Prior research on the ability of financial ratios to predict bankruptcies has shown a significant difference between the companies that went into bankruptcy and those that survived. This paper investigates whether there is a difference in the prediction ability of financial ratios during the last financial crisis compared to relatively normal macroeconomic environments in which most previous studies have been conducted. We use univariate analysis to compare companies that went into bankruptcy during 2010 and 2011 with companies that remained active. Our dataset consists of 51 failed companies that are matched with 102 companies that remained active. All companies were Swedish limited companies with more than 50 employees and the comparison is made with 26 financial ratios.

Public opinion can be shaped as well as transformed in a number of ways. Government authorities occasionally make use of public information campaigns to educate and steer the public. In this thesis the balance between public and private, the individual and the society is analysed in terms of dimensions of individualism and communitarianism. These dissimilar theories on how the society ought to be constructed can be used when analysing many different policy areas, however, they also pinpoint the controversies seen in the public debate regarding Swedish information policy. Based on this analysis an empirical study identifies what kind of knowledge the state wants the citizens to possess and public information campaigns can be problematic.

This thesis examines how techniques from place marketing, developed to market places, can be used in the process of designing a visual identity for an institution. The thesis is a case study of the development of a new visual identity for the public art institution Malmö konsthall. The essay presents Malmö Konsthall, defines the term visual identity and describes the main principles in place branding. I then define target audiences and key values, discuss the application of place marketing principle and go through the design process of the new visual identity. The process showed that theories about flagship buildings, signature design and signature districts have the biggest influence on the design.

Men and women in advertising - a study of the ads in the magazines Café and Elle is an essay in media and communication studies covering 15hp. The author examines what is considered masculinity and femininity in a variety of advertisements, and which products are linked to masculinity and femininity. Besides this, the author also examines the production of happiness, and how this may differ between men and women. Although stereotypes, myths and metaphors are examined. The essay is examined on the basis of gender theory, and theories about stereotypes and myths.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate what attributes were used in story-time activities, why attributes were used in story-time activities and what functions they have. The study is based on qualitative methods in the form of a literature studies, observations and interviews. The interviews were undertaken with two storytellers from the same public library. The story-time activities were adapted for children from three to six years of age. The study suggested that there was a connection between story-time activities and a social and cultural perspective.

This report is about intranets and SharePoint. It explains how user?s expectations can affect an implementation of an intranet and what companies want to get out of an intranet. It?s also about risks that may occur when an intranet is developed and how to avoid these problems.SharePoint is a collaborative platform and publishing system from Microsoft that assists developers in the implementation of an intranet.

My purpose with this paper related to my questions was to find out how professionals preeschool teachers working on multilingualism. I also wanted to get answers on how pedagogues in the preeschool may promote multilingual children´s language development, the factors that promote multilingual children´s language development and the role parents have in the language development of multilingual children. I chose to do my study in the form of interviews with professional preeschool teachers and interviewees described including the need for more knowledge of pedagogues around multilingualism. My result based on theoretichal background and the study is that pedagogues should let the children´s all languages esemble together. A factor influencing the multilingual children´s language development is ambient attitudes to multilingualism.

Syftet med studien är att få en fördjupad kunskap om innebörden av Time som begrepp samt att ge en bild av hur erfarna lärare hanterar ämnet i sin undervisning. Denna studie har sin teoretiska utgångspunkt i det sociokulturella perspektivet och hur medierande redskap används i undervisningen.Den kvalitativa forskningsintervjun användes som metod för att få svar på mina frågor. De fem informanterna arbetar i antingen Värmlands eller Örebro Län. De är alla verksamma pedagoger på nivåerna från gymnasium upp till musikhögskola och de undervisar i olika musikämnen. Resultatet visar att ämnet handlar om hur man, som musiker, placerar sina toner i förhållande till en given puls samt att alla informanter understryker att Time är viktigt och bör undervisas i.

Every year more than 6000 thefts, to a value of 1.5 billion SEK, are reportedwithin the Swedish building trade. Plus all the indirect costs of having theconstruction site standing still.SafeTool is a newly started company that will try to prevent this problem witha modern technology solution.The key to SafeTool?s solution is RFID ? Radio Frequency Identification ? andthe solution looks like this;All tools are stored in a container on the construction site. Every tool isequipped with a RFID-tag that uniquely identifies the tool. With antennas in thecontainer it is possible to detect when a tool is leaving the container and whenit comes back.

The main purpose of this study was to examine how preschool teachers are working to promote each child's language development and whether they can ensure that they do that. Therefore I wanted to find out what a good language development implies for each teacher, how they work to promote each child's language development in daily practice, how they measure the actual language development and also what conditions the teachers have, to engage in a language development way to work. For the study, I chose a qualitative method, with structured interviews and all together I interviewed six preschool teachers, within the same organization in a suburb close to Stockholm.  The results showed that there is an ambiguity, among the preschool teachers, in what a good language development means, but it can be stated that they do have a language development way to work even if it needs to be developed. Further on, it has emerged that the teachers have the tools to measure children's language development, although they do not have the conditions yet to use the method to the fullest. About the preschool teachers own conditions in order to operate in a language development way to work, I concluded that they have a strong foundation to build on, but they still have much work ahead of them.

The purpose of this study was to examine how some young mothers, who previously have been in foster care or residential care, describe the way motherhood has affected their lives and identities. Narrative interviews were conducted with three teenage mothers and one mother aged 23. As tools for analyzing the narratives, theories about narrative psychology and how people present themselves through story-telling and language were used. The results of the study show that becoming a mother was life-changing in a positive way, according to the young mothers. They described how they, since becoming mothers, had become more mature and now lived less risk-full lives.

The study's purpose is to describe students' experiences of help and support in mathematics. To investigate this, I adopted the questions: What does it mean, according to the students, to get "help and support in mathematics?" Are there differences in the description of help and support depending on the age of the students? What different kinds of help and support do students feel that they get from their math teachers? What different kinds of help and support would they like to have? The study is based on a qualitative method, group interviews, with three groups of students, one from each stage of primary school in one municipality in Sweden. The students were at the time of the interview in grade 3, 5 and 8. The interviews were analysed from a sociocultural perspective. The results show that what the students primarily consider as the meaning of help and support it is to get individual support from their teacher.

The purpose of this essay is to examine whether and how labor consultants, job coaches, guidance counselors promote the possibility of self-realization of the clients they encounter in their work. By analyzing, based on the theoretical framework, six semi-structured interviews of people having the chosen professions answer the questions "Do counselors promote client's opportunities for self-realization in their work?" and "If so: how is this practiced?". In the theoretical framework three important concepts are addressed: "identity", "recognition" and "self-realization". These are explained with the help of works by including Emma Engdahl, Anthony Giddens, Axel Honneth and Allison Weir.

Kritik är ett begrepp som inte har fått lika stort utrymme som feedback i forskning om sociala relationer. Den här studien visar på dess betydelse för relationer mellan lärare på en gymnasieskola. Utifrån teorier som Scheffs sociala band, Asplunds problemlösning, Meads ?I? och ?Me? med flera, belyser vi kritikens olika aspekter och vad som krävs för att den skall tolkas som positiv kontra negativ. Vi har under den här studien hittat en del saker som är relevanta när det gäller hur personer förhåller sig till kritik, exempelvis på vilket sätt den bör framföras och tas emot.

Today there are many students in schools with a wide variety of different behavioral disorders. Among these disorders you can find ADHD. We have selected to research how pedagogues respond to students with ADHD. The essay will address the issues concerning the pedagogues own knowledge about ADHD. This essay will problematize if pedagogues find their knowledge about ADHD sufficient enough to respond to students with ADHD and other students without diagnoses of one of the class equivalent manner.