Even though provocative marketing is a widely used tool among companies to distin-guish themselves from the crowd and catch the attention of consumers, there are several variables that remain relatively unexplored. This paper aims to investigate what impact the brand has on how provocative advertising is perceived and how it affects attitudes and behavior. An experiment was conducted where several well-established measures of ad effectiveness such as brand attitude, buying intentions and word-of-mouth intentions were used to analyze the effects of brand knowledge. The results show that a provocative advert lowers attitude and buying inten-tions for the established brand while it remains unchanged for the unestablished brand. This implicates bigger freedom for unestablished brands to elaborate with provocative elements in their marketing.

Earlier psychological research on stress and its complex of problems has identified several factors which have shown a relation with the occurrence of a poorer mental ill-health. In this study some of these factors have been examined in 69 police officers from Stockholm, Lund and Helsingborg. In the study, police officers with high and low self reported ill-health were compared considering trait anxiety, alexithymia and posttraumatic stress symptoms.The results showed that police officers with poorer mental ill health had a significant higher degree of trait anxiety, the dimension of alexithymia difficulty identifying feelings and the PTSD-dimension avoidance and hyperarousal. The results also showed several positive relations among the variables that divided the groups. On account of the last-mentioned the results will above all be discussed in an integrating perspective..

This study aims at norming a new objective method to track and measure jaw movements in 3D (three dimensional) during chewing in the young adult population (n=41, age 22-30). Norm values of the range of movements and the duration were calculated. Intra and inter rater reliability was high. Masticatory efficiency among participants was evaluated with a two-colored wax, analyzed with picture analysis software. Regression analysis was used to calculate the relationship between movement and duration variables and masticatory efficiency.

Already in 1988, different levels of participation in the election between different districts of big cities in Sweden were noticed. The problem with low political participation in specific areas has almost always been theoretically explained through an individual perspective. This study is therefore focusing on the problem from a contextual perspective. The hypothesis for the study is as follows, in the case of Malmö the level of participation in elections are affected by social environment in which segregation will be the single highest factor. The dependent variable, participation in the election was tested by the independent variables representing social environment; origin, education, gainfully employed and income.

We have by Statistics Sweden (SCB) been given the task of using different dynamic regression models in order to forecast service price index for sea transport. The aim is to see whether these models provide better forecasts than those previously used. This essay aim to identify, estimate and evaluate the selected prediction models. Through our data material we were given access to 28 sightings of sea transport index during the period of 2004 q1 to 2010 q4. We have chosen to evaluate three different transfer function models, one ARIMA model and one naive forecasting model. The input variables we decided to test in our transfer function models were the price of petroleum products, the port activity in Swedish ports and the lending rate of Swedish Central bank. The results of our study suggest that transfer function models generally provide better models than the ARIMA model and the naive forecast model.

The task to this thesis has been to create an application, Katana-databas 1.0, for analysing c-code. The generated output gets stored in a data structure which content in the end of the program run gets written in a textfile which gets used by Katana. It's a tool for reverse engineering, developed by Johan Kraft at Mälardalens institute.Katana-databas has got the following limitations. (1) It can only handle preprocessed files, meaning it doesn't contain any rows beginning with "#". (2) Only complete files can be handled.

The Sub-Saharan countries have for a long time struggled with poverty and conflicts which might have proven hostile for investors. The analysis aims to see if there is a significant correlation between foreign direct investments (FDI) and economic growth and which cultural and institutional factors seem to be significant in this correlation. Considered are also other variables and their influence that might explain what motivates and gives incentives for foreign direct investments (FDI) and are used in the construction of a regression analysis. This to see whether there is an effect on the economic growth in relations to FDI. The results show that FDI is of significance to the economic growth in the region and the study shows that corruption seems to be the most significant institutional factor in the correlation with effect on economic growth and the ability to attract FDI..

Essay in political science, D-level by Lisa Kringsberg, spring semester 2008.Tutor: Michele Micheletti.?Civil Society in Singapore? can it make democratization possible?The third wave of democratization and the end of the cold war has together increased the interest of the civil society as an impact on democratization. Singapore is a country which is higly-developt in both the socie-economic and economic field. Dispate this Singapore has not yet achieved to become a democratic state. The purpose of this essay is to study how the civil society can affect democracy in a country.

The goal of our research is to give the general picture of the attitudes of immigrants to their own integration process into the Swedish society, focusing on the feeling of belonging, satisfaction with the social network, as well as confidence in the future. Moreover, in our study, we investigate a possible relation between the attitudes of the immigrants to the above-mentioned variables and their age and education. The research is based on a quantitative questionnaire investigation, which comprises all Sfi students at level D in the northeastern part of Skåne county. The research shows that the majority are open to the Swedish culture and traditions, keeping, at the same time, their own native traditions. Four out of five think that the Swedish language is important for integration.

AbstractThe aim of this essay is to analyse the effects of women's representation on actual political outcome. Quantitative method and materials are used to study the consequences of women's political participation in Swedish municipals.Many theorists think that women have special interests, different from men?s, which is also the belief of this essay. This political interest is here defined as freedom from discrimination and violence against women. In order to see if this interest is present in local policy it is transformed into variables concerning whether the local authority has an equality plan, supports a local shelter for abused women and by how much money it supports women's shelter.

This quantitative study aims to investigate whether there is a difference in the effect of the policy rate on the price per square meter for condominiums between small and large cities in Sweden. The study encompasses a total of seven Swedish municipalities, of which three located in large cities and four in small cities. Data regarding housing sales and additional variables have been collected for all municipalities, and the price per square meter is the dependent variable in the regressions performed on the dataset, which constitutes the empirical basis of the study. The aim is further to contribute to an increased understanding of how the effect of the policy rate might differ between Swedish cities and why. The results of the study show significant differences in how the policy rate affects the price per square meter in a small city compared to a large city, with the effect being greater in the latter.

This thesis takes as its starting-point the different stands on the ever ongoing growth of multinational corporations (MNCs) and its consequences. Two opposing branches of theories, arguing that the establishment of MNCs in developing countries is good respectively bad for these countries, are tested for the aspect of state capacity. A quantitative method is then used to test if there exists such a relationship at all and if so, which of the two notions that are right.The presence of MNCs is measured as FDI of GDP while state capacity is defined as a combined index for three of ICRG's Political risk indicators. The two variables are analysed, mainly by cross tabulation, using an extensive dataset of 130 developing countries measured for a period of 20 years.The outcome is though ambiguous: No solid correlation can be found, but countries with a higher rate of FDI of GDP tend to have a slight worse rate of state capacity throughout the analysis. Thus the result points in favour of the notion that MNCs are bad for developing countries? state capacity.

This thesis reports on the methodology and results of a study with one retailers 73 units to investigate factors of the store managers leadership that influence productivity performance in store. The study determine the impact of ten independent variables in terms of the store managers leadership on four performance measures: (3) three productivity measures: Sales Over Labor (SALOL), Sales Over Inventory (SALOI) and Sales Over Square-metre (SALOS) and (1) one profit measure: Contribution Income Over Square-metre (CIOS). The result shows that the leadership factors give no more explanation to the economic results after factors of local market condition and the store attributes are taking in to account. The store manager's leadership can though influence his or her decision-making in-store. The store manager's decision to staff the store more intense (higher service-intensity) can increase the level of contribution income over square metre in-store..

The purpose of the study is to investigate how board structure influences CEO compensation for companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange in 2004. The theoretical frame of reference is based upon the corporate governance theory, the principal-agent theory and previous empirical research in the area. A cross sectional regression analysis is used, where a number of control variables are included and significance tests are conducted. The study is based on information regarding CEO compensation, and possible factors affecting the compensation, from 267 companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange A- and O-list in the year 2004. We find that the board structure has no significant effect on the CEO compensation.

The focus of this thesis is to examine posts on library?s Facebook pages and to investigate possible connections between posts and user response. The study examines posts published from thirty different libraries Facebook pages over a two week period to examine if any correlation between different subjects or types of posts affects the degree and type of response from the users.The findings show that photos stand for the majority of the published post concerning its type and that activities at the library was the most common subject of posts. After using eta as measure of association a tenuous connection between degree of response and the posts subject and between the degree of response and the type of post was found. The standard deviation, however, was high in the majority of the variables used.