The focus of this thesis is on what is considered to be a suitable foster home. For the study to be carried out an application had to be made to get access to the foster home assessments in a medium-sized municipality in Sweden. With the support of attachment theory and theory of standards different categories have been picked out and analyzed in foster home assessements that have been approved. The conclusion to what is considered to be a suitable foster home is a complex issue, as there are many factors that are interacting. Social workers seem to focus on the importance of a family?s ability to provide some kind of stability and security for a child who is considered to be placed within their home.

The aim of this thesis is to develop two idealtypes of politics to help serve as instruments in understanding and analysing the view on politics held by top civil servants in the municipality of Lund Sweden. The two ideal types developed here are symbolic sense making politics and rational instrumental politics. These two ideal types were applied to material from a qualitative survey to help bring out clear results and to help with the interpretation of the material The results of the study showed that the two idealtypes could not help to clearly categorize the civil servants views on management by objectives. But while categorizing the top civil servants views the important features of policy documents the ideal types were helpful. By using the ideal types I came to the conclusion that the view on policy documents was mainly characterized by sense making politics.

Religious congregations and social work have long been a neglected field of research. Although the number of studies have increased during the last twenty years. With a starting point in the situation in this field of research and in the current public debate in Sweden the focus of this study will be on how Christian and Muslim congregations view cooperating with the municipalities, organizations, the religious community to whom which the congregation belongs and how the congregations view cooperating with other religious communities. Qualitative method of research was used. Representatives of four religious congregations was interviewed; a deacon in a congregation in the Swedish Lutheran Church, a pastor in a congregation belonging to the Mission Covenent Church of Sweden, the chairman in a the board of a Muslim congregation and volunteerleader in another Muslim congregation.

Chlamydia is a sexually transmitted infection. The infection rates have increased in the last decade. During 2008 the trend rates declined in all counties and regions in Sweden. Chlamydia infections have a geographical spatial pattern differences. This is seen from the national surveillance data report from the Swedish Institute for infectious disease control (SMI).

The purpose of this study is to contribute to our knowledge about what methods? teachers say they use in the work with pupils? early reading acquisition, and how they evaluate the pupils´ reading development. I also like to find out what educational interventions teachers believe that pupils with reading difficulties need, and how they say they work to meet the needs of these pupils. The project is based on the following questions: What methods do teachers say they use in the work with pupils early reading acquisition? What extra resources do teachers consider that pupils with reading difficulties need? How do teachers evaluate children's reading development? In order to answer my questions, I've done qualitative interviews with three teachers, at two schools, in two medium-sized municipalities.

Ensåsengruvan is a mine situated within Ljusdals municipality in central Sweden. Themine was in use from 1984 to 1991 and has since been undergoing a remediation program. Mine tailings from sulfide rich ore is a potential environmental hazard due to its tendency to cause acid waters and heavy metal leakage. Lake Ensjön is situated one kilometer from the mine area. Due to the hydrological conditions it was not expected to receive inflowing water from the mining area.

This master thesis explores the nature of public participation as a central and most current subject in the field of urban planning. A first impression exposes a seemingly unanalyzed consensus on the values and benefits which public participation provides the process of urban planning. The city may be a concern to all its inhabitants; hence knowledge and opinions of the local public are of great importance for the urban development. But is there really something new to these assumptions, and are the advantages of increased public participation in urban planning always obvious?  By using action research as a main method, I have put myself into the context of the Swedish municipality of Nacka and their projects dealing with the development of public participation.

Using interviews conducted within the municipality of Nam Dich, Vietnam, this qualitative study explores how ethnic minority parents and children navigate around the state's supervision in order to preserve their traditional practices of child marriages. Moreover, the research explores the roles and expectations between individuals within an ethnic minority family as a collective unit. Using governmentality supported by the concept of state evasion, culture bearers and empowerment, I argue that understanding child marriage as a phenomenon requires analysis of cultural context. The paper starts with an introduction of the ongoing relation between the Vietnamese state and ethnic minority traditions related to child marriage. While the Vietnamese state ?s modernization projects aim to empower individuals by creating more freedom within the process of marriage and increasing the opportunity for education and work, certain ethnic minority groups want to uphold their cultural ways of marriage when parental arrangement occurs from an early age.

Purpose of this thesis is to study the impact of wind turbines on their surroundings. It also aims to analyze how the communication looks between the authorities, the planner and local residents prior to the establishment of wind turbines in Lännäs/Odensbacken in Örebro, where three wind turbines set up in a group.The results of this survey show that the participants experience themselves not as especially disturbed of the turbines in the form of large noise, shadows, and sleep disturbance indoors and outdoors. Participants felt that no change had taken place on the natural environment (52%) since the turbines became operational. It was 49% of participants had got no information about the establishment of Örebro Municipality, Örebro County Administrative Board or Wind Power Company. Scientists/­experts had the highest confidence of 86%, politicians and the media/journalists had least confidence.

Kalmar Municipality has in 2008-2010 made an effort to educate managers on gender, with the goal of mainstreaming gender into public activities so that all citizens should feel safe in that treatment and services are designed and resources are distributed equally to both sexes living conditions and needs. The overall aim of this study was to examine whether the training effort has paid off, and how gender mainstreaming has been implemented in the different activities. We have used a qualitative approach, which we examined through interviews managers' approach to gender equality.Gender was generally described as an important issue of all respondents, and all were working to mainstream gender into their activities and workplaces. The results show that the operational and management needed clearer directives and strategies in their efforts to promote gender equality. Education was necessary because personal definition of gender may differ from the control contents of the documents.

The main purpose of this Master thesis is to illuminate the understanding of local politicians regarding the public libraries and the librarians. We argue that the local politicians´ opinions regarding public libraries and librarians influence the way they act and react in their roles as politicians.In order to achieve the aim of this thesis we focused on following questions:What are the opinions of the politicians:- regarding themselves in relation to the public library?- concerning public libraries in general and its functions especially in the municipalities of their own?- concerning the librarians and their work in a public function?What are the conclusions to be drawn regarding the politicians´ interest and commitment to public libraries in the politic daily-life of the municipalities? Our empiric material consists of qualitative interviews with six politicians elected in two municipalities in the interior of Västerbotten, a northern sparsely populated district. In order to distinguish the various opinions that emerge from the material, we apply a phenomenographic approach. The analysis result we present in three conceivable categories in order to express the different opinions.In general our study points at a positive and favourable attitude to the public library, and all the respondents assume that the municipality ought to offer this service.

With this study, our purpose has been to achieve profounded knowledge and understanding regarding the use of discretion among social workers specialized in social allowance issues. The Social Services Act, structured as a framework law in the Swedish context, provides the social worker with a certain degree of discretion, in order to enable accommodated decisions depending on client case specifics. This study problematizes these aspects of legal security, and our intention has been to examine which factors impact the assessments social workers carry out in statutory decisions of social allowance applications. To attain this, we narrowed down our intention into a number of distinct and delimitated research questions: (1) Which elements of the client case impact the social worker?s assessment? (2) Which external aspects influence the social worker?s assessments and decisions? (3) How do social workers decide the client?s credibility? In order to establish answers to our research questions, we have utilized a qualitative approach of research by exerting qualitative interviews in addition to a vignette study.

The main purpose of this thesis is to analyze why or why not Swedish municipalities implement the gender equality policy ? ?right to work fulltime?. In order to understand this institutional change, the analysis is based on a theoretical framework consisting of two fields: political representation and feminist institutionalism. The study is divided into two empirical inquiries. The first part is based on a quantitative survey that describes the casual relationship between two independent variables; women´s political representation and party ideology, and the dependent variable; political decision about ?right to work fulltime?.

`When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has´: `I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras....You´ve no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it´s incredible how one grows. ´ The aim of this master thesis is to find words and expressions that can accompany city phenomenas as well as the people wandering through the space which is defiened as city. Through this tentative search a new term was found namely Urban Settler Marks. This term started a journey and an attempt to theoretisize why people have a need for various spaces to put their Urban Settlers Marks onto. My focus was drawn to electrical boxes in the urban environment because of their ambigious nature.

This thesis has been made on behalf of Forsmarks Kraftgrupp AB and is the final part of the education of Bachelor of Engineering in ? Innovation, production and logistics atMälardalens Högskola.Forsmark nuclear power plant is located in Östhammars municipality at the coast of Uppland. The three nuclear reactors in Forsmark together produces approximately one-sixth of Sweden?s electricity consumption each year.The background of this study is that a large number of requests come to the purchasing department with incomplete information. Usually it is in the description of what is to be acquired as the information is incomplete, but also in knowing when Quality Control-functions (QC) is supposed to be used.The aim of this work is to describe and analyse the material acquisition process.