The main focus of this study is to explore Swedish soldiers? experiences of the transition back to everyday life after international service missions. This includes the help and support that they have received and also what barriers to care they have experienced during the transition back to everyday life. The theoretical perspectives of this study are social identity and stigma theory. This study was performed using a qualitative method and includes six individual interviews with active duty officers within the Swedish armed forces.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine boys?/young men?s forming of masculinity and gender identity and how discussions around gender stereotypes and conceptions represents themselves in contemporary youth novels. Gender theory based upon R.W. Connell?s theoretical framework which discusses masculinities in plural is used.

This essay focuses on Finnish immigrants living in Sweden and their experiences of educationof literature in Swedish upper secondary school. It concerns the fact of how education ofliterature can be used to strengthen students? formation of cultural identity. The essay tries toidentify obstacles as well as possibilities in the teaching of literature with a view to deepenand enrich this process. The method consists of a phenomenological approach includinginterviews with a group of Finnish immigrants living in Sweden.

In recent years, the Internet has exploded with different kinds of social media, where a significant function is to share your life in text and images. This changes how we form our identity, our religious identity included. The aim of this paper was to study how Instagram forms a space for the creation and development of religious and spiritual beliefs. For this purpose, Instagram updates from five women with yoga oriented Instagram accounts have been analyzed in relation to two theories: Paul Heelas? och Linda Woodhead?s theory of a spiritual revolution and Heidi Campbell?s theory of networked religion.The aim of the study was to explore how these women presented themselves in their Instagram flow and what part religion and spirituality had in their presentations.

Sverige är ett mångkulturellt land och forskningsområdet kring hur det är att leva med två kulturer är viktig att belysa. Denna studies fokus riktas mot hur unga vuxna upplever kopplingen mellan den personliga och etniska identiteten. En kvalitativ undersökning genomfördes med 16 intervjuer. Respondenterna levde i den svenska samt en utomeuropeisk kultur. Resultatet visade att deltagarna upplever sig som en blandning av de två erfarna kulturerna och att den etniska identiteten upplevs som stark.

The purpose of this thesis is to study how today?s consumer society can be understood from ananalysis of the phenomenon Every Day Carry (EDC). The aim is thus to problematize the daily useof the artifacts that surrounds us and investigate how these can be understood as networks of humanand non-human actors, aswell as identity- and meaning-making practices in today?s consumersociety.The theoretical and methodical framework is built upon an eclectic variety of consumptiontheories,Michel Callon?s, John Law?s and Bruno Latour?s work on Actor-Network-Theory,Discourse analysis inspired by Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and anethnographic methodology specifically adapted for online research. The empirical material consistsof photographs and commentaries from two EDC blogs aswell as commentaries regarding EDCfrom a commentary field on Youtube.com.

The purpose of this essay was to examine the packaging design´s communications related to the colloquially brand's symbolic capital and how they became meaningful through experience and perceptions that led to the identification processes in the consumer society. There were eight interviews of snuff users who became my main collections materials. My theoretical framework was discourse psychology´s emphasis on language and Bourdieu´s concept provided important tools in the analysis of the material.I could highlight that packaging design and the brand had influenced the informants and given them symbolic beliefs and what it meant to sniff a certain brand. Color, brand awareness and price were crucial in choosing where the informants attributed themselves the cans symbolic values to their identity. It could be inferred high and low status perceptions based on stereotypes in the design itself..

This thesis studies how the Swedish government articulates social exclusion within the spring budget of 2007. Through a discourse theoretical approach, inspired by Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the empirical findings are reconstructed through the nodal point of labour and two chains of equivalence, based upon the duality between employment and unemployment. By viewing social exclusion as a phenomenon concerning discourse, identity and politics, this duality forms the basis of a deconstructive and hegemonic analysis.I argue that the term social exclusion is a powerful and flexible political concept in that it obscures ideological assumptions and objectives as well as draws attention away from alternative social concepts. Throughout the thesis social exclusion is stressed as a social category constituting the relation between individual and society. Hence I argue that it is of vital importance that the values underlying its usage are made explicit and that social exclusion as a floating signifier is made an object of academic analysis..

The purpose of the study is, through literature and interview studies, to analyze and draw attention to critical mindedness regarding news features in a multilateral way. In the interview 16 participants got to see three SVT news features with lack of criticism. Great importance was given to the spontaneous reasoning of the participant. The study is explorative and has given a number of hypotheses and ideas for further research concerning the subject. Among other things the study shows that previous beliefs affect the critical mindedness of the individual, that individuals have the ability to think critically if reminded and that the trust of the source and medium affects the critical mindedness of the individual..

The purpose of this study is to survey and evaluate if the individual contrast sensitivity and preferences for horizontal and vertical lighting level correspond to the values that standard SS-EN 12464-1 recommends for the workplace- and surrounding light levels.This study examines if lighting should be adapted after the individuals? need or if a general value can be found that will cover every individuals? need for a workplace and surrounding light level. This study also examines if parameters like sex, age and/or glasses/lenses have an effect on the amount of lighting that the test subjects need. Lastly we compared the values concerning the relationship between workplace- and surrounding light levels with standard SS-EN 12464-1?s recommendations.The study is carried out with an experimental design that surveys 220 test subjects who were chosen by a selection of convenience.

Individual adaption to the student´s needs is a recurring main theme in the new Swedish curriculum (Lgr11). The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine how teachers work with individual adjustment for students with reading and writing difficulties. The study was based on five questions;In what way do teachers organize their teaching in the classroom individually for students with reading and writing difficulties?What methods do they use for student´s with reading and writing difficulties?What difficulties do they encounter in their teaching?How do the teachers reason to curriculum goals regarding individual adaptions?How do they think about their own knowledge regarding reading- and writing difficulties and dyslexia?The method for my study was qualitative interviews. Five teachers were interviewed in semi-structured interviews.

AbstractBackground: Countries can be seen as brands (nation brands) with brand values that transmitto the country?s products. Country-of-origin (COO), the brands nationality, links the productto an associative network of cultural shared national stereotypes. Through associating thebrand with a country or a region, the credibility of the brand can increase and strengthen thebrand. Therefore COO is used in marketing to position a brand.Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine how luxury fashion brands communicatetheir national identity through analyzing their advertising.

The LSH-study started in 2003 at the department of Health and Society at the University of Linköping. The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between life condition, stress and health. A total of 1007 people from ten different health centres in Östergötlands län participated. At the follow up, a couple of years later, 795 of the 1007 participated. 127 of the 212 in the attrition turned down the follow up, twelve people were not invited (for example in case of death) and the rest did not respond at all.

Individual trees can act as carriers of meaning. When a person attributes deep meanings to a specific tree, a relationship between the person and the tree is created. To avoid conflicts between users and planners, increased awareness is required of how important individual trees may be to a person. The objective of this study was to elucidate persons? relationships with individual urban trees.

The purpose of this study was to investigate to what extent  young adults use media to create the image of themselves. The questions we wanted to answer was as follows: what does the media use of young adults look like compared to their attitudes towards media content; what awareness do they have of other young adults attitudes concerning media content; and finally, how do these attitudes affect their own media use?Media consumption is a great part of  the daily lives of young adults living in Sweden: the national  average media consumption is seven hours a day, for 15-24 year olds. This provides a new way for young adults to express their identity - by showing their use of different media content, they can change other's perception of themselves.The method we used in our study was a combination between a quantitative and a qualitative method. We first made a survey in three classes with senior year high school-students, in a Swedish school.