The environment that surrounds us affects us all. Research has shown that we feel physically and emotionally best in natural environments with greenery or water elements. Urban environments are likely to be more stressing then natural environments. How we experience specific elements, as water, of an environment is not as much investigated. There is a need of further knowledge for us to fully understand the interplay between our senses and the environment. Human beings have always been depending on water and the search for it has characterized our deeds and doings through out evolution.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine what part and importance electronic games play in the life of girls, how the girls use electronic games and what the girls think and say about their use of electronic games. We also intend to examine what girls have to say about electronic games at the public library. Our attempt is to illuminate and bring knowledge to those who work within the library with the selection, purchase and conveyance of electronic games. Method used in the survey is focusgroup-interviews with girls in the age between 12-14 years in three different schools. The findings are related to four different perspectives, theory of child development, from a gender perspective, theories of understanding how young people use computer games and theories to understand the purpose of public libraries.

The novel American Psycho was first published in 1991. It recieved harsh criticism and was viewed as a work of heterosexism, misogyny and pointless violence. Despite the criticism, the protagonist, a wealthy serial killer yuppie namned Patrick Bateman, fascinated the readers. He hides his monstrosity behind a façade of heteronormativity, but this essay shows that the norms in American Psycho are fragile. Batemans relationships are shallow, his identity is constructed out of traditional masculinitynorms and even though he?s homophobic there?s a homoerotic undertone in the text, as well as gothic patterns that give the novel a fair amount of queerness too.

Although  ?naming and shaming? paedophiles are growing in Sweden, professionals working with the rehabilitation and treatment of paedophiles describe that the naming and shaming might not prevent child sex abuse. On the opposite naming and shaming alienates the perpetrator from any ordinary life. The alienation could lead them to only having other paedophiles as friends. Previous studies show that professionals are often distancing themselves from working with paedophiles, even if there is competence.

The aim of this undergraduate thesis was to study the experience of participation in support groups for children of mentally ill parents. The research questions dealt with how the children and the adolescents talked about the knowledge, that they believed having assimilated in the support groups. The knowledge concerned mental illness and the possible impact on children when having mentally ill parents. The research questions also dealt with how the children and the adolescents talked about the meaning of being in a group. Qualitative semi structured interviews were used in order to capture the respondents? subjective experiences.

The purpose of this study is to examine the personnel?s perspective on how the emotions shame and guilt are present in the treatment of female addicts on an LVM institution. Three questions have been designed to meet the objective: How do they work in the treatment with guilt and shame, how important is it to work with these feelings and what significance does genders have in relation to shame, guilt and treatment? A qualitative approach and techniques have been used to obtain the result. The study's theoretical starting point consists of three themes: gender theory, labeling theory and a theoretical approach to the concepts of guilt and shame.

The purpose of this work is to create more knowledge about the teacher's perceptions of group dynamics and its impact on school activities. How do teachers opportunities and obstacles in order to influence group dynamics among students. The questions I have answered is how the teachers see the importance of a functioning group dynamics in school, how teachers work with group dynamics and how teachers describe the opportunities and obstacles for effective group dynamics. The method I am using at work is a qualitative research method that involves obtaining the teachers' own thoughts, feelings and experiences around the right questions. I have interviewed three teachers in primary schools in the county of Stockholm to find out their particular approach.

The aim of this study was to investigate the individual meaning of experiences of migration and day-to day life experiences before and after migration, of women that had migrated from the Middle-east area to Sweden. This was to be done with a psychological health perspective looking for stressors and salutogenic factors. A phenomenological approach was used. Eleven women where interviewed with three open questions on a trajectory theme. The analysis was supported by software Sphinx Lexica and software MCA-Minerva.

The aim with this Master's thesis is to study the debate that takes place in the local community when a public library branch is threatened by closedown through the local newspapers. Through this it is our aim to understand why the debate takes place, and why so many people gets concerned with it. By relating this debate to contemporary research of library- and information science, and the discussion in three major Swedish library journals, we have found the answers to these questions. By studying the debate, we found six subjects that where essential for this study. These were Politics and economics, Urban and rural districts, Democracy and accessibility, The service of the library, The meeting place and To replace a closed down library.

The aim of this study is to investigate and analyze the potential effects on a number of social workers that may arise from listening to stories of domestic violence, and how these social workers deal with the potential effects. The study is based on qualitative interviews with seven social workers that work with domestic violence. The theoretical perspective that we used was the theory of coping. The results of this study have indicated that the respondents have been affected of listening to the stories of domestic violence. Examples of different impacts that the work has had on some of the social workers is that they avoid movies and/or books with elements of violence, they are more aware of the domestic violence in the surroundings and there has also been changes in their cognitive schemas.

As the occurrence of obesity increases amongst young people, so increases the risk of more people suffering from heart failure as early as during middle age. The aim is to describe the life experiences of middle aged persons living with chronic heart failure. The literature study is based on twelve published, qualitative, and scientifically proved articles derived from MedLine and Cinahl using queries representing the subject, as well as from manual searching in ScienceDirect and LIBRIS. These articles have been analyzed from a life world perspective. Four main themes and four sub themes were identified from the articles' results.

This study is about fourteen-year-old boys, who are not interested in reading. It deals with what thoughts and feelings some boys have around books, reading and libraries. Further the study investigates the boys' leisure activities and their making of identities. The study is built on interviews among twelve boys in a secondary school. The result is compared to earlier reports and research.

Abstract The aim of this paper is to investigate whether Vara municipality has a continuous picture of their identity, profile and image. Globalization has contributed to the increasingly growing of place marketing. Therefore, the study goes on to using the concepts of identity, profile and image to find out if Vara Municipality communicates similar throughout the whole organization and find out their all through core values. Globalisation will be an interpretive framework for the work that describes why the place marketing is becoming more pressing. The sense of place will be a central part of this study as it is the feelings and images of different places that will be described by the municipality together with the identity, profile and image.

The aim of this undergraduate thesis was to explore how the welfare officers at palliative units in Stockholm respond to the patients? thoughts and experiences during the last phase of life, as well as exploring their picture of the patients experiences. The research questions of the study were:? How do the welfare officers relate to the patients? experience of their death? ? In what way do the welfare officers respond to the dying patient and his or her experiences?? What knowledge/experience do the welfare officers have and what knowledge/experience do they consider is needed in their profession?To answer the research questions a qualitative method was used where five welfare officers in three different palliative units were interviewed. The empirical material was analysed through meaning concentration and are presented using exact quotations.

The general purpose of this dissertation is to study picture communication in picture books and it addresses the following questions:What is the illustrator?s role in the process of making a picture book? What communicative qualities do pictures have in picture books and how do pictures interact with texts? What methods do illustrators use to visualize the meaning of stories in picture books?A genre analysis, a literature study and an interview of a professional illustrator has been conducted to answer the questions. I found that all objects that make up pictures, the arrangement, colours and shapes contribute to the meaning in diverse ways. Pictures also communicate in a different way than texts. An important difference between pictures and texts in the context of picture books is that pictures are more open for interpretation.