children who have witnessed or been victims of domestic violence. Using focus group interview this study investigate how the social workers meet the needs of these children. The bases for our analysis are the Organization Theory and the Attachment Theory, as well as previous research. Important results are that the social services are dependent on notifications in order to do their work and that the most common interventions are foster care, emergency foster care and/or family therapy. The difficulties that social workers perceive their work are unjustified families and heavy workloads.

This two years master?s thesis is a review and exploration of the Swedish debate concerning children?s literature from the 19th century to the present, as well as the evaluation and analysis of four adaptations of the tale Red Riding Hood. The aims are to identify how ideas and values regarding the role of children?s literature in society have developed over time and to contribute with a knowledge base for continued reflection and discussion on the subject of children?s reading and mediation of children?s literature in public libraries.The theory and method used in the thesis, is primarily based on the discourse analysis of Michel Foucault. I have identified four main discourses: the educational discourse, the liberation discourse, the politicized dis- course and the popular discourse.

Abstract   In this thesis, my aim was to investigate how preschool teachers view their involvement in children's free play. In order to answer this, I chose to do semi-structured interviews with four preschool teachers in three different preschools. My interviews has revealed similarities and support for as how history of research looks at the involvement of educationists. Both research and my results stresses the importance of being active in children's free play and to be a supportive teacher, particulary in conflict situations. For those children who have difficulty entering into the free game its the educationists task to co-play and help the children find the game.