Automatic query expansion has long been studied in information retrieval research as a technique that deals with the fundamental issue of word mismatch between query and document. The purpose of this thesis is to compare the retrieval effectiveness of different strategies for automatic query expansion. The strategies are based on local analysis of the corpus and use statistical information from the local document set to extract terms that suppose to adapt themselves to each individual search and therefore appear to be searchonyms to the index terms. The strategies compared are: association clusters, metric cluster and scalar cluster. Baseline queries of 24 topics are expanded using terms from the different clusters and searches are made.

Leadership in organizations plays a crucial role in promoting employee motivation. Different leadership styles have been shown to affect motivation in various ways. The purpose of this report is to establish a deeper understanding of the relationship between different leadership styles and motivation according to Self-Determination Theory. The report also aims to highlight potential similarities and differences in the perceptions of leaders and employees in various industries, regarding motivation as defined by Self-Determination Theory. Based on a case study, it includes interviews with eight leaders and eight employees.

AbstractThe purpose of this essay was to investigate what thoughts children in preschool and preschool class have about friendship. We also want to investigate what characteristics and which strategies they look for in friendship relationships.  To perform this study we used the following questions as a starting point. Which characteristics do children see as attractive in their cultures?How are friendship relationships affected in different contexts?Can one see a difference in the most important characteristics and strategies between the children in preschool and the children in preschool class? To answer our questions and to reach our purpose we have held group interviews with children in preschool and in preschool class.  We have, in our study, used published scientific literature to get an understanding of what has been presented in relation to this topic in the past.The result shows that the children in preschool and preschool class do differ in certain aspects but also have some similarities on ideas about friendship. Both preschool children and the children in the preschool class are highly competent and skilled at integrating with other children. What divides them is their ways to plan their friendship.

During recent years, the trend of Swedish students? negative performance and results in mathematics has been discussed. It is agreed that a change in teaching methods is necessary in order to solve this issue. Thus we found it interesting to take a closer look at an alternative way of teaching. The purpose of this study was to find out what teachers and students associate concrete mathematics with and make a comparison between them.

I detta arbete har samband mellan personlighetsdrag definierade enligt Femfaktor-modellen gentemot strategier för lärande och erhållna betyg undersökts.  53 gymnasieelever på naturvetarprogrammet samt 6 lärare deltog i studien. En tidigare rapporterad association mellan höga idrottsbetyg och extraversion (t.ex. hög självsäkerhet, mera utåtriktad, mer spänningssökande) var statistiskt signifikant även i denna studie.  Två andra personlighetsdrag, vänlighet/värme samt känslomässig stabilitet, visade även signifikans, p<0,05, gentemot höga betyg i biologi/kemi. Hypotesen att lärare tenderar att ge högre betyg till elever som har likande personlighetsdrag som de själva kunde inte verifieras i denna studie. I studien fanns exempel på lärare som gav högsta betyg till elever vars personligheter i vissa avseenden var motsatta lärarens.Då personlighetsdrag ställdes gentemot lärande, både i enkät och intervjuer, pekade resultaten på att elever har olika strategier för att underlätta sitt lärande och det som fungerar för en elev kan vara ineffektivt för andra. Detta understryker vikten av att läraren varierar undervisningen så att inte bara en strategi för lärande premieras..

This master?s thesis aims at examining and structuring different viewpoints concerning the assignments of the Swedish public library system. The method used is ideology analysis.The main questions are: what are the overriding goals connected to each of the different assignments? How are these goals motivated? By which means are the goals to be reached? And how does our analysis relate to earlier research on the assignments of the Swedish public library? The thesis can be said to consist of three main parts. Part one is a theoretical framework introducing the concept ?ideology analysis? and the concept ?schools of thought?.

Should libraries first and foremost be a source of free informationwhere the citizens can find whatever information they want, or dothe librarians have a responsibility for what kind of works theypresent to people on their shelves? A wild debate broke out inSwedish media in September 2012, after the artistic leader ofKulturhuset in Stockholm; Behrang Miri decided to weed out allthe Tintin albums from the children´s library Tiotretton. Hewanted to start a debate on stereotypes in children´s fiction, andwhat damage they do to children who face them. The purpose ofthe thesis is to carry out a discourse analysis of this media debate,and to identify the different views that are expressed on thedemocratic mission of the libraries, what media they shouldpresent. The method and theory is based on the discourse theory ofErnesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and their concepts are used toarrange the analysis around certain themes that build up twodifferent discourses; ?Freedom of information discourse? and the?Weeding out discourse?.The two main questions are: What views of the public librariesselection of works are expressed in the Tintin debate in Tiotretton,and how do the views relate to each other? What concepts arespecific for the debate, and what meanings do they get in thesedifferent views?In the concluding chapter I discuss which consequences theseopposing opinions can have for the future selection processes ofthe library..

This is a discourse analysis of three WebPages which topic is sexual information. Our purpose is to examine the WebPages RFSL (The Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights), RFSU (The Swedish Association for Sexuality Education) and UMO (Reception for young people) from a queer theoretical perspective and illustrate how they discuss the subjects? gender, sexual preference and sexual limits. Our questions are; what information about gender, sexual preference and sexual limits are presented on the WebPages RFSU, RFSL and UMO, and what similarities and differences can be identified and how can these be analyzed from a queer perspective? Our material was collected from the three WebPages and categorized according to three topics of interest; gender, sexual preference and sexual limits.

This essay aims to broaden the understanding of intolerance towards people with religious and/or cultural Islamic association or background. This thesis has intolerance and Islamophobia as central components and starts with the question: In what manner do twelve pupils talk about Islam and Muslims in their third year of the vocational program, in small towns and in the countryside? The survey took place in the south of Sweden in a rural municipality where a total of twelve students from the industrial, electricity and vehicle program in the Swedish gymnasiums participated in two separate focus group interviews. The essay will use an intersectional analysis to see where the students position themselves and Muslims in relation to each other and to society. The essay also contains a comparison of Islamophobia in the country side and in the city environment.

The Swedish state and educational system are secular, so to say they do not depend on the former protestant state church anymore. Many people in Sweden are also secular. Even so, in school teachers meet students with a religious faith. The purpose of this study is to examine how teachers without a religious belonging experience the encounter with religious students. The method used was semistructured interviews with five teachers in a upper secondary school in a multicultural suburb of Stockholm.

In 1985 the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions published a paper on recommended depreciation time on capital assets for the public sector. This paper should only be seen as guidance, but many municipals use it without any further investigations. Swedish municipals are not like private companies; one very distinguished difference is that they are not allowed to make any profit. The municipals in Sweden are regulated by the constitution law which means that they can not go bankrupt. The public and the private sector have different legislations that result in different ways on how they for example treat depreciations.

-1949 [26][upps-01.gif] The aim of this master thesis is to investigate how W.E.A. Workers Educational Association, took part in the great changes of society and in the modernizing process in the period of 1920-1949. The examination is based upon three journals of educational material that were connected with W.E.A. The question at issue is to show how the people behind W.E.A. aimed to educate and indeed educated the workers to modern people and moreso to see how the articles in fact were written and to analyse in what way they turn to the workers and get their attention.

The aim of this essay was to gain a deeper understanding about how school employees interpret and practice school law regarding cyber-bullying that occurs between pupils on the internet. To examine this we used a qualitative method. We completed eight interviews with five teachers, one headmaster, one school welfare officer and one special educationist. These eight school employees were from four different high schools. In our interviews we found that the school employees thought it was difficult to define different concepts within the school law such as in association with the occupation and offensive behaviour which prohibits them from interpreting the school law in the same way.

The aim of this study is to describe and analyze how the European union relates to the different dimensions of abortion. What kind of problem is abortion and whose right is it? Does difference framings of the problem enable different solutions?By analyzing debates from the European parliament through Carol Lee Bacchis method ?What?s the problem approach? I have come to see that different representations of a problem changes the problem it self. This emphasis that a problem is a problem in one context, but not in an other.Depending on the work of, among others, Barbara Hobson and Ailbhe Smyth I have focused upon the European union as a economical project, leaving social issues to national competence. This makes the EU a patriarchal project that fails to guarantee women?s rights.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how purchasingmanagers in bookshops and public librarians reason withregards to their selection of fiction literature. Nineinterviews have been conducted in this qualitative studymade in the spring of 2013; four librarians, four bookmerchants, as well as a market director of a major chain ofbookstores. Our focus has been particularly directed toascertaining what influence the cultural-political mission oflibraries have had on the process of selection, as well as theextent to which factors such as demand and quality play apart in both organizations. We have been interested inseeing how libraries and bookstores compare with regards tothese factors, because of obvious differences in their goalsand purposes. Librarians see both the benefits and flaws intheir way of working, as well as in the way in whichbookstores conduct their business, and vice versa, that theyare often successful in cooperating, like when arrangingvisits from authors etc.