This degree project documents the meeting of four high-school students with working life before and during the practical training period, which is a mandatory part of the Swedish media curriculum. We looked into practical training, which we qualify as the crossroads between school and working life, from a student?s perspective. We chose to approach the problem theoretically via hermeneutics and we used the case study method for our field research. The foundation of our pre-understanding of the media curriculum?s practical training period lays on previously published research, the study of specialist literature, own experience gained during practical training and teaching experience at high-schools as well as a pre-study we carried out.

The following essay describes a study made in Sweden in the autumn of 2010 at Södertörn University. The main purpose with this study is to find out and describe how people´s own understanding of being multilingual has influenced them. The objective behind this is to create a wider understanding for the phenomena. Therefore, the phenomenological perspective is used to describe the subjective reflection of a phenomena, in this case multilingualism. A qualitative method is being used for data gathering, implying conversational interviews with six multilingual people born in the 1970s and 1980s.The results show that the people interviewed mostly use their mother tongue in conversations with their parents and relatives today.

This thesis is an investigation of Iranian immigrants and their use of libraries in Sweden. It isbased on a combination of a qualitative and a·quantitative method.Using a qualitative method, I give an outline of the history of lran from ancient times up to the present, as well as the different ethnological groups in Iran and their cultures. The main objective of this part is to clarify the contrasts between Iranian and Swedish cultural, social, linguistic and family structures, and also the characteristics of the crisis that most immigrants go through on their arrival in the new country. The qualitative method also involves structured telephone interviews with eight highly educated Iranians.This method was supplemented by a quantitative study through questionnaires of the attitudes· of lranian immigrants to libraries and reading. Iranians in Sweden turned out to be frequent Iibrary users.

Because of among other things the globalization and a focus on core competencies knowledge has become very important for the companies of today, especially for research-intensive companies. The problem is that the companies become more sensitive to how knowledge is created and spread, that is, how organizational knowledge is created. Especially sensitive are companies who are small, young and research-intensive. The purpose with this thesis is to explore how organizational knowledge is created in small, young and research intensive companies.The theory is based on a five-phase model of organizational knowledge creation and four modes of knowledge conversion described by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995). These concepts constitute the foundation of the analytical model used in the thesis.The study is carried out by qualitative, highly structured interviews with low standardization.

This study investigates how the host community of Tenerife perceives the socio-cultural effects of tourism on the island. The method chosen for the study was qualitative interviews which were performed with six respondents, each born in Spain, living permanently in Tenerife and employed within service-related occupations. The interview material was interpreted and handled according to a hermeneutic approach. The results of the study showed that the respondents had an over-all positive perception of tourism. Perceived positive socio-cultural effects were related to cultural and linguistic influences.

The companies? managements acknowledge personal relations and trust, through good communication and predefined responsibilities and goals, as key factors to succeed in strategic alliance. These factors did not always exist according to the employees? involved. This research, in contrast, suggests that these factors are subordinate to the correlation between the company?s vision and the alliance objectives, hence level of priority, which indicates that management has hidden motives for entering the strategic alliance.

An ongoing discussion concerning the possibilities of universal classification based on phenomena rather than on research disciplines has been noticed. In order to discover if this was a limited discussion or the beginning of a major new field of research a study of citations was made using the database Web of Science. In addition, references of the works concerned were studied to find out where the ideas originated. The study of references shows that the ideas originate in a limited number of older published works, some of them well established in Information Science, some of them less generally known. The main ideas commonly used in Information Science are Ranganathan?s facet theories and the work of the Classification Research Group.

Librarians like to think that libraries contribute substantially to the progress of research. However, libraries still seem to have serious problems getting integrated in their parent organization on equal terms with other parts of that organization. The degree of integration of the library is thus the main topic of this thesis and the purpose is to examine how the interaction between librarians and scientists is formed and can be developed. That issue leads to concrete questions concerning what part librarians play in the scientists work and which factors influence the cooperation or lack of cooperation. We have chosen, for reasons of comparison, to make two case studies; one is a branch of a university library and the other is a library in a large pharmaceutical company.

Author Cocitation Analysis (ACA), multidimensional scaling (MDS) and Social Network Analysis (SNA), has been used to analyze and visualize the invisible college of the journal European Union Politics. The concept invisible college was first introduced in the fifteenth century, through the creation of the ?the Royal Society of London?, and it was reintroduced in the 1960:ies and the 1970:ies by scholars such as Price and Crane. It is said to have been interpreted in as many ways as there are authors who have used it. Here it has been used synonymously with the term citation network.

Sten Jonsson wants to start a production of an advertising catalogue for small companies in Sweden. Acatalogue where the advertisingcost is so low that most of the companies can afford to participate. Thecompanies who will advertise should be manufacturing companies in trades of carpentry, sheet metalworkshops, forging workshops and engineering workshops.The catalogue will facilitate for the manufacturer to reach the costumer without any middleman.Without a middleman creates a possibility for an opinion about the product at the same time as theprice can be held low. A catalogue of this type would benefit the marketing of the companies at the sametime as it would generate an occasion for innovations.The possible target groups are property companies, construct companies and farmers.A market research has been carried out contained a postal interview and a phone interview. Themarket research carried out to get an understanding in what the companies think about the idea butalso to see if the companies are in interest of advertise in the catalogue.

In this paper respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) was examined in relation to two kinds of threatening pictures, biological and nonbiological. Based on the results of prior research the hypothesis was claimed to note a difference between the two types of pictures regarding RSA and gender differences regarding cardiac activity due to the emotional stimulus. ECG and respiration were collected from 36 adults, 17 women and 19 men. There were no significant relationship between the different types of threatening pictorial stimuli, and no significant effects of gender were found. The results support some of the prior research on the topic but are in conflict with other.

Abstract  The purpose of this essay was to study understandings, determine the meening of a good learning environment in the school class, and how teachers and principal can contribute to it. On the basis of existing research that says: the common attitudes and standpoints between the school management and the teachers, is fundamental in case a good learning environment will occur in the classroom, the study has analyzed if the principal?s and the teacher?s attitudes in this study, are the same. The study is based on four main questions:  What is a good learning environment, according to teachers, principal and existing research?  How can teachers and principal contribute to a good learning environment, according to teachers, principal and existing research?  Do the teacher?s and principal?s attitudes concerning what defines a good learning environment, agree?   Do the teacher?s and principal?s attitudes concerning how teachers and principal can contribute to a good learning environment, agree?  To reply to the purpose of the study, five qualitative interviews were made. The interviews were done with five teachers and one principal, working in the same school. Research and litterature of interest, has been read, and these are presented in this essay. The study result shows that the existing research gives a wide definition of what a good learning environment is, and how a teacher and principal can contribute to it.

What is it that drives a person with criminal behavior to change their lifestyle? What are the obstacles to a lifestyle change? These issues have been guiding us during this study. In the introduction, we describe the previous research that has been done among crime in men. The themes that will follow us through the course of the study are as follows; cause of crime, Self-efficacy, social network and lifestyle change. The aim of the study was to investigate the factors that a former prison convicted individual believes has been significant, as they break their criminal behavior associated with a lifestyle change.

Self-archiving as a way to provide open access to research publications is gaining ground in the area of scholarly publishing. An increasing number of research funders and universities are mandating open access for output associated with their research, which calls for evaluation of the effects of the phenomenon.This two years master?s thesis aims to investigate researchers? experiences of self-archiving. A qualitative web survey was conducted and answered by 41 researchers from several different countries, and a vast majority of the respondents concur with the principle of open access. Although self-archiving shows not to be a guarantee of increased impact for the single researcher, the study shows that might be the case.

The token economy program, which is a method for behaviour modification, has been used worldwide for different groups within different settings in order to vhange behaviour.Research has found the token economy program to be effective. However, research is limited to quantitative and experimental studies, and Swedish research in this field is brief. Nevertheless, the program is used in several institutions n Sweden. A qualitative study in Swedish settings could therefore be useful. The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of a token economy program using qualitative interviews.