The academic underachievement of looked after children is well known. By involving foster carers in a Paired Reading intervention a Swedish project tried to address this issue, replicating a successful British trial. The aim of my thesis was to study the variations in the foster carers? experiences of this literacy intervention. Reading reports from 100 children were collected and qualitative interviews with 15 foster parents were analyzed using concepts from motivational psychology.

The aim of this descriptive review was to elucidate how the literature describes how children of parents with mental illness experience and have knowledge about their parent?s illness. The aim was furthermore to describe how the children?s existence is affected, can be improved and why the children so often are invisible. Search through Medline (through PubMed) database and additional manual search was conducted.

The study is quantitative and is about working men and women?s view of male and female leadership. The intention of the study is to see if the men and women have a different perception of male and female leadership and also if they have different personality types. The method used was a survey where the sample is 80 participants, 31 men and 49 women from four different companies. Previous research shows that the perception of male and female leadership can be different, and that the reason can be prejudices and beliefs.

Barnavårdscentralen (BVC) är en frivillig men väl socialt accepterad del av barnhälsovården i Sverige. Behovet av stöd på BVC har förändrats över tid och nu dominerar de psykosociala behoven. Barn är beroende av vuxnas omsorg. Eftersom en stor andel av förskolebarnen träffar en BVC-sjuksköterska har hon en viktig roll i att identifiera och hjälpa barn som är utsatta för omsorgssvikt. Syftet med studien är att undersöka BVC-sjuksköterskors erfarenheter av att möta familjer där de misstänker att barn kan vara utsatta för omsorgssvikt och hur de upplever de resurser de har till sitt förfogande för att hjälpa barn och familj.En kvalitativ metod med induktiv ansats valdes och åtta BVC-sjuksköterskor intervjuades.

Literature and studies exist on how to create services in the best interest of the client or how these services have an impact on individuals. They are however mainly from a social work professional stand point and rarely from how clients would develop and create the services that can imply a life change for them. Especially when working with children under 18 years old issues of agency and age that can result in the disregard of the Convention on the Right of the Child (UNCRC). The target group of this study is therefore youth between the ages of 15 to 17 years old in three cities across Sweden to allow them to voice their opinion and experience of being in treatment. Resulting from that is the aim of this study ? to investigate how an intensive treatment method like Multisystemic Therapy is described from a client?s point of view.

Due to the growing population in Stockholm, some of the urban green areas are beingsubjected to exploitation. Hammarbyskogen is an urban forest in the south of Stockholm andis an example of a green area that is planned to be transformed into an urban environment.This paper investigates key qualities and values of an urban forest of Hammarbyskogenvalued by local inhabitants of the neighbourhoods of Hammarbyhöjden and Björkhagen in thesouth of Stockholm. In addition to that, the study seeks to investigate people?s perception ofthe planned development of the forest as well as investigate how these perceptions andqualities are being incorporated into the process of neighbourhood development.Using text analysis, interviews and discussion forums, findings have been made showing thatthe local inhabitants value the urban forest mostly for its ecological and recreational qualities.Regarding perception of the change, people are either positive or negative to the developmentwhich can be explained by people?s experienced sense of place and place attachment of thearea and the forest itself. The study has also shown that the urban planners rely on localinhabitants? view, as well as on expert knowledge during the process of planning.The results of the study contributes to a better understanding of why and for what purposesurban forests are important for the city dwellers..

Hämning (Behavior Inhibition) tycks utgöra en riskfaktor för olika typer av ångestsyndrom. Child Inhibition Scale (CIS) är ett föräldraformulär som mäter hämning hos barn. Syftet med studien är att normera samt att psykometriskt utpröva den svenska versionen av CIS mot ett föräldraformulär som mäter generell ångest hos barn och ungdomar Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children ? Parent version (MASC-P). I studien ingår skolor från fem områden i Storstockholm.

The purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate how the welfare officer who works in the child and youth- habilitation is documenting in boys and girls journals. We also want to see if there are any differences or similarities in the journals on the basis of a gender perspective? The investigation is made from ten journals, five boys and five girls in the ages from 13 -18 years. The analysis which proceeds from prior research made on this area and from a number of gender theories and gender perspectives is based on a hermeneutic nature. The results show that the welfare officers make more documentation about the boys´ school situation than the girls´.

The purpose of this study was to examine the narrative skill of sixyear-olds in terms of macrostructure and cohesion, and its relation tonarrative content, auditory attention, auditory short-term memory and threemeasures of word retrieval. A group comparison of macrostructure andcohesion was also performed between children with and without epilepsy.The material consisted of audio recordings of 44 children (18 with epilepsyand 26 from a reference group) retelling the story Nelli-sagan (Holmberg &Sahlén, 2000). No correlation was found between content and macrostructureor cohesion, but several between the latter two. Auditory short-termmemory and word retrieval without pictures showed several correlationswith macrostructure as well as cohesion. No differences in macrostructure orcohesion were found between the children with epilepsy and the referencegroup.

Goods that children come in contact with on a daily basis for example toys, electronics, textiles, household items, have attracted an increased attention in recent years because of a common occurrence of residues of potentially hazardous chemical substances. Some municipalities in Stockholm have developed plans for managing chemical risks and work systematically to phase out products containing hazardous substances. This thesis aims to contribute to an improved knowledge base for any future work with non-toxic nursery schools in Haninge. The study's focus is on the challenges encountered by conditions and problems of preschool personnel to manage chemical risks in early childhood environments. Primary data was collected through a qualitative approach based on semi-structured interviews with both the preschool staff and practitioners working in the central organization of the municipality.

Introduction: More and more children and young people get the diagnosis celiac disease established. Celiac is a life-long disease, which means that the child during the rest of its life has to be on a strictly gluten-free diet. There are few studies so far, which have examined how children having a life-long disease with food treatment and increasing prevalence really experience their health related quality of life (HRQoL).Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine how children (8 ? 18 years old) suffering from celiac valued their HRQoL and to illustrate as well whether the age of the child and its extent of disease when it was taken ill affected the child?s evaluation of HRQoL later in life. The purpose was also to compare whether the children?s parents valued the HRQoL of their children to the same extent as the children did.Method: 160 children, 54 boys and 102 girls were included in the study.

Advertisers of today are facing a great challenge in a landscape where it becomes even more difficult to break through the clutter and convince consumers to buy their products. In order to succeed, they need to come up with new ways of communicating with their customers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if micro-blogging could be considered an effective media choice in order to enhance the perception of brand associations and traditional communication effects. The subject is of interest as brands are putting increasingly more resources into this communication channel. However, at the current date the marketing effects of micro-blogging is unexplored in academic research.

This study explores how consumers' attitudes and intentions-to-buy towards an atypical product can be influenced by the presentation of the product and consumers shopping goals. Moreover, another product, which was shown together with the atypical piece, was analyzed in order to investigate context effects. The aim of the study is to provide insights into a rather unexplored subject and help retailers in presenting their assortment in a way which will create a better perception and intention-to-buy towards the assortment. The study was conducted with the help of two studies, the first one aimed to find an atypical item and to see how attitudes could be affected by differences in presentation by comparing it with a typical item within the same category. The second study used the identified atypical piece in order to see the how attitude and intention-to-buy could be altered by presentation and consumer shopping goals.

This thesis deals with the characterization of Japan and Japanese people by Swedish travelers during the Meiji period. It seeks to answer what aspects of Japanese people two Swedish travelers chose to highlight, and how these aspects were presented in their travelogues. This thesis also has a second aim. By applying Edward Said?s theory of orientalism, it wants to answer if Swedish travelogues were influenced by western 19th century ideas of colonialism and imperialism.

Syftet med arbetet är att undersöka huruvida betraktaren kan urskilja en konstnärs budskap i ett specifikt verk. Det hävdas att vi baserar våra tolkningar på vad vi till exempel har för utbildning och vad våra tidigare erfarenheter är. Det blir ett problem då man måste ställa frågan: "Kan någon annan än konstnären förstå konstnärens budskap?"Arbetet berör även vårt fysiska synsinne, vår perception och bildsemiotik. Bildsemiotik är läran om bilder, bilder som tecken och betydelse.