It seems like Swedish municipalities are dominated by beliefs that all citizen participation is good for the development of local democracy. A critic of this certainty is rising among Swedish scholars of political science. However, a critic with an ambition of such generalization is harsh. Different democratic projects contents different qualities and thereby diverse problems in the democratic process. If these democratic problems within the process can be recognized, a deeper understanding can be found and in the prolongation a strengthening of the democracy.This essay examines the democratic process of Lomma municipality's democratic project of citizen participation.

In our attempts to understand the world, wildlife films play a significant role. Wildlife films help us to see new places and learn about animals in remote locations, that we otherwise wouldn?t be able to do. Yet wildlife films have throughout history been criticized, mainly for the ambivalent relationship between science and storytelling. While the films give us a scientific impression and say something about the ?reality?, they clearly have the intension to amuse, capture and entertain their audience.

This study investigates the potential of a rhetorical theory of knowledge to expand beyond its own domain and into political theory, specifically theories of deliberative democracy. Despite the increasing interest in communication in democratic theory in the last decades, the majority of theorists have not turned their interest towards rhetorical science. On the contrary, theorists often regard rhetoric as dangerous and incompatible with the deliberative ideal of reason. The aim of this study is therefore to defend rhetorical science by investigating how the rhetorical theory of knowledge ? as it is presented by Chaïm Perelman and Oldbrecht Tyteca, and further developed by Mats Rosengren and Maria Wolrath Söderberg ? can contribute to the understanding of deliberative democracy.

The purpose of my work is to investigate the experiences in school for pupils with Asperger syndrome around the question, what is a good school for them. I´m also interested in what experiences the staff has about this question. I made a qualitative interview study. I have interviewed three pupils with Asperger syndrome, a teacher and a pupil assistant. To give the reader background information I have written about what the researchers say about what it is like to have Asperger syndrome.

The purpose of our research is to study how guidance counseling initiated by the students themselves differs between girls and boys in high school. We want to study if there are any differences between girls and boys regarding guidance initiated by the students themselves. We conducted a quantitative survey consisting of a questionnaire survey with 125 respondents. The respondents are second year students at the Science program. The result of the survey shows that there are hardly any differences between girls and boys regarding guidance initiated by the students themselves.

Manual signs are an augmentative and alternative communication mode which enables and facilitates communication for persons with impairments in speech, language and hearing. There are different ways of teaching signs to persons with intellectual disabilities. One of them is milieu teaching, which is a method where the teaching takes place in natural settings. This method has proven to give good results in generalization and maintenance. Teaching signs to staff in groups has been shown to be effective.

The Swedish social insurance agency provides financial support for families and children, but also for people with work injury, illness and at old age. During 2012 they saw the amount of notifications of insurance increasing in Sweden, which is a development that cost our society a great deal of money. With the aim to pursue a sustainable development I have therefore devoted this project to wellness and stress management within preschool.The employees of preschool are often dealing with a lot of stress, due to the big groups of children that causes high noise and sound levels. The high noise and sound levels is a contributor to stress which additionally can damage the health and cause impaired hearing loss. About half of the people around their forties until the age of retirement have difficulties understanding speech in large groups.The purpose of this project has been to investigate the causes of negative stress for my target group, women between 30-60 years old who works in preschool.

In my degree project I have chosen to write about the social interactions in children?s play. Iwanted to study their free play and the time when their teachers tell them what to play to seewhat their social interactions look like. The purpose with my research is to study whathappens in the social interactions in their different playing situations.I performed three observations of the free play and three observations of the guided play at apreschool to study what social interactions that takes place in the different playing situations.What happens and what patterns can I find in their play.In my research I had some questions that this project rests upon:What happens in the social interactions in the different playing situations?How do the children?s different social interactions look?The children that I have observed showed me that when they are interacting they especiallyuse their cognitive abilities, because an interaction needs a certain mental development.

This report is a part of a diploma work, conducted as a part of a Master of Science degree. The diploma work consists of a preliminary study, two case studies, a user study, a paper and this report. It was created at the Linköping University for the department of Science and Technology, in cooperation with Unilever Research in the UK, and partly with the EC founded project, Smartdoc IST-2000-28137. Hand-held, mobile devices like Personal Digital Assistances (PDAs) are becoming increasingly popular in today?s wireless world.

Open source is growing outside the boundaries of hackers, amateurs and software development, creating a humongous potential in many different areas and aspects of society. The intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that drives open source have been in the subject of much research recently, but how they affect each other when paid and unpaid contributors come together is still hidden in obscurity. In this study I investigate how intrinsic and extrinsic motivation correlates with each other and how those correlations affect paid and unpaid open source software contributors. The literature synthesis is based on of systematic reviews through searches in library databases, identification of articles by searching on the Internet and by reading relevant books. My results indicate that intrinsic and extrinsic motivations continuously affect each other and that paid contributors are more vulnerable since their extrinsic motivation in terms of money is reached only when many other motivations are fulfilled.

This study examines journalism student?s information use atSödertörn University during the writing process of theirbachelor thesis. The students are divided in two groupsfollowing the schools main bachelor programs majoring injournalism.The method used in this study has been a reference analysisof the student?s bibliographies along with five semistructuredinterviews. The study stems upon a socioculturalperspective and drives the thesis that information use is asituated activity.

This study is an analysis of the Internet transaction logs of Malmö Public, Sweden [...].

In Political Science a main theory is that a minimal winning coalition (MWC) will participate in the government. The parties included have to share the power of government. Therefore the winning coalition to be expected is the one including the fewest parties possible.My paper will atempt to examine if this is the main pattern in Swedish municipalities. My experience indicates that the ?Alliance for Sweden? including the four right-wing parties, that for the first time were connected through formal agreements in the elections 2006, formed a partly new and more obvious coalition pattern.

The Swedish metropolitan politics have had the bottom-up perspective as a major principle to evolve the democratic participation in segregated areas. My objective was to investigate if a bottom-up perspective has been used as a method of evaluation in a sample of 10 evaluation reports made about democratic participation in Malmö.The key questions were; In the evaluations:- How was the bottom-up perspective and related concepts defined?- What criterias and theories were used?- What values surfaced?- What methods were used?- Has a critical approach been used?The method used is analysis using the theories of Critical Social Method by Alvesson & Deetz, Values in evaluation by House & Howe and Choices of perspective by Eliasson.None of the analysed evaluations have used participatorial methods. As participation is defined mainly statistically, the criterias are usually quantitative measurements, though the evaluators agree that democracy is a matter of quality. There is a common lack of theoretical basis of analysis and methodology description.

Today there is a shortage of skilled IT-technicians in Sweden. It is approximated that Swedish companies can hire 31 000 IT-technicians in 2015 and the need seems to increase in the coming years. One proposed solution to this problem is to make programming more desirable to youths. In this study we attempt to investigate the effects of an introductory course in computer science on youths? (16-17 years old) in a classroom setting.