Background: Quality of life is a concept of individual meaning which is perceived differently depending on the person experiencing it. To have a chronic disease in the lung, such as asthma, has an effect on the quality of life. Asthma affects people of all ages. It is a disease that causes a constriction in the patients? airways which leads to a feeling of suffocation which in turn produces a feeling of anxiety.Aim: The purpose is to illuminate which factors affect the quality of life in adult patients with asthma.Method: This is a literary review based on ten articles, both quantitative and qualitative, from four different continents.

This thesis investigates whether it is accordance between the different profit measures in the financial market. The first aim of the thesis is to examine if it exists a difference between the profit measures that companies publish in their fourth quarter interim report and the measures that they state in their annual report, issued some months later. The second aim is to examine whether there is a divergence in definitions and the assumption regarding the risk of bankruptcy between profit measures published by companies and analysts. The study focuses on Swedish companies listed on the OMX Stockholm Large Cap and concerns the years of 2006 and 2007. The analysts interviewed are working in Sweden with listed Swedish companies.

Introduction: Taxes result in a big cost for corporations which create an incentive for tax planning. Previous studies have demonstrated that it's the management team and the board of directors that influences to what extent the corporation is going to tax plan. We want to study underlying factors for how the composition of the groups affect the tax planning in a corporation based on four demographic traits; sex, nationality, age and duration.Purpose: The purpose with the study is to explain how the composition of the management team and the board of directors affect the corporations tax planning.Method: The study has a deductive approach where theories about the composition of the board of directors and the management team have been used to derive hypothesis. The empirical material has been collected from Nasdaq OMX Stockholm. Two different measures have been used to calculate the corporations tax planning.Results and Conclusions: The result of the study demonstrates that the composition of both the board of directors and the management team has an effect on corporations tax planning.

The high debt levels experienced in European Countries have lead to academic interest in the deficit bias -the tendency for governments to run budget deficits and accumulate debt. In part one of this thesis a surveyof the economic literature on the origins and solutions to the deficit bias are conducted. The proposedinstitutional solution to the deficit bias in the form of Fiscal Policy Councils (FPC) are outlined and existingEuropean FPCs presented. Based on the works of Calmfors and Wren-Lewis (2011) the EuropeanCommission (EC) is defined as an FPC. Based on this survey, two hypothesis are formulated: (1) theforecasts of future macro-economic events and fiscal performance will differ between the national FPCs andthe national government.

The purpose of this thesis is to gain a holistic understanding of who are the consumers of fortified health food products; moreover to highlight what are the characteristics of the consumers who are likely to purchase these products. This thesis employed a quantitative strategy with an inductive and a grounded theory approach. The data was collected from a research company. Existing theories in the area of functional food were not possible to find. Considering that the area is new this seems plausible; however, previous studies provided insight for substantive framework.

It is important to identify the consequences of alcohol consumption among university students since over-consumption can lead to health problems and poorer academic performance. The following personality factors, neuroticism, conscientiousness and extraversion, have in previous studies shown to be related to alcohol consumption  and shown to be associated with the university students' alcohol use and living arrangements. This study examines the following question; Is there a link between university students' alcohol consumption, and;1) the personality factors neuroticism, conscientiousness, extraversion?2) their living situation?3) personality factors and living situation together?Participating in this survey was one hundred university students with a mean age of 23.4 years (SD = 2.6). To examine participants' personality, alcohol consumption and living arrangements, the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (Costa, McCrae, 2003) questionnaire was used and the questionnaire also contained self-constructed questions about drinking habits, living arrangements and demographic questions. This study's results indicate that neuroticism, conscientiousness, living situation and extraversion predicts alcohol consumption (R2 = .354, p <.001). Thus, students who have these personality traits and circumstances one by one or together have a increased risk for alcohol over-consumption..

This study describes the intellectual ability of a cohort consisting of 120 young women in compulsory care at a SiS institution in Sweden, tested and analyzed between January 2001 and May 2005. The women have been tested with the intelligence tests WISC-III or WAIS-R, as well as the personality trait tests BCT, CMPS and SCL-90, and the personality disorder test SCID-II. This material has been analyzed to investigate how these women's intellectual ability relates to other factors. The analyses show that the main difference between the women of this study and the normal population is their level of intelligence and presence of personality disorders. The IQ level of these women is statistically proven on an average one standard deviation lower than the normal population.

The goal of this Masters thesis is to examine how people at the production department of Arkivator Falköping AB perceive the internal organisational communication transfer and exchange of information, by means of a communication audit. The objectives are also to characterise the communication climate and the respondents satisfaction with the internal organisational communication within the organisation. The results of the study are compared with the companys information policy and with previous research in organisational communication. Answers from different demographic groups within the population are compared. The communication audit was conducted using a modified and added version of a questionnaire originally compiled by the International Communications Association.

Injuries are considered to be a major public health issue. More than 4600 people die each year and 10 % of all hospitalization in Sweden is related to injuries. The cost in a societal perspective is estimated to 59 billion a year. Injuries are possible to prevent. However it needs knowledge that the injury has occurred and the surrounding circumstances.

The urbanization of the world is increasing. How it affects bird populations have been well studied during the last decade, and comparisons between urban and non-urban habitats have been carried out. A common method for measuring habitat quality is to calculate the population density. This method is easy to use, but have been criticized during the last couple of years. In this study, data of population densities was compared with data on reproduction success.

The work examines geographical variations of bicycle use in Trondheim municipality with the aim to create an understanding of what influences the use of bicycles and explain the geographical travel pattern for cycling. The work focuses on the how physical structures generates different transports effects. Where bicycle travels in Trondheim municipality are undertaken is described by using network analysis in ArcGIS, based on aggregated data from the travel habit survey (RVU) in 2009/2010. Trondheim municipality is divided into smaller geographical units (zoner) whose characteristics are described by 19 variables, categorized into 6 groups; Distance, Land use, Topography, Bicycle Facilities, Road characteristics and Demographic factors.By linear regression analysis in SPSS and ArcGIS Spatial Analyst, an explanatory model is elaborated. The variablesdistance to the regional center, workplace density, percentage separate bike paths and hilly terrain explains 78 percent of where cycle journeys are undertaken.

Introduction: The population of Sweden has during the last century doubled. An increased live expectancy results in an older population and the share needing medical care increases. Demographic and political changes in developed counties have resulted in changed demands on the care of the elderly. The elderly are discharged from hospital earlier and this results a significant responsibility on the elderly themselves and their relatives. Often the relatives are engaged in the elderly?s health problems, care needs and the future consequences the current situation results in for the elderly and the domestic life.

Allocation of funds to public libraries is uneven and this study will try to explain the reasons and clarify why the allocations of funds are distributed like they are and what calculations influenced the financial apportionment. This master thesis accounts for allocation in seven public libraries in Uppsala. The study shows that one reason for uneven allocations is demographic. Another reason is that the library has come into a good or bad circle. There are no models for allocation of funds to public libraries in Uppsala, thats why their allocations are given after a percentage increase of earlier years allocations, and that leads to a good or bad circle.

The Stockholm office market segment have for a long time been considered a safe havenwhen it comes to withstand negative turmoil in the form of rental compression due toeconomic fluctuation, especially in the CBD demographic. Recently however, a large numberof banks and institutions, amounting to some 200000 square meters, have decided to relocateto more peripheral locations with the aim of cost reductions on rent. This mass exodus isstudied with focus on rental dynamics as the result of increased vacancies. Other variables arestock changes and employment. The method is econometric combined with an interviewseries.

The goal for this thesis work was to develop Business Intelligence (BI) for an IT consultant company.LexiConsult is an IT consultant company in the Lexicon-group which offers expertise within Office (templates, database, spreadsheets, Outlook etc.) but also SharePoint development and services like support, documentation etcetera.We have investigated the functionality in SharePoint and MS SQL Server and have also evaluated which possibilities these platforms offer in terms of creating a BI-solution for LexiConsults needs. SharePoint offers a variety of different tools and services for BI but none of these where available in the Office365-version which LexiConsult uses. Another solution was therefore suggested where the reports should be published on a web hosting company.We have also studied critical success factors when implementing BI in an IT consulting company.The result is a set of BI-reports developed for SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), which the staff of LexiConsult can access via their SharePoint site.The reports are designed for monitoring and analysis of the economy with e.g. key performance indicators, drill-down of the revenue in different aspects such as by time period, per employee, per customer etcetera. The reports provides vital knowledge that can be used for decision support, e.g.