A study has been conducted on how organizations in Sweden administer costs of facilities management services internally. There are three main theoretical methods for administering costs. In the first method, costs are maintained on a central level; in the second method, costs are allocated and in the third method, internal transfer pricing is used. The aim of the study is to Identify which methods are applied in practice, to evaluate whether the methods fulfill their intended purposes and to study the relationship between the methods used and the cost level of facilites management services. In practice, a large diversity of methods are used for facilities management costs.

Introduction: Good hand hygiene practice is the single most important measure to reduce the spread of bacteria and viruses in healthcare. For nurses, this has become more important as the spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria in hospitals is increasingObjective: To Identify factors that are important for adherence to hand hygiene among health care workers with patient contact.Method: Systematic literature review. Original articles were searched in PubMed and Cinahl.Results: Factors of importance for compliance was profession, lack of time, knowledge/education, physical work environment, attitudes toward hand hygiene, and dry hands.Conclusion: More education, less workload and more visible placement of hand disinfectant containers are examples of actions that could lead to the improvement of staff hand hygiene and reduce the incidence of healthcare associated infections. Due to the fact that health care workers around the world have different training and approaches, the result of this study may be difficult to use. To increase adherence to hand hygiene, a similar study limited to a specific country, such as Sweden, would therefore be interesting to carry through.Keywords: hand hygiene, Infection Control, Compliance..

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine how the images of librarians are conceived and held by the public. It has often been claimed that librarians are subject to widely spread negative stereotyping. My purpose is to study the nature and origin of these stereotypes. Since popular media is one source of these stereotypes and images I have chosen to look into how librarians are characterized in 20 Swedish novels written between 1982-2002. The questions this thesis aims to answer are: What images of librarians occur in the novels? How are the tasks of the librarians respectively described in the novels? How are female and male librarians respectively described? The analysis of the novels is then compared with interviews with three professional librarians about their view of their professional role and their perceptions of its status and image.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate the presences of open-ended problems in the textbooks of high school Mathematics A. For practical reasons the study was limited to three textbooks and two topics, Fractions and Area & Volume. The Essay also describes the theory behind open-ended problems and why they should be used. I Identify three criteria as a definition for open-ended problems. The study found that only 7,6% of the investigated tasks qualified, and met at least 1 criterion.

To be able to maintain an adequate ITservice for various users and needs,more municipalities are looking at thepossibility for mergers of local ITdepartments. One solution for mergingmultiple services/functions and creatingsynergy opportunities is called SharedService Center (SSC). The concept of SSCis that the administrative serviceitself becomes a core activity withinthe organization. The aim of this thesisis to provide municipalities who areconsidering a merging of their local ITdepartments with recommendations on howto design the Shared IT Service Center.Recommendations are outlined based on ananalysis of IT-management literature,reports and by conducting a study onthree ongoing collaborations.The conclusions drawn from the studysuggest guidelines for the design of aShared IT Service Center formunicipalities. These are as following:Create a vision associated with aspecific and structured target state.Identify needs for different targetgroups in municipalities and set acommon standard.Create a clear and practical model/SLAappearance of the cooperation andagreement.Ensure the individual municipalitiescommissioning skills in order to notlose it in the context of a common IToperation.Find an organization that is democraticfor member municipalities andfacilitates long-term partnership.Specify the operation and maintenance sothat it can be regulated and controlledEstablish a common help desk.Establish a common standard andconsolidated infrastructure before theintroduction of a common technology platform..

The Swedish pharmacy market will be re-regulated in July 2009 which will present private actors with an opportunity to enter the market. Several risks and uncertainties are associated with such an entry. The purpose of this thesis is to increase the understanding of identification and management of risks and uncertainties associated with entering the Swedish pharmacy market. We also intend to investigate similarities and differences in risk identification and risk management as well as create an understanding of the underlying reasons for these similarities and differences. Three companies interested in entering the market have been interviewed and the interviews were conducted with an open approach to avoid influencing the companies? answers.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to Identify discourses within the school library field and to analyse which professional identities the discourses result in for school librarians. The empirical data consist of 71 articles from Swedish journals concerning school libraries and school librarians, between the years 2000-2003. The theory and method used is a discourse analysis which is inspired by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. This form of discourse analysis was chosen since it was useful when identity was the focus of study. The analysis is accomplished in three steps.

The web has made an incredible amount of unorganized information available to anyone. There are search engines that help us structuring the information, but it is still difficult to find what you search for on the web. The purpose of this master's thesis is to investigate whether the already existing techniques for automatic indexing are suited for the new information retrieval context on the web and how the choice to support these techniques, or not, affects the search results. This is examined through a literature study on automatic indexing and other related concepts, such as information retrieval and information searching on the web in order to get a theoretical frame to the work and by an observation of the search engine HotBot to approach the purpose of the thesis. The observation is carried out by searching HotBot's database and investigating the search results in order to try to Identify patterns that can reveal something about how HotBot's automatic indexing is done.

 In this essay the aim was to investigate how the EU is trying to function as a democracy promoter in three particular countries, the so called candidate-countries Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey. The aim was also to analyze if there exist any differences in how the EU functions in these countries as a democracy promoter with a focus on how acts of democracy promotion is taken place. In order to fulfil the purpose of the essay two questions were addressed, how does the EU perform in promoting democracy in the three candidate-countries Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey? And also, is it possible to Identify any differences in how the EU functions as a democracy promoter in those three countries?The method used to fulfil purpose and answering research-questions was qualitative text-analysis.  The results of the study were that the EU does perform in a number of ways to promote democracy in the three countries. The main differences are that the EU is using primarily political tools in Croatia and Macedonia which are channelized top-down and economic tools in Turkey channelized mainly top-down to promote democracy.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to analyze the research front within medical ethics. We wish to Identify which research themes that are included in the subject field of medical ethics. The research themes can be identified by a couple of bibliometrical methods and techniques. In our case, it is bibliographic coupling combined with a cluster analysis. The analysis is accomplished by the extracted references from articles in the two journals Bioethics and Journal of medical ethics.

The purpose of this essay is to Identify and analyze the term leadership based on democratically-, authoritarian-, and passive (laissez-faire) leadership and find out which of these types are to be preferred among employees. Our main aspects are:Do employees prefer democratically-, authoritarian-, or passive leadership?Are there any differences regarding ideal leadership considering sex, age, length of service and sector?We have chosen to make a quantitative study of two equivalent organizations, one in the private and one in the public sector. Our method is an explorative method were we seek to find new knowledge about our fenomena. Our study is based on the already established theories on leadership and our empirical data is gathered by questionnaires.The conclusions to be drawn from this study is that our respondents to a large extent prefer a democratic leadership towards an authoritarian and passive leadership. Most of them prefer a democratic leadership with elements of the other leadership types.

An increasing number of students leave the Swedish compulsory school without having a satisfactory grade in mathematics. Causes why students risk ending up with difficulties in the subject of mathematics are debated but one explanation might be that more and more students are diagnosed with dyscalculia. The purpose of this study is to investigate how educationalists Identify and organize their teaching in order to help students with difficulties in mathematics to reach the schools requirement and long-term goals that are defined in advance. It is vital to detect learning difficulties at an early stage. Accordingly, it can be avoided that the student starts to develop a negative self-image due to repeated failures and in the same time provide relevant help.

The objective of the present study was to highlight preschool children?s encounters with children?s literature, in a heterogeneous language context.  The idea was to Identify significant features in the linkages between the reading of children?s literature, didactic activities and children?s learning, language development and emergent literacy activities.  Our interest was directed towards the activities connected with read-alouds, as well as the preschool teacher?s perceptions of those activities.  The empiric material was collected by use of participant observations of four read-aloud sessions. After the observations the preschool teacher in charge of the observed read-aloud was in-depth interviewed. In addition, the physical print environment in the actual preschool was observed. The results indicate that the physical and social reading environment interact with each other.  Furthermore, the preschool  teachers? approaches and ways of working with literature does not always optimize the language, literacy and content area  learning opportunities for the children.

Purpose/Aim: To Identify which channels of communication are most effective in conveying consumer brands to students. The main areas of research are social media, brochures , employees, and face-to-face interaction as with job fairs, study visits and lectures.Material/Method: Group interviews, literature, electronic sources, Internet sources.Main results: The results of the study show that employees are seen as the most trustworthy source since they are thought of as the most honest. Social media are seen as the communication channel with the broadest range of information but with the possibility of appearing unproffesional. Brochures were considered to be the least effective communication channel as these are rarely read and when they are, often seem contrived and give an overly rigid impression of the company. Face-to-face communication was considered to be the most effective way to gain a professional connection but was as viewed upon with certain skepsis due to the companies tendencies to at times present a false projection of themselves at events such as job fairs.

The amount of web APIs that are open to the public is increasing fast. Both the free web APIs as well as the ones that cost money to access. Both bigger and smaller organizations, professional and non-professional developers use these web APIs to add value to their systems or use it to create new applications. This is an area study where alot of research has been done in the last few years. In spite of this there are still no user-centered evaluation methods for web APIs.