Products and services have for a long time competed with their brands. For some time now, cities have begun to compete with each other to attract visitors and other stakeholders to come to their town. It is important that the citizens feel as they are a part of the message that the city sends out in its communication.Cities are today working actively with their brands, much like regular companies, in order to create the profile and image in order to be competitive against other cities and places. Cities and places are part of a dynamic process which includes both positive and negative events. These events might have an impact on the brands, and therefore it is a necessity to be able to react on these events to make the most of positive things and deal with the negative in a way that minimizes the effects on the brand.Citybranding as a research field is quite new.

This thesis sets out to investigate three questions, first, how the Belarusian democratization process has progressed since the country?s independence in 1991 to the year of 2006. Second, how the relationship between Russia and Belarus has progressed during this time and third, if and how Russia has affected the democratization process. The study has been conducted through qualitative method, mainly using books and articles as sources of information. It has been found that the democratization process in Belarus has evolved in a negative direction ever since the presidential election of 1994.

The Dark Side of the Word-of-Mouse Effect- An experimental study of how negative information in today?s social media can influence consumer perception As a result of the electronic revolution of information dissemination, social media as a phenomenon has come to play an important part, both in society at large but also when it comes to business and marketing. Nowadays, knowledge and opinions about brands and products are spread by reputation through a wide range of social media platforms, a phenomenon which in the literature is referred to as word-of-mouse or electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM).The purpose of this paper is to investigate how people?s opinions towards a company and its product are affected by negative information in terms of eWOM. Or more precisely, whether or not there is a difference in this effect depending on information content, concerning company values on the one hand and product attributes on the other.This was done in an experimental setting where two groups of respondents were subjected to fictitious information of different types using established social media platforms.

The aim of the study was to examine the retinal ON- and OFF-pathways of the canine electroretinogram (ERG). The ON- and OFF-pathways are used to distinguish objects from their backgrounds. A dark object is discernible from a lighter background using the OFFpathway and the ON-pathway is used to descry a light object upon a darker background. This study shows that the dog ERG has both ON- and OFF-responses and that these responses can be separated by prolonging the flash duration over 50 ms. The dog OFF-response waveform was more similar to the cat OFF-response than the human OFF-response (Frishman, 2006; Zrenner and Gouras, 1979). In this study six female three-year-old Beagle dogs were included. Both background and flash stimuli were provided by LEDs (light emitting diodes) with a wavelength of 470 nm, a wavelength that is absorbed almost as effectively by the canine M/L-cones as by the S-cones. These stimuli gave ERGs with both ON- and OFF-responses.

Objective: 1.4 million people in Sweden state that they are having problems with hearing and the majority havehad no contact with the hearing rehabilitation services. To have a hearing loss seems to be associated withseveral negative attributes. This could be due to bad attitude and insufficient knowledge on hearing loss intoday?s society.Purpose: The purpose with this study was to map the adult populations attitude towards hearing loss and selfratedknowledge of hearing with a survey.Methods: A web survey was made for this study. An official link to the survey was shared from two Facebookaccounts to a total of 997 contacts and a total of 247 responses were collected.Results: The majority of the respondents have estimated their general knowledge of hearing to fairly extensivefollowed by very small.

The working alliance between therapist and client has been proven important for the treatment outcome in psychotherapy, as well as the therapist?s characteristics. The aim of the current study was to examine the experience of important characteristics when forming a working alliance, among psychotherapy trainees. Eight psychotherapy trainees at Umeå University were interviewed and the material was analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Characteristics described as positively impacting the working alliance were interested, empathic, warm, genuine, secure, flexible and accepting.

This study describes how the women lived with breast cancer. The purpose with this study was to describe the womens' view on the disease and the understanding they hade on the social support they were depended on. The method was a study of literature with article reviews according to Polit et al., 2001. As theoretical frame of reference we choose Carnevalis model, Everyday life -Functional state of health. The result showed that the following four groups were formed: Support, positive and negative support off nursing staff and significant others.

Sweden became a member of the European Union in 1995. Consequently Sweden became obligated to implement the Working Time Directive 2003/88/EC (formerly termed 93/104/EC). At that time Sweden considered that their legislation already gave their employees as high level of protection as the directive prescribed. Instead they decided upon an adjustment of the collective agreements concerning working time. A particular EC-restriction was incorporated in the Working Hours Act (SFS 1982:673).

The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of being a homosexual immigrant in the Swedish society. Our questions were how the interviewed homosexual immigrants experience being treated by the people in their surroundings and how they are influenced by their attitudes. We also wanted to know what kind of thoughts they have about affiliation considering origin and sexuality, and what positive and negative aspects they experience from the combination of being both homosexual and immigrants.To get the answers to these questions we used a qualitative method and interviewed seven homosexual immigrants between the ages of 25 and 40 years. We then compared our material with earlier studies of the living situation of homosexual immigrants in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. We also linked our findings to Goffman's stigma theory and to heteronormativity.The main result was that the combination of homosexuality and immigrantness can result in various difficulties.

ABSTRACTThe aim of the study was to survey attitudes towards animals among veterinary students, and to assess how the Swedish veterinary education affected students' perspectives on animals. Students in the first and second years of the study programme were asked to answer the question "What is an animal?" as they saw fit, and the answers were analysed using a qualitative-to-quantitave analysis method called the Elementary Model, which had been developed for the purpose. Results showed a significant decrease in "zoo-perspectives", i.e. views and descriptions of animals as beings with cognitive and motor functions, and a significant increase in "homo-perspectives", i.e.

Background: Patients with cancer of the lung have to endure a quantity of physical, psychological and social difficulties. In their exposed position they are in need of help and support to pull through the situation. With the knowledge of factors effecting lung cancer patients? quality of life, it will be easier to give the help and support they need. Aim: The aim of this study was to describe factors effecting lung cancer patients quality of life from the patient?s perspective.

Media has a big actuating power over the public opinion. The image of reality that media choose to reproduce will affect the recipient view of reality. The case about Thomas Quick and its associated news coverage has been used as an example to illustrate the problematization regarding media imag-es and media framing attempt. The purpose of this essay was to illuminate how daily and evening newspapers works with various framing methods.The theoretical framework for this essay will discuss the media framing theory and its ramification attribute framing theory. This laid the foundation for the research question.

The purpose with this study is to examine how the twelve-step program is described by the author J Keith Miller (2004) in his book Steg in i livet and by the author Olle Carlsson (2012) in his book 12steg för hopplösa. The aim for the study is to highlight the twelve steps usage on people without addiction problems. In the study, the two author?s thoughts and experience of the twelve-step program is analysed and interpreted by Pargaments (1997) theory of religious coping. The research questions in this study are: 1.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between the Big Five personality traits Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism and the five conflict styles developed by Thomas-Kilmann: Accommodating, Avoiding, Compromising, Collaborating and Competing. The participants consisted of 128 students of the Linnaeus University in Växjö. A questionnaire consisting of two parts were used for this study: Part one consist of a personality-test developed from Lewis R. Goldberg?s Big-five scale, and part two where the participant is asked to fill out Thomas-Kilmanns conflict style test.

It is important for every store to have a good financial performance which can be affected by the average purchase and the number of customers in the store. Customers shopping experience can affect both of these factors and therefore it is important for retailers to know about how an in-store environment can affect this experience. The purpose of this study is to give retailers an indication of the importance of consumers' shopping experience and how this may affect the store's financial performance. To study this subject an in-store survey was conducted in four grocery stores in Stockholm where a total of 320 consumers answered a total of 41 questions about their shopping experience. By sales data it was possible to conduct a statistical analysis to see which variables regarding consumers shopping experience influenced the average purchase.