Abstract The present study examined if early deaf people and people with severe hearing loss perceive visual information differently than hearing people. An experiment was conducted with eight deaf participants and eight participants with normal hearing. The participants were between the ages of 18-74 years. The participants were asked to look at fifteen different images portraying manipulated illusions, and then assess if the images were of the same size. Subsequently another image depicting a different illusion with a face hidden in it was presented to the participants.

Background: Learning is important for companies? existence in today?s society and many studies discuss the importance of life long learning and learning organizations. An increased understanding for how the individual learn at the work place is importance to study to gain an accepting for how learning occurs, both formal and informal. Purpose: The purpose with this study is to describe the process of learning at the work place from an individual perspective, with focus on how formal and informal learning occur and interact. The purpose is also to confirm, contradict or develop existing theories.

Title: Internal Communication Approach ? A study of the internal communication-channels of the ICA Administration. Background: The ICA Administration is in the process of generating an organizational change with the purpose of improving their external communication. The internal communication, on the other hand, has been put aside and is missing guidelines at the present.  Since the ICA Administration does not know how the staff uses the internal communication-channels they cannot optimize nor develop them. As the literature shows, it is important to choose the channel that is most appropriate for the type of information that it is meant to communicate. Choosing the wrong channel, or using it wrongly, can bring problems consisting of the staff experiencing to receive less information than needed in their daily work. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to explore and describe the internal communication between the employees of the ICA Administration from the existing communication-channels and their usage. Method: Through the initial interviews with the staff, the internal communication-channels of the ICA Administration were determined.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse and if possible improve the communication, mainly seen from a pedagogical perspective, between the IT company (Nostratic) and their clients in a first meeting. The analysis covers the preparation part, communication during the meetings, the technical terminology used during the meetings as well as the follow up of the meetings. Due to the lack of research within this area and the lack of personal experience on my part, the conducted study has been explorative with the use of qualitative methods. Although my first aim was to put emphisis on the pedagogical part of the communication, I found while conducting the study that there were other areas of higher importance to analyse in order to improve the customer meetings. Unfortunately the company went bankrupt in the middle of my study which resulted in me not beeing able to try out the potential improvements.

Audionomprogrammet.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the special education, for children with language impairment in preschool, was organised in a municipality in Sweden. The study was based on interviews and field studies as the primary research tools in qualitative and ethnographic method. The result showed that special education teachers were localised in different geographic areas of school and that there were preschools that lacked special educational expertise in language impairment. Literature and the importance of playing for language development were emphasised as well as the use of signs and visual aids as augmentative and alternative communication. In the preschool for children with language impairment, the teachers carried their knowledge into practical and pedagogical work.

The project has been performed in a close collaboration with Hörsam who works in the field of hearing technology. In a first meeting with the company, the Project group was showed a few existing storage boxes for hearing aids. The company thought they were unnecessarily large with plenty of unused space and wanted a new, smarter solution to be developed.The project began with user studies in which audiologists, maintenance technicians, future users and others were interviewed. The purpose was to obtain their views on today's storage boxes and to find out how well the users maintained their hearing aids. It proved to be a large lack of knowledge regarding the management of hearing aids within the users.

This thesis examines and evaluates user boards in Swedish public schools from a democratic perspective. In order to evaluate whether the democratic values are fulfilled five different democratic ideals are selected to serve as a theoretical fundament. These ideals derive from the Swedish Government Official Reports that preceded the reform of user boards in schools, and are identified as the following: participation, dialogue, trust, democratic schooling and influence. The study is based on cases and involves two schools with user boards and two comparative schools with informal parental influence, so called school advisory boards. The study concludes that the main difference between the two types of parental influence is the level of formality.

Navigating to different locations isn?t always easy. Imagine then how it is for people with a visual impairment to walk across the street or to get from one point to another. The Swedish Association of the Visually Impaired (SRF) has pointed out that today's society is not sufficiently accessible to people with visual impairment and there are improvements that need to get done. Technology is something that has evolved a lot this last decade and occurs today almost everywhere in our environment.In some areas, technology has facilitated people's daily life very much and we have therefore chosen to examine whether a combination of several technical functions integrated into the fictive artifact called Eyenavster can facilitate outdoor orientation and increase the accessibility for people with a visual impairment.Qualitative data collection methods have been used in this study by six interviews to answer our question.

Different forms of relaxing methods can be used in rehabilitation for individuals with tinnitus and Ménièré?s disease. Research continues to find convincing proof of effects from the different methods. This study presents methods of relaxing, massage and Mindfulness, as possible complementary rehabilitation tools.The purpose of this study was to investigate opinions about relaxing from professionals working with hearing care. A qualitative approach with phenomenological influence was chosen for the study.

Hearing is considered to be the most important sense for the communication between people. Several studies have shown that hearing loss can lead to deterioration in quality of life, reduced social activities, feelings of alienation and hence the increasing incidence of depression symptoms.An early audiological rehabilitation is a prerequisite for proper communication among people with hearing loss. Knowledge has been shown to be of great importance and structured learning and individually targeted approach can be expected to facilitate the audiological rehabilitation.The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of an educational effort for people with hearing loss where the effort was made in the distance within the audiological rehabilitation and was followed-up by professional phone support, through a randomized controlled study.The study group consisted of 69 hearing aid users who were randomized by an independent person into two groups, an intervention group and a control group. The intervention group (n = 33) had access to the book "When the sounds are weaker - on hearing and hearing aids". The group received weekly topic-based information related to the different chapters of the book, in five rounds.

The purpose of the study was to learn how social structures can enable accessibility, by asking persons with visual impairment about their experiences of accessibility in the public environment in the city of Stockholm. Eleven adults with visual impairments, living in the city of Stockholm, were interviewed using two separate focus groups. The study was carried out with the objective to allow for the participants to be involved in the research process. The resulting data was analyzed on the basis of Nancy Fraser?s theory on social justice, focusing on the conceptions; needs, politicised needs, redistribution, recognition and misrecognition.

Following the implementation of IFRS with yearly impairment tests, the question of correlations and causalities between impairments and investors? decision making is gaining interest in academia. This essay will study the relationship between significant goodwill impairments, communicated on the Nasdaq OMX Stockholm webpage between the years 2005-2009, and the impact those announcements have had on investors? decision making. Furthermore, the causality behind the impairments will be in focus.

Background: Bone anchored hearing system is a surgically implantable system for treatment ofindividuals with hearing loss. The Softband is intended for patients who can benefit from a boneanchored hearing system but who are not yet suitable for implant surgery.Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate whether an adhesive bone conductor, Adjoin, canbe used as an alternative to Softband.Material and Method: Twenty adult subjects with normal hearing participated in the study.Measurement of functional gain and speech intelligibility was performed with Softband and Adjoinwhich then were compared. A questionnaire was answered by the participants after the measurementsthat treated their subjective experiences with each option.Results: The objective measurements yielded no overall difference between Softband and Adjoin forthe group studied. The subjective results showed differences in the perceived comfort as well as whichof the two bone conductors that would be preferred to use in everyday life, with Adjoin being thepreferred option. No difference was detected on participants perceived gain, sound quality and speechintelligibility.Conclusion: Based on the measured results, Adjoin seems to be a suitable alternative to Softband.However, there are questions about how Adjoin works with long-term use..

The purpose of this thesis is to determine how well a student is prepared as a future librarian at BHS in Borås, when it comes to serving individuals with hearing disabilities at the libraries. The theory and combined methods is that of discourse theory, interviews and Webb searches. The source material for this thesis comprises course material from 2002 and 2003, with the main focus on the spring term 2003 and on what is called the users perspective användarperspektivet. The study is divided into two parts: firstly, to determine the students expected knowledge and his/her future professional identity through this knowledge. The user groups that were mentioned to the students during the education were also linked to the students knowledge.