The purpose of this study was to gain deeper knowledge about the special needs of guidance significance as an aid to students based on teachers' views and perceptions.Eight teachers from three different Municipalities, active in primary school and middle school have been interviewed since all have participated in and have experience with special needs tutoring. Their responses were compiled and answered the three research questions: What experiences have teachers of special education counseling? How do teachers the guidance they received from a special teacher? What effect has the special educational guidance given for the inclusive education? The result shows that the special educational tutorial helps teachers gain a deeper understanding of students in need of special support and guidance to the mission vary in scope and content. The special educational tutorial that is aimed directly at the teachers seem to have a positive effect on inclusion and a critical/dilemma perspective while the consultative guidance primarily directed towards the adaptation of educational material and allows students to walk out of the classroom to receive special education promotes exclusion and ability grouping and a compensatory perspectives. From a sociocultural perspective pointing results of the study that teachers with special education tutoring experience to students in an inclusive education contribute to each other's learning,creating meaningful for everyone involved..

The purpose of this essay is to examine the concept of competence within the social services. More specifically it aims to find out how the social workers themselves look upon their own competence in social investigations concerning children. As the study was based on focus groups the main questions were vague at the beginning and were cleared later on during the group sessions.In three focus group interviews in three different Municipalities in southern Sweden 11 social workers were asked to discuss this issue. The interviews were then thoroughly transcribed. In the data I identified 9 themes seeming to play a special roll in the discussions about competence: practice; experience; approach; intuition; responsibility; theories, methods and laws; reflection; resources and ethics; specialisation versus integration.The analysis made on these themes was based on two different kinds of perspective; one focusing knowing-in-action and the other focusing the organization framing the competence considered.As a conclusion the 7 first themes can be seen as a definition of the competence used in social investigations concerning children.

Den globala medelhavsniv?n stiger och ?r ett o?terkalleligt fenomen som kommer forts?tta att stiga flera tusen ?r fram?ver. Studien syftar till att f?rst? hur kustkommunerna, Malm? och Trelleborg, resonerar kring strategier och anpassnings?tg?rder f?r att hantera utmaningar med havsniv?h?jningar, s?v?l som med r?dande styrning och ansvarsf?rdelningen. Studien unders?ker ?ven kommunernas syn p? havet och valet av tidsperspektiv i planeringen.? Resultatet fr?n studien visar p? ett behov av ett l?ngre tidsperspektiv, bortom 100 ?r f?r att m?ta utmaningarna med havsniv?h?jningar.

Due to deficiency in dementia care, the government has commissioned the National Board of Health and Welfare to develop national guidelines for health care services to people with dementia and support for their relatives. It has been allocated stimulus funds that may be applied for to work on improvements in dementia care. In August 2010 these guidelines formed the basis for a decision made that collaboration would take place between the county and the Municipalities regarding dementia care in Halland, named Anna's path. The aim of this study is to investigate, analyse and describe how our respondents in the project Anna?s path are planning and preparing for the implementation of the registry of quality BPSD - Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia.

The aim of this study was to reach a deeper understanding of the process that occurs within the social services after receiving a notification according to Chapter 14, section 1, The Social Services Act. More specifically the focus of this study was to illustrate how social secretaries reason about children?s participation in the process, as well as to examine whether the legislative change, Chapter 11, section 1 a, The Social Services Act, has affected the process in any way. The study?s results reflect interviews with five social secretaries who are active in four different Municipalities in southern Sweden.

The purpose of this thesis is to look into the knowledge city concept and the preferences and requirements of companies on such a city. Furthermore, suggestions of ideal conditions in a knowledge city are proposed. The thesis has been conducted through a qualitative approach where a deductive procedure has been implemented. In order to examine knowledge cities, Barcelona has sketchily been looked at as an early example of a knowledge city, whereas a more exhaustive observation of Copenhagen was conducted. Since the concept of knowledge cities is a rather new phenomenon, models from several disciplines constitute the theoretical framework.

Young councillors are currently under-represented in Sweden's Municipalities. Young councillors are also stepping down in greater numbers than older members. This paper explores the reasons why young councillors choose to resign from their mission, so to identify possible remedies to the problematic trend of underrepresentation of younger people in local authorities in Sweden.This qualitative essay intends, through interviewing politically-active young people who has left their assignment, to study the reasons for resignations from elected posts. To see what could be the reason I have looked at previous studies and theories about opting out but also tried to remain open to identifying new and emerging trends previously undetected in existing surveys.The results showed that the political assignment proved to be too time-consuming, with young people choosing to spend their time on career and leisure. Those who resign from political life often express criticism towards the Municipal Council; they consider it tedious and many complain of having little influence.

This dissertation discusses head librarians in Swedish public libraries and the stress factors which affect them. The aim is to map out potential stress factors which head librarians come across in their day-to-day work. The purpose of the dissertation is to answer the following question: what stress factors affect library managers in Swedish public libraries? The dissertation was conducted through a literature study, informal interviews and a quantitative questionnaire. The results of the quantitative questionnaires show that the factor that produces the highest level of stress is having too many different tasks.

The aim of this study was to investigate how school counselors experienced collaboration with social services and whether they felt they have the ability to improve upon this collaboration. The empirical data consists of qualitative interviews with eight school counselors from public schools, ages 13 to 15, in eight separate Municipalities in the Stockholm area. The main results showed that the school counselors recognized the positive benefits from collaboration, but that they in practice experienced difficulties turning this into a high-quality collaboration. The school counselors experienced that due to uncertain expectations in the collaboration it led to unclear distribution of areas of responsibilities. The school counselors expressed small or no possibilities for them to improve upon collaboration but pointed out that higher commitment and a positive attitude are valuable attributes to improving collaboration.

The aim of this study was to investigate and analyze what is required for the environmental quality objective Good built environment to be fulfilled by 2020 in the Swedish county Jämtland. The focus of the study was to gain an understanding of the work that the local government does and further investigate the problems that the officials face with implement these questions in themunicipal planning.The study is based on semi structured interviews with officials in the Municipalities of Jämtland county. General plan and programs for the municipality have been reviewed, based on how the plans highlights these issues linked to sustainability and Good built environment.The results of the study show that there are major problems with the formulations of the environmental quality goal in itself and its specifications. The environmental quality goal is formulated to suit the entire Sweden. But as it turns out in the analysis it does not work on the basis of the conditions inJämtland with sparsely populated areas and scattered dwellings.

The aim of this study was to examine what knowledge social workers express about home visits in child welfare investigations and how they know what to do. Sixteen social workers who work with social investigations concerning children were asked to discuss the topic home visit in three focus group interviews in three different Municipalities in southern Sweden. The social workers in our focus group interviews mainly discussed the purpose of the home visit, what social workers do during home visits and furthermore their opinions about guidelines and policy documents regarding the home visit.  To get an understanding of what type of knowledge is the basis for social workers use of the home visit, we used Polanyi's concept of 'tacit knowing' as well as the Aristotelian theory of knowledge containing three forms of knowledge, that is, episteme, techne and fronesis. We found that the displaying of ?tacit knowing? was a consistent feature in all groups, as they had difficulty expressing their knowledge use.

In the beginning of 2009 The County Administrative Boards assumed the responsibility of animal welfare, a task previously performed by the individual Municipalities. This transfer was made with the aim of achieving more efficient and equivalent animal welfare controls across the country. Previous studies among animal owners have shown a somewhat negative image of animal welfare controls. This study focuses on investigating the experiences of the horse keepers in the County of Halland concerning animal welfare. The study is based on a questionnaire which was sent to 423 horse keepers in Halland, of which 130 were returned with information that laid the foundation of this study.

The aim of this study was to research how social-work professionals apprehend, manage and influence difficult conversation.  This study is based on a qualitative method and we did qualitative interviews with eleven social-work professionals in three Municipalities located in southern Sweden. In addition to our research on difficult conversation we decided to study easy conversation. Our result show that there isn?t any special subjects that creates difficult conversation, but it is the absent of conversation that makes it difficult.

A systematic quality work is essential for anyone working in preschool, school,kindergarten and adult education to give children and students an equal education.Skollagen (2010:800) indicates that quality work should be focused on the nationalgoals of education. According to Skolverkets allmänna råd med kommentarer omsystematiskt kvalitetsarbete - för skolväsendet (2012) is the work to develop quality acontinuous process. Everyone's involvement and participation is therefore essential.Systematic quality work means to systematically and continuously monitor theactivities, analyze performance against national targets and based on that plan anddevelop. Although the work has been driven outside governmental policy documentssince 1997 shows, among others, Skolinspektionens audits of Municipalities andschools that there is major deficiencies in the obligation to conduct a systematicquality work. It appears that more than half of the surveyed schools had deficienciesin its system quality work.This is the starting position this study takes on to and through literature review,document studies and interviews of principals is the subject problematized.

The aim of this study was to examine care managers and how they understand and use their discretion. We used a qualitative method and the data was gathered by semi-structured interviews. We interviewed eight care managers in four different Municipalities in southern Sweden. The theoretical approach we used was Michael Lipsky?s theory about street-level bureaucracy.