This study aims to examine attitudes and conceptions of staff who work with mentally disabled persons, concerning normalization and gender. Six qualitative interviews with such professionals were performed and subsequently analyzed. Since the method of this study is qualitative, no claim of generalizability is made. The interview material has been categorized into themes by means of coding. The result of the study is presented according to those themes.

Swedish university libraries traditionally collect recreational readingmaterial only to support the teaching and research interests of theirinstitutions. However many university libraries hold a substantial yetunspecified collection of popular fiction. This thesis investigates theextent of these collections and examines academic librarians' viewsabout students' recreational reading in the academic context and theirattitudes towards the role of fiction and of readers' advisory inacademic libraries. The theoretical framework includes literature andresearch about the benefits of reading for pleasure, collections' rolesand readers' advisory strategies. The empirical material was gatheredthrough quantitative surveys sent to academic librarians in Sweden.The results show that academic librarians are positive about thebenefits of recreational reading for university students.

Preschool is an important social arena for children. This might be the first time that children find themselves in a larger social context and create their first peer-relations. The aim of this study was to examine children?s peer-relations with particular focus on the acts of social exclusion and inclusion, and how children use different strategies to exclude and include each other. Another aim was to investigate how both verbal and non-verbal communication is used in these processes.This study has an ethnographic approach, and the use of video observation as a method enabled us to capture the children?s everyday interactions at preschool.Our results show that children use a number of different strategies to exclude other children that seek access to an ongoing activity to protect the interactional space that they already share.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to study how the comics have been evaluated and debated in the Swedish library press from 1960 to 1999. Have they been seen as something good or something bad? What arguments have been put forward against them or in their defense? What kinds of development can be seen over time? The point of doing this, is of course that evaluation always plays a crucial part in library work. By studying how a "new" medium or art form has been evaluated in the past, we can hopefully gain a greater understanding of how today?s newcomers should best be treated.

A large number of genocides have taken place in our history. The purpose of this essay is to examine how genocide is treated in five high school history textbooks. I have studied a large number of issues. I have examined which genocides are discussed in the textbooks and which genocides the textbooks don?t discuss.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, is described in Swedish mass media. The research question of the paper is "How was president Hugo Chávez portrayed in Swedish newspapers in the 2004 Venezuelan referendum?". The answer of this question provides information about how the mass media form the image of current political events which is an important aspect of power. The applied method and theory in the study is the critical discourse analysis.

The research in this thesis attempts to understand what happens when children (3-6 years of age) interact with each other in the context of free play in two pre-school settings when adults are not involved. The aim of the study was to get a closer look at how children create relationships and how they protect and defend their interactional spaces. Data was gathered through ethnographically inspired methodology, using video observation to capture the everyday interactions of the children. Results were analyzed using a phenomenological approach to peer cultures. Previous research suggests that it is very important for children to maintain their interactions with peers and gaining access to play.

Climate change is a phenomenon that know no boundaries. While focus on environment and climate change has become highly prioritized, nationalism has spread across Europe. Nationalism is by many considered to refuse action to combat climate change although some argue that nationalism could combat global climate change. Previous research on how nationalism is implemented in environment and climate politics has mainly focused on single parties. The thesis therefore aims to give a broad approach and compare how nationalism is used in environment and climate politics by analyzing 4 European parties with either ethnic or civic nationalism and different roles in their party system. With a qualitative content analysis on party programs and election manifestos the findings imply that parties use nationalism in the climate and environment discourse in a variety of ways.

This bachelor thesis discusses firefighting and the use of portable fireextinguishers in the salvageof historic artefacts focusing on textiles. It also looks into the use of multi-purpose dry chemicalextinguishers in a textile context and the impact the actual dry-agent has on textiles afterfirefighting.Literature studies, interviews and tests on different textiles were carried out to write this thesis.During the tests textiles were exposed to the dry agent and also to dry agent plus water toinvestigate the difference in residue. After vacuumcleaning it was clear that when the textile wasexposed to dry agent and water it was almost impossible to remove the chemical without rinsingin water.By examining the residue left on the textile using SEM it was possible to see if a textile was aswell decontaminated after vacuum-cleaning as it looks to the eye. We know that the dry agentoften consists of ammonium phosphate which acts corrosively on many materials and one canassume it damages textiles as well after longer exposure.Buildings housing cultural collections are vulnerable as we cannot easily replace ruined materialwith new.

This thesis aims to analyse ontology, primarily as the word is used in the context of the Semantic Web. One of the main questions is how ontologies relate to classification and thesauri, two concepts well known within Library and Information Science. The vision of the Semantic Web, a more intelligent addition to the current World Wide Web, has raised the question of how to deal with information scattered over a multitude of locations, stored in different formats, written in different languages et cetera. This issue is in many ways similar to the classical problems encountered in library science: how to classify and categorise large amounts of information. The use of ontologies is one of the main steps leading to the Semantic Web, as well as a tool which can be used in other areas of information organisation and management.

This study aims to examine attitudes and conceptions of staff who work with mentally disabled persons, concerning normalization and gender. Six qualitative interviews with such professionals were performed and subsequently analyzed. Since the method of this study is qualitative, no claim of generalizability is made. The interview material has been categorized into themes by means of coding. The result of the study is presented according to those themes.

The objective of this qualitative study was to contribute to the understanding of how musical activities affect the participants' well-being and empowerment and to investigate which fac-tors contribute to that effect. Invitations were sent to 13 adult participants in a rock music school in the middle part of Sweden. 7 persons (4 men, 3 women) participated in the study. 4 themes were discussed in focus groups to highlight how informants were affected by the ac-tivity and what factors were important in the context. Results showed that music activities impact on participants' well-being and empowerment through several factors.Themes that appeared were: 1) focus on the present through music, 2) personal development, 3) meaningful leisure activity 4) the group properties.

The aim of this study is to examine how girls from the discussion group "Coolt med koll" understand the phenomenon honor-related violence. The study is based upon three issues; how do our informants understand honor-related violence, where do the interviewed obtain information concerning honor-related violence and how do it affect their point of view, last but not least what do the girls know regarding children?s rights. The theoretical points of this study are theories about honor-related living conditions and radical feminist theory. The study is carried out through six semi-structured qualitative interviews, which all are conducted separately.

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate the understanding of children's librari-ans regarding children's needs and preconditions in a library context and based on devel-opmental psychology and information seeking theories. The children's perspective is said to be the guiding star in the children's library and the thesis also aims to study the chil-dren's perspective as defined by children's librarians.The master thesis is a qualitative study based on interviews with children's librarians working at major public libraries. Observations of the children's libraries in the study have to some extent been performed.The study reveals that children's librarians are fairly knowledgeable about children but do not to a full extent use that knowledge into adapting the library to children and their needs. The children are not contributing to the adaptation of the library to any extent as there are few routines for that matter. In society in general children are on a regular basis represented by adults and their perspective on children and children's needs, which may differ from the perspective children have on their own lives, and the same is applicable for the children's library.

Title: Migration and Labor Market Integration ? the German Reunification Since the German reunification former East Germany has been struggling with rising unemployment numbers and extensive emigration. The East German Länder are still well behind the West German and even though Germany unquestionably is united politically the old border divides the economy ? and the labor market ? in two. This thesis aims to describe the reunification process of the East German and the West German labor markets, and in particular the role of migration in this process.