Environmental chemicals are transported to the Arctic through the air and oceans, once within the Arctic they spread through rivers, lakes and other watercourses. Polar bears and sledge dogs in-gest high concentrations of environmental chemicals since many of the chemicals are fat-soluble and their diet mainly consists of marine mammals. The aim of this study is to describe how environmental chemicals spread in nature, how they reach the polar bears, and finally how they affect the animals reproduction, with reproductive hormones and genitals in focus. The animals are exposed to a cocktail effect which complicates the assessment of the chemicals impact on the reproduction. Studies show that the genitals can decrease in size or become malformed, sexual maturation can be affected and the reproductive hormones can be disturbed.

This study analyses social age as a phenomenon and if unaccompanied refugee children has a social age that, according to the Swedish culture, do not correspond with their biological age and if so is, the reason for that. Furthermore, our study has discussed the potential consequences of the effects for the unaccompanied refugee children and the social age when interacting with Swedish society. According to our study, the social age is effected by other factors besides cultural norms, values and role expectations that a society has on a specific biological age. The results in this study shows that social age is a vital component to someone?s identity.

Social phobia is a fear which limits a person's capabilities in daily situations. The fear can be so strong that a person can distance themselves from all social situations, for example education, marriage, sports activities etc. The purpose of this study is to discover whether there are any correlations between social fear and choice of educational program, between social fear and sex, and between social fear and Internet use. Questionnaires were administered to 80 upper secondary pupils. Each questionnaire answer was assigned a certain score, which was then coded in SPSS, the highest scores corresponding to highest degrees of shyness.

This paper examines the function of narrative discourse in television talk shows. Basing our analysis on five episodes of the Swedish talk show Skavlan, we illustrate how narratives are initiated and elaborated by the participants of the show. The analysis shows that the institutional roles are challanged and that the roles vary between the host ant the guests. The analysis also shows that when guests introduce and elaborate stories they use the same discursive actions and resources as the host. When participants enter an actvie role in their storytelling the hos takes a more restrained role in which he lets the the conversation evolve spontaneously.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how love relationship affects the identity and attitude towards school of study motivated girls in 17-18 years of age with the subsidiary purpose to get anidea of how the gender order is maintained in the relationship.The study is based on theories of gender theory and identity theory, which concerns gender as aresult of actions and how the gender order is maintained. The identity theory is based as a choice toconvey different roles.The study is founded on qualitative research interviews with six different girls, where the focus wasto learn about their own experiences of how the love relationship affects them.The results were interpreted through a hermeneutic analysis.The results show that the love relationship affect informants' identity on self-perception, what roles they convey and the attitude towards school. It turned out that the informants' attitude towards school was dependent on their boyfriend´s attitude towards school.The results also show that girls are highly involved in the process of maintaining the gender order in which they choose to manage their time according to their boyfriend's time, and has the role of the engaging and emotional in the relationship..

The purpose of our study is to get more knowledge about how moral dilemmas affect social workers in their work. This because we find that a big part of social work involves ethic reflections and that is why we find it important for social workers to have knowledge about how they should and can think and act in these situations. Ethic statements exist for social workers to use in their work but we haven?t found any guidelines for concrete situations and that?s why we decided to study this area. Questions we want to answer are how do the social workers define moral dilemmas in social work? How do the social workers deal with moral dilemmas in their work? How do moral dilemmas affect social workers in their work? This is a qualitative study with interviews from seven social workers from one social service office although they are from different units.

In Sweden the social assistance from a historical perspective, has been a part of the social legislation, since the 18th century. In that time called poor relief. Through the centuries this has established the social assistance we have today. With focus on the child, we have attempted to illustrate how the social workers consider the child perspective when they are dealing with the social assistance. We wanted to get a view of how the social worker reasons about needs the children have and how they can see that the benefit has been provided for.

This thesis deals with the information-seeking behaviour of occupational therapists. Focus was on three different aspects of information-seeking behaviour. The purpose was to investigate how occupational therapists conceive of work-related information needs, their choice and use of formal and informal information sources and their use of the hospital library. Twelve interviews with occupational therapists were conducted at a rehabilitation clinic in a hospital. The theoretical frame consists of a general model of the information-seeking of professionals by Leckie, Pettigrew and Sylvain.

This is a comparative study between traditional group work and cooperative learning among 9 graders at a Swedish high school. The classes did an assignment that involved translating and then both students and teachers answered a questionnaire. An example of how profitable cooperative learning is is the fact that the speech activity was more equal in the cooperative groups. All the students in the cooperative groups had to contribute to the assignment in order to fulfill the assignment. The reason for higher speech activity is the structure of cooperative learning, which involves roles suited for the assignment.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the portrayal of the Disney princesses have changed over time, we looked at eleven movies with a total of twelve different princesses. We wanted to see if there were any stereotypical roles of women in Disney movies and we wanted to see when the most obvious change occured in the portrayal of the princesses. This paper has used the method of qualitative content analysis using a semiotic and narrative analysis with the help of the actant model. We have selected different characteristics and categories that we looked for in the movies. These features and categories include various stereotypical roles of characters and what chores the princesses perform in their homes.

The main purpose of the thesis was to investigate if mothers of girls with Asperger syndrome/high-functioning autism experienced the same stressors regardless of society and culture or in which way the stressors might differ.A special purpose of the thesis was to investigate if the society by different types of support could relieve stress and eliminate or reduce stressors.The method of the thesis was to interview three mothers in Sweden and three in Spain, who all had a daughter, 10 - 15 years old, with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism.The result shows that mothers in both countries experienced equal level of stress, though the Swedish mothers got more support from the society. However, the stressors differed. For the Spanish mothers the main stressor was the girls´ problems at school. The main stressor for the Swedish mothers was how to find time to fulfil their different roles, e.g. mother, wife, housewife, professional, friend.

Purpose: Our aim is to get an insight on how home care workers experience, handle and looks upon their work. We also want to form an opinion of how home care workers experience the relationship to the clients they meet.Questions: How does home care workers experience their daily work with their clients? Home care workers daily meet many different sorts of clients with different needs, how do they handle this? What kind of support does home care workers get in their work?Method: A qualitative design with semistructured interviews.Conclusion: The most central conclusion from all of our interviews were: that home care service workers has a very stressful and demanding occupation, that the work has a low status, that the personnel has a big responsibility for the wellbeing of other people and that they often find their work satisfying and fun. To have someone to talk to and exchange ideas with was also mentioned by the informants as a vital part of feeling support in their work. From the Antonovskys theory, a sense of coherence, and Goffmans views of the society, we also find that the larger part of our informants feel a high sense of coherence and that when they have to adjust to their different caretakers they play different roles..

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to study how librarians experience reference work. We wanted to get a better understanding about librarians assignments through the study. We chose to limit the study to public libraries, and to the south of Sweden. The questions used in our study are: How do librarians interpret the conception of reference work? What values do librarians have concerning reference work? How do librarians experience reference work? How do librarians look at different roles in reference work? We chose to use a fenomenographically inspired method.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how six fantasynovels reflects or breaks the heteronormativity in society bylooking at how gender roles and sexuality are described.The theoretical framework is based on Judith Butler's theoryabout the heterosexual matrix which requires two separategenders and a compulsory heterosexuality and YvonneHirdman's two principles about dichotomy and hierarchy.The method used was idea analysis where dimensions basedon the theoretical framework were constructed. Thesedimensions were: behaviour, tasks, relationships and roles.The result shows that all of the books both breaks andreflects the society's values on gender and sexuality. Thereare some stereotypes present, for example that intuition isassociated with femininity and physical strength withmasculinity. However, the books also offer characters ofboth sexes that break the gender stereotypes, such asstrong women and emotional men.

Swedish healthcare has experienced increased economic pressure during the last decades and organizations have faced many changes. Managers and their roles in organizations have also been affected by the changes. Traditionally, managers in the healthcare sector are highly specialized doctors with a strong medical background. In the thesis, we study a big private healthcare company with an ambition to lead the development in the sector. In order to accomplish its goal, the company is trying to change the organization of managers.