Sustainable design - a study on sustainable design and its incentives and barriersThe purpose of this study was to investigate the incentives and barriers existing within companies focusing on eco-design. The aim was also to examine the consumers? thoughts on eco-design and sustainable products. A further aim was to try to concretize important lessons for future work on sustainable production and consumption. Two methods were used for completing this study; a literature study and a practical study consisting of interviews with companies focusing on eco-design and a survey among students.

AbstractThere is a lot of confusion when it comes to defining Special Education. An example of this appears here by a statement from Assarson (2007) "Special Education initiates a special pedagogy, but contains no innate sense of what is the special component in it" (p. 52, authors? translation). This study is an attempt to clarify the elements of the concept.

The purpose of this study is to understand how parents to children with autism handle difficulties in their daily lives. Previous research defines autism and shows how it can affect families but it doesn?t show how families handle autism. We have done eight qualitative interviews with parents to children with autism. The result shows similar forms of difficulties in families which children with autism, even though the degree of difficulties varies.

In school, pupils learn to critically relate to sources of various texts. In the course of time they also learn how to make references and cite properly. Yet, alarming reports show increasing cheating and plagiarism in colleges and universities. Plagiarism prevention services are used today in Swedish high schools. We are questioning how this relates to the sociocultural perspective and curriculum view of imitation as a natural part of the learning process, communication and language.Material from depth interviews, with four teachers in the school subject Swedish about their theoretical and practical approach to students' writing process and writing development are used to deal with the issues of this thesis.

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.

This thesis is a discourse theory analysis of two feminist anthologies - Det heter feminism! and F- ordet.  By analyzing these texts through the three categories feminism & feminists, gender equality & equality and sex/gender & sexuality I have raised questions about the feminist debate in Sweden in the 21st century.The discourse theory?s ideas of descriptions of reality and fixation of meaning lies as a foundation for this thesis. The concepts of social constructionism, post structuralism and essentialism/anti essentialism are central for the analysis as well as concepts connected to the three previously mentioned categories.The intention of this thesis is to describe and analyze a fraction of the Swedish feminist debate in the 21st century and discuss its meaning in a societal context. A number of conclusions were reached in the final discussion.

Social work has gone from being a primarily philanthropic issue to becoming an academic discipline at university level. To ensure its legitimacy social work must be founded on, and developed through scientific research and documented experience. The purpose of this essay is to review the various arguments on social work in order to evaluate their impact on education, which in turn affects students. In addition, it will demonstrate how different forms of knowledge are valued depending on the contexts. As a means of reaching this objective, the following questions are addressed: ?What are the requirements and recommendations on how the education of social work should be structured, and why are these requirements and recommendations important??, ?How has the education of social work been influenced by the perception of valuable knowledge?? and ?How does the education of social work affect students?? The collected material consists of various arguments concerning the development of social work and the education of social work's formation.

This study aims to investigate how participants in a companys traineeprogram describe that the programmes educational tasks has prepared them for their future work. The study also examines how participants perceive that they have developed skills that are specifik to their profession and how they became part of a community. The following questions were formed to make it possible to investigate the purpose further; ?Do the participants feel that the interaction within the trainee group has promoted their learning??, ?How does the participants describe the training elements in relation to their development of competencies that they use in their professional role?? and ?How does the traineeprogram contribute to the participants becoming part of a community??. This was examined by taking part of what previous research has highlighted as important for learning and socialization in relation to traineeprograms.

Suicidology deals a lot with taking into consideration significant symptoms, risk factors and establishing causal relationships which inevitably are very important for suicide prevention. But do we understand the suicide attempters better thereby? The aim with the study is to elucidate the meaning of the lived suicidal experience that is expressed by participants on an Internet forum. Ten participants' texts which concerned own suicidality were chosen out from this Internet forum and were analyzed and interpreted on the basis of a phenomenological hermeneutical method inspired by Ricoeur (1976). The result established twelve themes that with the aid of Heidegger (1993) and Derrida (1978, 1991) led to that the following conclusions could be drawn about the meaning of the suicidal lifeworld: suicidal concern and care in itself reduces the sense of identity, practical suicidal doing in itself reduces the world, sense of identity is more affected by the future than the present and the past, the death is escaped from through a calculating determination to have the death at one's disposal, inability to turn away from the death increases oscillating between states of emotions, the surrounding world's requirement to avoiding death becomes to a compulsion to isolate one self; and finally: to both feel anxiety in front of one self's own death and dread when escaping from it..

This thesis is performed as a case study in Västerbotten Museum's textile storage space. The intention with this study is to investigate the relationships between the museum?s tasks: to collect, preserve and make the collections accessible. The aim is to reveal the problems that exist in museums today with increasing collections, less resources for the preservation of the collections and increasing requirements on accessibility. The aim is to deduce the problem by finding out how the different tasks relate to one another today.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the functions of the public library for parents of infants and how they see the ideal library. The research questions are: How do parents of infants use the library and what are their experience of it? What opinions and wishes do parents of infants have regarding the library? How can library services be developed to better match the needs of the parents of infants? The theoretical approach is based on Marianne Andersson and Dorte Skot-Hansen?s model of the public library?s functions and the model of classification by Ellen-Merete Duvold and Gunnar Sæbø. To answer my research questions I have carried out three focus-group interviews with parents of infants. The study revealed that the public library functions as a cultural centre, a social centre, a knowledge centre and, to a certain extent, an information centre for the parents.

The purpose with this essay is to find out the role of mythology in history in Swedish elementary schools to day. The questions I used to fulfill the purpose in my essay are these: How is the relationship between the school subject history and northern mythology, (what is myth, what is history) how does history and myth being linked together? And How is the practical use of northern mythology shaped in to days school, How does the teacher form the education in northern mythology and what controls it? The method I used was an interview, a case study and a literature study, based on the didactical questions how, why and what.The mythology is motivated by the guidelines and goals, set up by the Swedish government, and is supposed to give the student history knowledge and thereby help the student to build up their identity. It is also supposed to give knowledge about the Swedish and Nordic cultural heritage. The role the mythology has is to support the history education.According to the interview in this essay the northern mythology is given a central place in the education in the Swedish elementary school today.

The purpose of my essay is to highlight the various dilemmas that can occur in the preschool during the moments of guided reflection but also the opportunities it can provide. I am using my own practical experience from situations where care for the children can be questioned and needs to be considered in comparison to the further development of the preschool teachers and with them the entire organization. In my research, I have chosen to highlight the importance of guided reflection, the importance of reliable and secure relationships for children and how these can be eradicated, and finally the importance of ethics for the preschool-teacher?s actions in a given situation.Key questions in my text are; What role does the reflection have in the work at the preschool? How are children affected while this is happening? How important is close and secure relationships for young children and how can they be affected? How can one find a balance between care and learning?By writing my essay I reflect on myself and my own actions. This leads me to a greater selfawareness and greater understanding of my own feelings and my role in the dilemmas I face in my profession.The conclusion of my work is that the preschool organization is not given and it can be constructed in many different ways.

Today older people?s health and life quality are current topics of conversation in society. The number of old people is increasing and their health is deteriorating, that is why there is a need of new ways of meeting their necessities. In this study we have tried to illustrate heads of districts reasoning concerning pets? significance for old people in special housing.

Sammanfattning och förord Studien fokuserar på lärarstudenters syn på fritidspedagogens roll för fostran av barn på fritidshem. Den franske sociologen Bourdieu och hans tankar om socialisation är studiens huvudsakliga teoretiska perspektiv. Bourdieu talar om fält, kapital, praktiskt sinne och habitus. I min studie jämför jag Bourdiues tankar med några pedagoger såsom Dewey och Säljö vilkas arbete är mer sociokulturell inriktat. För att tydliggöra hur fostran av barn på fritidshem sker har jag intervjuat tio blivande lärarstudenter vilka studerar med inriktning mot fritidshemmets pedagogik.