In this master thesis, I investigate four Public Librarys´ program activities. The purpose is to explore what the library program activities contribute to as a part of a well functioning democracy. The theoretical points, I have brought from political science. I assume three different ideals of democracy; electoral democracy, participation democracy and deliberative democracy. All have different views on what can be characterized by a well-functioning democracy.My empirical material consists of library program guides, the libraries´ target documents and interviews with staff at the libraries who work with or have overall responsibility for program activities in their respective libraries.

The purpose of this study was to examine and describe how politicians and directors of care define and experience quality in aged care facilities. Further on we wanted to compare on which fundamental principles the participants base their opinion about quality and how they work with quality. To reach our aim we conducted five interviews with politicians and directors of care. The results show that it is hard to determine quality in an unambiguous and objective way. Quality in aged care appears to be about relations and encounters amongst people.

The aim of this undergraduate thesis was to study the experience of participation in support groups for children of mentally ill parents. The research questions dealt with how the children and the adolescents talked about the knowledge, that they believed having assimilated in the support groups. The knowledge concerned mental illness and the possible impact on children when having mentally ill parents. The research questions also dealt with how the children and the adolescents talked about the meaning of being in a group. Qualitative semi structured interviews were used in order to capture the respondents? subjective experiences.

Title: Det bortglömda valet? ? En kvantitativ undersökning av mediernas bevakning kring Europaparlamentsvalet 2009Authors: Elin Kullander and Sara LundinSubject: The media coverage of the election of the European parliament 2009Term: Spring 2014Supervisor: Mats Ekström, JMG, Gothenburg UniversityPages/words: 44/11 065Purpose: The purpose has been to investigate how great the media coverage was on the European parliament elections in 2009 and then compare the result to previous elections. The discussion is based on media?s role as a multiplier in a democracy.Method: We have used a quantitative method and studied the media coverage in four Swedish newspapers 23 days before the Swedish election on 7th of June 2009.Results: We have come to the conclusion that media is in fact meeting its democratic role as a multiplier, in any case as long as we only take in conclusion the amount of articles that has been published. We have seen that the media coverage for the first time has increased both in number of articles and in how big the articles were.

In today's society social movement are dependent on media as a channel to com-municate their political message and their discourse. Media is an arena for dis-courses but at the same time, along with Attac, one of the actors who struggle to be part of the dominant discourse of the society. This struggle is uneven due to media and the relationship is to some content hegemonic.Attac Sweden was constituted in January 2001 and got an enormous amount of attention in media. But after the riots during the Göteborg European Council in June 2001, that Attac was partly blamed for, the attention in media has faded out. This paper shows that the images of Attac in media hasn?t been favouring the movement, especially during and after the meeting in Gothenburg.

The aim of the study was to examine how social workers investigate and assess addiction cases whether gender matters or not. The following questions were asked in the study; ? Does the gender of the client influence whether a case is opened after the first meeting at the Addiction Unit? ? Do social workers consider there is a difference in handling an addiction treatment investigation when the client is a man or a woman? ? Do divergences exist in the assessment and the final decision process when the case concerns a man or a woman? The study is based on the qualitative method. The material is gathered from semi-structured interviews with social workers. Their job tasks include assessment and evaluation of addiction cases.

This study examines the closure of public libraries, and the nonprofit organizations takeover of them as a phenomenon. The aim is to understand why the nonprofit takeover is common and what the takeover symbolizes and if the discourse in media invokes the views on libraries and the profession.Interviews were made with librarians, politicians and representatives of a nonprofit organization to study different sides of the phenomenon. Other empirical data were found in local and national newspapers and media-channels. I discovered that public libraries are highly valued by both politicians and the community. The study also showed that a library in a community makes people feel valued.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to survey what personal encounter at the library can signify, and to examine Swedish public libraries? policies for personal encounter. The posed questions are: What does personal encounter at the library signify? How are users and library staff represented in the collected policies? What do the policies say about digital encounter? 290 e-mail queries were sent to Swedish public libraries in May 2010. Of 140 responses, 107 stated that they did not have a written policy on personal encounter.

During the past decade, consumer health information-centers have been developed at the hospital libraries in Sweden in order to meet the increasing demand from patients and their relatives concerning consumer health information. In 1993, the hospital libraries in Falun, Västervik and Karlstad launched a consumer health information database called PION. The aim of this Master's thesis is two-fold. My first aim is to describe and discuss the principles of user-oriented evaluation. In my attempt to convey the theoretical discussion into the everyday life of librarianship, my second and most important aim is to conduct a user-oriented evaluation of the database PION.

Spatial design for children nine to twelve years old at the Halmstad City Library. An investigation about the specific needs of the target group and how the child department can be designed to stimulate their experience of visiting the library. The aim was to create a spatial concept from the children?s ideas that inspires to playfulness and lust to read at the library. A more personal goal was to collaborate with an external part to prepare for my future role as a designer within child culture.

The aim with this Master's thesis is to study the debate that takes place in the local community when a public library branch is threatened by closedown through the local newspapers. Through this it is our aim to understand why the debate takes place, and why so many people gets concerned with it. By relating this debate to contemporary research of library- and information science, and the discussion in three major Swedish library journals, we have found the answers to these questions. By studying the debate, we found six subjects that where essential for this study. These were Politics and economics, Urban and rural districts, Democracy and accessibility, The service of the library, The meeting place and To replace a closed down library.

The school can be seen as a place that reflects the wider community. Here is a school welfare officer an important representative of the school social work. The main subject of our study is to clarify how the school welfare officers? talk about documentation in the individual meeting with the pupil. Through individual interviews with five school welfare officers in elementary schools in three municipalities in the southern part ofSweden, we have attempted to explore these main research question.In addition to qualitative interviews we have accomplished a survey study that included 178 school welfare officers throughout the country.The result of our two studies demonstrates the school welfare officers? free work where the choice to document or not is wide.

This study aims to identify the municipalities of Hallands? methods, guidelines and policies in integration concerning new arrivals of children and teenagers. Some of the new arrivals are under the power of Swedish Migration Board and some of them are by a contract handed over to the municipalities. The evaluation is based on Michael Lipskys street-level bureaucracy which puts its focus on the lower level of bureaucrats meeting with clients. The frame is Skolverkets guideline for education of new arrivals which is more or less a way towards a common policy.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to examine the activity at the library and preschool at Kristineberg (a part of the town of Borås) and its underlying approach. How do the activities agree with the ideological attitudes of the 1970s? To answer these questions I have carried out a case study based on qualitative interviews. The theoretical background includes ideas of the library, the community center and the cultural activity at the library.

The Sand Catcher                                                       The thesis project The Sand Catcher investigates the encounter between permanent structures and an ever-changing landscape. The migrating sand dune Råbjerg Mile in northern Denmark is 40 meters high and moves more than 15 meters every year. By introducing a solid structure on the site, the fast movement of the sand dune is emphasised and thereby our view of time and space.Through intuitively building models with varied openings and densities I investigated how architectural elements react with sand. From these experiments a series of spatial features and effects were found, generated from the meeting with the sand.The Sand Catcher is a solid and permanent structure. The sand is the liquid element that generates new spaces, circulations and experiences.