Young councillors are currently under-represented in Sweden's municipalities. Young councillors are also stepping down in greater numbers than older members. This paper explores the reasons why young councillors choose to resign from their mission, so to identify possible remedies to the problematic trend of underrepresentation of younger people in local authorities in Sweden.This qualitative essay intends, through interviewing politically-active young people who has left their assignment, to study the reasons for resignations from elected posts. To see what could be the reason I have looked at previous studies and theories about opting out but also tried to remain open to identifying new and emerging trends previously undetected in existing surveys.The results showed that the political assignment proved to be too time-consuming, with young people choosing to spend their time on career and leisure. Those who resign from political life often express criticism towards the Municipal Council; they consider it tedious and many complain of having little influence.

AbstractThe purpose with this essay is to get knowledge about the consequences that speech-defects bring for children in pre-school ages. I got interested in this matter when I, during my teaching practice, got in touch with children carrying this specific disorder. I chose to apply qualitative interview as a method to investigate this and as a starting-point I used these aspects: How does speech-defects affect learning, understanding, friendship relations, and development in general?I interviewed three pre-school teachers in two different schools. One school in a smaller district and the other one in a middle-sized town, in the middle of Sweden.

AbstractThere is a lot of confusion when it comes to defining Special Education. An example of this appears here by a statement from Assarson (2007) "Special Education initiates a special pedagogy, but contains no innate sense of what is the special component in it" (p. 52, authors? translation). This study is an attempt to clarify the elements of the concept.

The purpose of this case study is to see how all the involved parties; students, custodians and teachers look upon ?A meeting of learning ? personal development dialogue that is led by children and young people?, on a school south of Stockholm. Our questions at issue were to see what the students had learned from their personal development dialogue, if the custodians had received all the information they expected to get from a personal development dialogue, and last but not least if all the involved parties; students, custodians and teachers, wanted to continue with this model? We used interviews and paper questionnaires to collect answers to our case study and the questions at issue. In both the interviews and paper questionnaires we could see that an overwhelming majority had a positive opinion about students leading and ?owning? their personal development dialogue, especially the students themselves.

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.

The purpose of this study was to examine creativity in psychosocial work. The aim issues where to find out how creativity develops in social work, why the relation is important for the innovativeness and how the creativeness can change a person. Through a qualitative method with interviews of four persons in psychosocial work and with one man who's a professor in philosophy, four relevant themes were identified. The themes are about the relation, the meeting, the dialog and the changing. All four themes are related to creativity and I used existential, philosophic and also psychoanalytic theories when I analyzed the material.

The aim of this study was to examine what knowledge social workers express about home visits in child welfare investigations and how they know what to do. Sixteen social workers who work with social investigations concerning children were asked to discuss the topic home visit in three focus group interviews in three different municipalities in southern Sweden. The social workers in our focus group interviews mainly discussed the purpose of the home visit, what social workers do during home visits and furthermore their opinions about guidelines and policy documents regarding the home visit.  To get an understanding of what type of knowledge is the basis for social workers use of the home visit, we used Polanyi's concept of 'tacit knowing' as well as the Aristotelian theory of knowledge containing three forms of knowledge, that is, episteme, techne and fronesis. We found that the displaying of ?tacit knowing? was a consistent feature in all groups, as they had difficulty expressing their knowledge use.

The Open Access (OA) movement came to be as a reaction against the enclosure of information resources, facilitated by new distribution technologies. The purpose of the OA movement is to make research results freely available. The aim of this master´s thesis is to increase the understanding of how libraries outside of the academic sphere and within research institutes relates to OA. As a theoretical framework I created two different ideologies, the OA ideology and the nonsharing ideology. I also conducted six interviews with librarians.

Syfte: Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka om vi kan validera en generell modell för kundupplevd servicekvalitet och teknologibaserad självservice genom att applicera den på portabel självscanning i dagligvarubutiken. I en vidare förlängning undersöker vi huruvida införandet av sådan teknologi i ett företag kan påverka den upplevda servicekvaliteten i företaget som helhet. Metod: Vi har använt oss av en kvantitativ metod där respondenter har fyllt i vår enkät som bygger på frågorna Dabholkar (1996) använde i sin attributbaserade modell. Teoretiska perspektiv: Vi har utgått från teorier inom service marketing med fokus på kundupplevd servicekvalitet. Empiri: Uppsatsens empiri består av den information vi erhållit vid enkätintervjuerna i dagligvarubutiken.

The subject of this study is gender norms in the preschool and children who oppose those norms. The aim is to investigate how the discourses are linked with the way in which preschool teachers and teaching assistants talk about children?s gender identity. This study is founded in feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis, which was a basis for the interpretation of the results. My research questions are:? How do educators express themselves concerning gender norms?? What do educators need to work with a gender critical agenda?? How do the educators describe their work concerning gender, gender norms and children who oppose those norms?? For educators who have experience with children who do not identify with the gender they was given at birth, how do educators describe their own treatment of said children, and how would they describe the treatment from the other members of the teaching team?The study consists of qualitative interviews with five educators who were asked questions relevant to: norms, gender, gender criticism and how they work with those topics.I found both positive and negative aspects of gender work in preschool.

Participation is central to the concept of democracy. The role of the civic participation varies with different types of democracy, but a fundamental requirement is that the participation is free and equal. In spite of this, there are significant differences between possibilities to democratic participation in Sweden today.This essay seeks to understand how disability, historically and still today, is constructed as a social deviation from normality, and is constructed to Otherness.One way to regard freedom and equality is to examine the personal autonomy, the legth to wich a person decides her/his roles and activities in abcence of external limitations. Personal autonomy is theoretically central in deliberative and strong democracy, but should reasonobly be a demand for the fundamental definition of democracy.The explanation to why the lack of personal autonomy is accepted, is that the construction of Otherness results in that the persons are categorized and are given simplified characteristics, and are thereby not accepted as equivalent people.In the inteviews conducted, seven politicians contribute both whiteness, pathological discourses regarding disability and ideas of normality through discussing democracy, participation and disability. Simultaniously, they express interest and an awareness on the majority's power and symbolic violence on the minority..

The purpose of this thesis is to identify power structures and instruments of power within the Jehovah?s witnesses and investigate how they affect the baptized youths baptized within the organization. The material consists of qualitative in-depth interviews and is analyzed with Foucault's theories of power. The results show that the participants have a very strict relationship to the rules of the congregation and also that they take great care in observing these rules carefully. It becomes evident that young members are exposed to disciplinary measures from the organization.

The aim of the study was to describe lone mothers? experience of the contact with the Child Health Centre (CHC). The definition of CHC in the study was the Child Health Centre?s daily activities, the child health nurse and the parent groups. The study had a descriptive design and eleven lone mothers from parent forums on the internet participated.

This thesis examines the retrieval effectiveness of two Web search engines. The two search engines are chosen to represent two different types Google as a broad general search engine and Dogpile as a broad general metasearcher. Twenty queries have been used and the first twenty hits for each query were evaluated for relevance. The queries were invented by the authors, based upon their interests and information needs. They were expressed in a general manner, by using one or several keywords, in accordance with the simple search mode available for each search engine.

Several researches asserts that as teachers are responsible for the content of teaching and by formulating teaching "Why, ""How" and "What", that will also give signals to students about what is important knowledge. This essay addresses the difficulties teachers may face in terms of self-disclosure student texts and awareness of this in the design of teaching and writing tasks. Research shows that self-disclosure and self-therapy student texts exist and that teachers are experiencing a difficulty with regard to assessment and treatment.Through qualitative interviews examined seven teachers' design of any, to the student, self-disclosure information from curriculum and policy documents. Another purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which teachers, through the information they give to their pupils, may affect the texts students submit. It turns out that the respondents are united in the belief that they, through their data, may affect the texts they receive from their students when they are the ones that control the content of teaching, and they agree that the curricula gives them a great choice for design data. The survey shows that the perception of the curriculum that will open up for self-disclosure texts differ as some of the respondents believe that the curriculum is very much about the students way to express feelings and opinions, while others believe that they may try to package this data in another purpose or exercise.