Background: The growth of the venture capital industry has given birth to new relations between investors and entrepreneurial firms. Venture capital firms are by definition investors serving as an active partner which implies a deeper relation between investors and entrepreneurs than has been the case previously. This new situation leads to a number of questions. Do venture capitalists really act as active partners with a long term interest in the venture? Do they add any value besides capital? How important is their influence in the portfolio company's decision making process? Purpose: The purpose of this study is to give a deeper understanding of the relation between venture capital firms and IT companies in the start-up phase.

Simulation means running a model of a system with suitable input and observing the corresponding output. Real-time environment simulation is a special kind of simulation used to simulate a control system's environment in real-time. This is done to test the control system before it is used in its real environment. In this project, computer simulation of a certain kind of environments, called track-based systems, is studied and a general model for track-based systems is developed. In this model, track layouts are represented by graphs, which is a flexible and extensible representation and a method for visualizing these layouts is presented.

The purpose of this study was to examine what social workers include in the term "parenting ability". More specifically the purpose was to investigate how social workers view the parenting ability among parents with an intellectual disability. Furthermore the aim was to examine what difficulties social workers come across in their work with families where one of the parents are intellectually disabled. The study was based on six interviews with social workers that specifically work with children under the age of 18, and occasionally come across parents with this type of disability. The interviews were analysed using Donald Winnicott's terms "good-enough-parenting", "holding" and "the holding environment".

The purpose of this study is to investigate if the class teachers believe that their education has given them enough knowledge about dyslexia in order to succeed a successful education for these pupils. It will present what four class teachers and two special education teachers has answered what they know about dyslexia. The study aims to find out if class teachers believe that they have enough knowledge to determine whether a pupil has dyslexia. If they have knowledge of appropriate methods and if they know how to prevent that pupils fall behind in their literacy and also what factors they believes makes it problematic to implement a literacy for these pupils. I propose the following questions:Do the class teachers consider that their education has given them sufficient knowledge of dyslexia and its characteristics?What methods does the class teachers and special education teachers considers as useful for pupils with dyslexia?What does the class teachers consider can prevent that pupils with dyslexia fall behind in their reading and writing skills?What factors consider class teachers and special education teachers is problematic to to succeed a reading and writing education for pupils with dyslexia?This study is based on a qualitative method and my theoretical approach is based on Høien and Lundberg established view of what dyslexia is.

Title: Older people's experiences of exercise training: a survey based on a descriptive design.Course: Public Health: Theory and method of application and degree, 30 credits. University of Gävle, health education program.Author: Helena AnderssonPurpose: According to earlier research the western population is aging. This may affect, the older peoples`s physical disability in one form or another. The consequences may be that the need off care can increase. However elderly can prevent a variety of age-related diseases by being physically active.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate how academic librarians experience reference work aimed at international students. International students are a growing usergroup in Swedish academic libraries. The study?s main research question is:- How do academic librarians experience reference work aimed at international students?The study was performed with a phenomenographic methodological approach where seven qualitative interviews with academic librarians were conducted.

The aim with this thesis is to investigate teachers view on gender equality and what this may be due to. Teachers are supposed to follow the curriculum where it is written that gender equality should be encouraged. After interviewing teachers it has come to light that depending of the teacher?s personal interest and the school?s management of the question, there is a difference between how teachers are working with gender equality. That is why we want to know why gender equality should be encouraged and how teachers should reach the aim from the curriculum about gender equality.

Many times it can be the simple things that affect the attitude of work and which have an importance on the organization's effectiveness. These are not always apparent but can have a large importance for the motivation and the attitude of work. Large number of companies uses wage and other financial rewards system but is there any form of informal factors that have an importance for the coworkers and that affects motivation. What factors that affect the motivation within the industry are interesting to examine and specifically the factors that are not apparent, in other words informal factors that increases the motivation. The purpose of this thesis is to examine and describe which informal motivator factors co-workers/employees in a production department think are meaningful.

With an increased empowerment of the users, and a dependence on outside critics, one wonders what kind of role the librarians have in a context where qualitative literature is discussed. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between librarians private and professional views on qualitative fiction, in order to be able to discuss their role as quality intermediaries in a user oriented context.The method used, is the qualitative, semistructured interview. This author interviewed seven librarians from three different libraries in Sweden. The theoretical emphasis partly relies on the ten words of qualitative value that Inger Elam and Bengt Brülde discusses in their respective texts, partly on David Garvins quality assessment theory, which defines several quality categories divided between an absolute and a relative quality view.Through the comparison between the private and the professional quality view, examined with the two theoretical approaches, the analysis of the interview material shows that there lies a complexity in the librarians professional role. On the one hand, they are dependent of both the users and the critics judgements about the qualitative aspect in the work with purchasing new literature to the library.

The purpose of this study was to investigate youth?s experiences of what meaning the nonprofit youth project Husby Marathon had on their social capital and self-identity. In order to answer the purpose a qualitative methodology was used based on interviews with four of the participant youths. Two teories were used, Social capital by Robert D. Putnam and Selfidentity by Anthony Giddens.

The degree project aims to gain a deeper understanding of how pedagogues are working with pedagogical documentation, as well as the significance of reflection in the educational work with children.The survey was implemented on two Reggio Emilia-inspired preschools and is based on a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with open questions, where six pedagogues shared how they view the pedagogical documentation.The study is seen from an epistemological perspective. The results show that pedagogues place great emphasis on reflection as a tool for a visibility of children´s learning and development. Pedagogues respond to children´s questions with a question at issue to challenge the children to develop their own hypotheses for problem solving.Keywords, pedagogical documentation, reflection, learning process..

Millions of people are using search engines every day when they are trying to find information on the Internet. The purpose of this report is to find out how people formulate search queries. The result in this report is based on an empirical study which is based on a search log from the Swedish search engine Seek.se.One of the results in this thesis is that nearly all search queries are based on keywords..

 Purpose: The purpose with this study is to investigate how preschool teachers understand the concept the competent child and in what ways this understanding affects their role in children?s learning. Question at issue: What perspective on children do the contributing educationalists have? How do they define a competent child? Do such children exist and if so, are they always competent in all situations? What is the educationalists perspective on learning and knowledge? What is the preschool teacher?s view of their role as educationalists? What do they consider as their most important tasks?Method: To execute this study I have made a qualitative research based on interviews with eight teachers from four different preschools.Main theories: I have built the theoretical part of this study based on four different perspectives on the concept the competent child according to the philosophies of Dion Summer, Jesper Juul and Reggio Emalia. I also describe different theories about learning, knowledge and educationalists as well as the preschools role in the development of child according to different well-known scientists and researchers.Summarized conclusion: The study shows that the interviewed preschool teachers chose to interpret the concept the competent child in three ways.

According to science internal communication is a complicated, yet very important, issue of organizations today. An organization with a successful internal communication shows better results both economically and in terms of coworker satisfaction. The two main theories on communication are sensemaking and transmission. After a century with a transmissionary point of view, researchers stress the importance of sensemaking internal communication.Main question of this thesis is ?Which of the two main theories is the most useful when anchoring important messages in large organizations??According to the results of this study, conducted by interviews, neither one is more useful than the other.

This study investigates the individual usage of the Dublin Core metadata format in three Swedish Subject Based Information Gateways, SAFARI, Svenska miljönätet and Svesök. The authors also present the reader with an overview of the metadata concept and explains in particular the Dublin Core Element Set. The approach to the study is investigation of Dublin Core application from the viewpoint of three major issues, user friendliness, interoperability and quality control. The study includes an in-depth comparison of the three different metadata templates, as well as interviews with people in charge of the metadata production at the respective SBIGs and users of the respective SBIGs« templates. The study shows that the three SBIGs are more similar than they are different.