Through a sociocultural perspectivethe purpose of this study is to investigate how preschool teachers look at quality development in preschool and how they perceive their participation in this development.I have used a qualitative method based on five interviews with preschool teachers from three different parts of Sweden. I used an interview guide with open questions. The interview answers were categorized in themes based on the responses which were most frequent. In the result I have been using an analysis based on these themes. The result showed that the preschool teachers consider that the leadership style affects their work.

In this study, I have examined the previous Social Democratic government?s communication with the voters, focusing on its promises during election campaigns, and the presentation of achieved results. The theories used are the mandate- and sanction theory; the first focuses on voters comparing manifestos to find the most agreeable, whilst the latter concentrates on voters evaluation the work of the previous government, to either discharge or support it. For the sanction theory to work, voters must have the necessary information to evaluate the government in progress. The question is; did the previous government provide the voters with such information?This has been done through scrutinizing the Social Democrats? election manifestos that was used between 1994 and 2006, to examine what the party promised to achieve in economics and the labor market.

Studies among parents of children with disabilities have shown that they experience a higher level of parenting stress as well as a lower degree of wellbeing, compared to parents of children without disabilities. However, there is a need to further explore parents? experience on this matter within a Swedish context. The aim of the current study was to examine how parents of preschool children, with and without disabilities, in Västerbotten, experience the impact of their child. A sample of 67 parents of children with disabilities and 134 parents of children without disabilities took part in the questionnaire study.

Abstract Title: PR consultants and bloggers; a win-win situation? -  A study of PR consultants? new adaptations in the labour market due to the emergence of fashion bloggers. Authors: Cecilia Girell, Sandra Kjellstro?m Tutor: Ylva Ekstro?mPurpose: With the expansion of the Internet, fashion bloggers have gotten more power. A few companies have understood this powerful and reasonable cheap marketing channel. Despite this, most companies still feel powerless, but what has happened to the work of PR consultants in this constant changing media environment? The ones whos purpose is to act as intermediaries between companies and various media channels.

Our study aimed at gaining insight of co-workers experiences of different factors that affects the verbal communication and leads to dialogue and misunderstanding between co-workers and their managers. The empirical material was gained from semi-structured interviews with co-workers at various departments within the same organization. We used a hermeneutic interpretive approach and our data was analyzed concerning different factors affecting communication. The result has been interpreted using the theories of deliberative conversations and dialogue competence. We have also used Illeris theory of learning.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the performance of queries that is expanded before translation in comparison with only translation of the queries using a bilingual dictionary, and also to see if the number of terms that was used to expand the queries was of any importance i. e. if many terms from a thesaurus helped or destroyed a query. To answer these questions i used two online thesauri, Rogets thesaurus and Merriam-Webster Online and one printed bilingual dictionary, Norstedts English-Swedish dictionary. Even though the number of examined queries is too small to draw any definite conclusions, the results suggest that expanding using a general thesaurus may have a negative effect on the queries.

This study aims to build a deeper understanding of how differences in identities and communication can affect the possibilities of achieving a successful merger between companies from different type of industries. Our study is of qualitative nature and looks into the specific merger between Företagshälsovården AB and Managementkonsulterna AB. The study builds upon 16 semi structured interviews which are carried out with employees from both parts of the organization and with management personnel. Firstly our study shows that the different identities existing within the different parts of the organization, highly affect the integration process after a merger. Secondly we show that the level of communication transmitted from the management, but also between the different parts of the organization, affects the possibilities of creating a successful merger.

The out-of-town retail establishments are part of the dramatic structural changes in the retailing of food and groceries. There are however strong indications suggesting these establishments result in negative externalities concerning areas such as pollution and urban environment. The purpose of this study is to describe and, from an economic perspective, analyse the Swedish political regulations and planning policies concerning the out-of-town supermarkets. The analysis establishes that the current regulations regarding out-of-town retailing do not, due to the occurrence of market failures, produce an optimal situation. It might therefore be necessary to change the planning policies in a more restrictive direction.

The purpose of the study is to observe how the participants of the study interacted musically through verbal, non-verbal and musically resonant expressions. Verbal communication was expressed in discussion of the music's tempo and to clarify for ensemble participants from where they we?re going to play and sing. Non-verbal communication could be used to gesticulate an instrument or a melody. For example, the movement of a hand could symbolize notes on a musical stave to indicate the notes placements.

This thesis compares four relevance feedback methods. The Rocchio and Ide dec-hi algorithms for the vector space model and the binary independence model and Okapi BM25 within the probabilistic framework. This is done in a custom-made Information Retrieval system utilizing a collection containing 131 896 LA-Times articles which is part of the TREC ad-hoc collection. The methods are compared on two grounds, using only the relevance information from the 20 highest ranked documents from an initial search and also by using all available relevance information. Although a significant effect of choice of method could be found on the first ground, post-hoc analysis could not determine any statistically significant differences between the methods where Rocchio, Ide dec-hi and Okapi BM25 performed equivalent.

AimThe purpose of this study is to analyze factors that affect the price on tenant-owner apartments in the central parts of Uppsala. Special attention is put on analyzing how the monthly fee and the location affect the price. The hypotheses are that the monthly fee and the distance to the central part of the city have a negative effect on the price. A number of additional price affecting factors was taken in consideration during this study.MethodThis study is mainly based on data supplied to us by Mäklarstatistik. The supplied data consists of information about tenant-owner apartment sales in Uppsala during a year under 2008 and 2009.

This essay concerns the issue of democracy and judicial review. The main focus is on the justification of both a positive and a negative attitude towards judicial review, and the values these justifications are based on. The analysis is made by textual analysis of four authors with different opinions of the subject matter: Robert Dahl and Jeremy Waldron who has a negative attitude towards judicial review, and Erwin Chemerinsky and Ronald Dworkin who are positive about it. In the analysis an analytic frame is used which consists of different dimensions and aspects of the problem of democracy and judicial review. The study shows that there are important differences in democratic values between a positive and a negative justification of judicial review.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine children's communication and interaction during story time at the public library. The aim is also to examine how to develop the story time ? in terms of participation and equality ? at a specific library.Action research was used as a research strategy and participant observation, log, tutoring and interviews as methods to collect data. Since action research is done on the basis of practice, a significant collaboration with the librarian and the participant children is taking place within this study.Research from the fields of Library and Information Science, Education and Childhood Sociology form the interdisciplinary research area to which this study links. The theoretical framework consists of theory and concepts from the Socio-cultural Perspective, Poststrucuralist Feminism and Childhood Sociology.

This is a study where the purpose was to investigate whether preschool teachers have a positive or negative attitude to outdoor education. Their view of outdoors education is also treated. The methods used were questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The survey was sent to all preschool teachers in three municipalities and on a social network. The interviews were conducted at a preschool, which had a form of outdoor profile.

The purpose is to illustrate the phenomenon of self-harm from a social psychological and sociological perspective. The purpose is furthermore to examine the role social relationships play in the individuals´ self- imagine and what role does identification play for anyone who harm themselves? We want to examine in what way social relationships are important and how they function for individuals who harm themselves, both once they have started to harm themselves, and if the relationships in any part caused the cutting to begin with.Questions:How do individuals shape their identity based on self- harm? Which self-image do individuals have who self-harm? Is there anything in the person's previous social relationships that have caused them to begin to hurt themselves?Method:In this paper we have analyzed five autobiographies. We have used open coding from grounded theory as analytical method and subject positions based on discourse analysis.Theory:We have used the Cooley concepts looking glass self, Foucault's theory of power, Giddens' concept of ontological security and existential anxiety.Results and Analysis:We found six different categories that we thought were central. These were negative self-image, guilt, lack of family support, negative experiences of others' views, the protective identity as self- harmer and insecure social relationships in school.Conclusion:The self-harming is a very complex behavior.