The study aimed to evaluate picture communication during clinical as-sessment and intervention procedures in paediatric care. As part of the project KomHIT (Augmentative communication in paediatric health care settings) care professionals at different care units were provided with education and designed pictorial supports. These consisted of appointment letters with pictorial support, visual schedules and communication boards with both general and specific vocabulary. Care professionals and parents to children with and without communication disabilities participated. Survey data from care professionals and parents at five care units was supplemented with qualitative data from an interview with a multiprofessional group at one of the care units.

My essay begins with a story in which I portray different communicative situations at the preschool unit Myran. The children in my story are at an early stage of development and they all suffer from multiple disabilities which inhibit their ways of communicating. Through my story, I describe how I perceive different communication dilemmas in my work place. A difficulty I cover in my essay is how the educator knows if he or she has interpreted a child correctly when it does not have a verbal communication and therefore is completely dependent on the educators? interpretations of its communication efforts.

Audit is a service of society that takes place in the public interest. To guarantee the quality of auditing a quality control is done with predetermined time intervals. The purpose of this paper is to investigate and analyze the concept quality and the procedure of the quality control and further to tie concepts like trust and ethics to the audit profession. To make the picture complete the paper also provides an insight regarding what deficiencies in quality, in other words failures, means to the audit profession. By performing semi-structured interviews with seven qualified auditors, active on different auditing firms in Skåne, substantial information was collected.

The aim of this thesis is to examine how different kinds of information seekers are evaluating information quality in the information flow online. To address the problem stated, qualitative interviews were carried out with a librarian as a reference person and a group consisting of journalists and scientists. The result of the study implies that the reference person is well aware of the strategies employed by her in the search process. However, the respondents are not aware of the strategies they are actually using. An explanation is the respondents lack of education in information seeking.

The purpose of this study is to develop a general understanding of the areas of alliances and service quality as well as their relation to each other, through a consumer perception. Further, to discover more detailed and close up knowledge of customer perceived service quality within airline alliances. This is done by identifying particularly significant dimensions in the service process that have an influence on the perceived service quality.The thesis is based on qualitative study using a critical incident technique to explore the issue of service quality. In the research of the material the iterative approach has been used. The primary information sources are the interviews with customers-members of airline alliance.

The aim of the study was to examine whether parental leave can serve as capacitating period in life. More specifically our aim was to get a deeper comprehension of the abilities and competencies developed through parental leave and how these can be of use to the individual when at work. 12 semistructured interviews were conducted with employees from a large organization in the south of Sweden. The results were analyzed using a hermeneutic approach. The results of the study show that competencies and abilities such as effectiveness, organizing, multitasking, leader abilities, communication, sensitivity, limiting skills, mindfulness, acceptance, self-confidence and life balance were enhanced during parental leave.

As a result of today`s competitive situation, the demand on the rapid development of research has increased. Both universities and companies are realizing the importance of a functioning and well-developed cooperation. A close collaboration and communication between universities and the business community has in many studies been shown to be very important for business development and knowledge transfer. The purose was to examine how communication and collaboration between universities and industry can be developed and strenghthen on the basis of innovative thinking. In order to initially identify the perceived problems the authors studied how communication and cooperation manifests itslelf today between the two parties, what does not work and how the existing tools for communication and collaboration look like today.

  iiiAbstract?We are living in a time of project. Everything becomes project. All development, all efficient,all changes are running as project?.

This master thesis has been done at Enea Epact AB. The purpose of this thesis is to develop and implement a Link Quality Control algorithm for GPRS/EPGRS in the current testing tool. A Link Quality Control (LQC) shall take quality values from mobile stations and base stations and decide a codingsscheme that opimizes the throughput of data. The Advantage with LQC is that it adapts the used coding scheme to the channel quality. If the channel quality is too bad for the used coding scheme, a slower coding scheme with more redundancy should be selected.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the Swedish Public Relations and Communication profession from the Stockholm Accords point of view. The Stockholm Accords are an attempt to reflect Public Relations and Communication Management practice as it stands today and to provide a global common ground for the practitioners.The method used for this study is a quantitative research method conducted by a web survey answered by more than 400 Swedish communication managers. The questions posed were examining these managers view of their profession compared to the Stockholm Accords.The research shows that the Swedish way of implementing communication in the organization broadly corresponds to the Stockholm Accords when it comes to internal and external communication. However, there are some areas where Swedish communication practice diverges from Stockholm Accords. The issues which link governance, management and sustainability to communication have a much wider distribution of responses.

The investigation was initiated because of the high workload of the sellers and, additionally, because the Tunadal sawmill has received low ratings in customer surveys. Thus,  two main approaches are adopted here,  the first being to investigate which of the three methods  of working, namely, market divided flow organization, function organizationand flow organization with collaboration, proves to be the most beneficial. The second is to investigate whether there is an available method to ease the daily work. A literature review has been made in order to determine more efficient ways for the sellers to work in the Tunadal sawmill. During the investigation, an in-depth investigation into the total quality management using a balanced scorecard as a management tool was conducted.

Open source software has recently been discussed, not least in media as a revolution in IT. A number of advantages have been listed in changing proprietary software into open source software. Examples of such pros are no expenses for license fees and improved efficiency. In spite of this, few users have made this change. One of the reasons is a distrust of the quality in open source software.

This master thesis is based on a general issue of quality in social services. I have chosen to illustrate through an empirical case, namely the position social responsibility coordinator and shortened SAS.This position is fairly new to the Swedish social services and has the overall mandate to monitor, develop and ensure quality.To study this, I have developed two analytic schemes. One is based on the concept of quality value components, the second is based on the concept of quality character components. These analytical schemes are used as the presented material. When I study mycase, I have used two methods, documents and questionnaires.In this study I will try to describe how new solutions to improve the quality of social services can conform and develop.

With this research we aimed to seek how youth workers express their experience of counselling on the internet compared to traditional counselling face to face with a theoretical ground in semiotics and symbolic interactionism. Our questions were 1) How do youth workers describe their experiences from anonymous, faceless online counselling? 2) How do youth workers experience the differences between online counselling and the traditional face-to-face counselling? 3) Which possibilities and difficulties do they see in online communication with adolescents? We used semi-structed interviews with seven youth workers. Six of those are active in non-profit organisations, and one in social services. The results from our interviews showed that the interviewees saw that misunderstandings were more frequent on the internet, but that online counselling with adolescents still was easier than in the face-to-face meetings.

AbstractObjective: To investigate the occurrence of and the risk factors for falls and to  investigate level of fall-related self-efficacy and health-related quality of life in people living in community living, 75 years or older within Uppsala and Västmanlands county. A further aim was to identify predictive risk factors for falls. Design: A cross-section study with a descriptive, comparative and correlative design based on a questionnaire was used. Participants: The participants were recruited from Uppsala and Västmanlands county. A random selection on 525 individuals was done, from a population based sample, in the detailed municipalities.