Our common future involves many important challenges. People and nature need to improve the relationship in order to reach an ecologically sustainable development. In a society where consumption of products steadily increases, the consumer awareness about social and environmental issues connected to the products becomes an importent factor. More and more companies choose to work more actively with these issues and more and more products get labelled by some of the eco labelling organisations. From the cradle to the gate means that a study has been done on a part of a products life cycle.

We want in this paper, by using participant observation and qualitative interviews, comecloser to an understanding of what meaning a language café might have for the peoplewho go there. Many of the visitors are people who recently moved to Sweden and are inthe middle of a process of learning Swedish. We want to get a further insight into howthey feel about their situation and what the social encounters on the language café mightmean to them. The purpose is to examine how this can have significance for the identitydevelopment of the visitors.The result shows that the language café is an important place for the visitors because itis the only place they can go to in order to practice speaking Swedish, which isimportant for them to find their place in Sweden. The language café also fulfils animportant function of a place where the visitors can receive an understanding of theSwedish society and reflect about it, but also a place for self-reflection to see theopportunities in the situations they find themselves in.

In my degree project I have chosen to write about the social interactions in children?s play. Iwanted to study their free play and the time when their teachers tell them what to play to seewhat their social interactions look like. The purpose with my research is to study whathappens in the social interactions in their different playing situations.I performed three observations of the free play and three observations of the guided play at apreschool to study what social interactions that takes place in the different playing situations.What happens and what patterns can I find in their play.In my research I had some questions that this project rests upon:What happens in the social interactions in the different playing situations?How do the children?s different social interactions look?The children that I have observed showed me that when they are interacting they especiallyuse their cognitive abilities, because an interaction needs a certain mental development.

Practical and theoretical learning are methods that are used in schools as a way to prepare students for the working life. Within the practical learning knowledge is not only acquired to learn in practice, but the students must also be able to apply their theoretical knowledge to what he/she does. Against this background, the aim of the study was to investigate the importance of practical learning for students in college / university level and how they are experiencing the stress that may arise out of the loss of practical learning during their education, as well as their vision for working life after completing their education. The population of the study consisted of N = 36, which 18 of these had used both practical and theoretical learning and the remainder had only used theoretical learning. The method was a questionnaire survey with a high proportion of fixed alternative answers according to likert scales.

This paper aims to describe how religion teachers in Swedish schools teach concerning questions about life issues and popular culture. To research the teachers' didactic approach to these issues, didactics has been defined with three educational questions: what, how and why. The essay focuses on teachers' effective implementation of teaching on life issues and popular culture, which we used a theory of offering meaningfulness describing what subject matter that may be imparted to the students. An offer of meaningfulness can be pursued and can be made visible in the context of what and how performs the teaching and also in the context where the teacher planned the teaching elements. The method that the paper has used is the interviews of four different active religious educators in Stockholm and Uppsala area.

 Syftet med litteraturstudien var att undersöka hur livskvaliteten upplevs hos äldre personer över 65 år med diabetes typ 2. Metoden var en beskrivande litteraturstudie. Totalt granskades 14 artiklar. Datasökningen genomfördes i Pub Med och sökorden som användes var type 2 diabetes, quality of life, health-related quality of life och HRQoL. Tre områden identifierades: fysisk, psykisk och social påverkan på livskvaliteten.

Background: Breast cancer is one of the most common cancer diseases among women worldwide. Breast cancer brings fear into many womens? life. It is a threat against life, but also to the psychological health, self-esteem and the female identity. Aim: The aim of this literature review was to describe newly breast cancer patient?s perception of information provided by healthcare personnel.

This study is based on a qualitative internet research about people with Asperger syndrome and their thoughts and opinions about the difficulties that occurs in the environment outside the home and their experiences of Internet. We have analyzed Internets social influences for those with Asperger syndrome, as a consequence of the difficulties that they meet in other environments. The constructed communities in the environment outside the home and the social interaction that occurs there is not adjusted for those with the diagnosis. This leads to difficulties to be there for those with Asperger syndrome. By doing a content analysis of the assembled data from a community site on the Internet, we found out that the environment on Internet is more comfortable for those with the diagnosis in several ways.

The aim of this study is to investigate how employees in consulting companies develop their competence in order to perform their daily work. The focus is on informal competence development. The theoretical framework consists of theories concerning learning and competence development in working life, theories on organizational change and evaluation, a well as professional reflection. The methods applied are narrative research and interviews based on the assumption that knowledge about reality is only obtainable through language and communication.The main results show that competence is developed through experience, social interaction, communication and dialog with co-workers and customers. The post-modern conceptions of the rapid (technical) development and need to be up-to-date has a strong hold on the informants apprehension of working life, as does the notion of not having enough time for all the competence development they would like.

This thesis studies public service social workers' opinions regarding their ability to act with moral courage as loyalty conflicts occur. The purpose of the thesis is to describe the social workers' experiences of their possibilities to stand up for what they believe in. We made qualitative interviews with five social workers in Stockholm. In an effort to pinpoint their experiences we asked them questions about what they want but cannot do and what is stop-ping them, what they do not want to do and why, aswell as what the possible solutions would be as loyalty conflicts occur. We were able to identify five different opinions on the organisa-tional cultures and how the employees' experience the extent of their actions.

This thesis examines young people's thoughts about their presence on social media. With asocial constructive approach the study focused on how young people think and act on socialmedia in relation to constructions of gender and normality. The analysis is based on fourgroup interviews with 13-year old boys and girls. The theoretical approach is based partly onsocial constructionism where discourses and ideas of normality are identified and analyzed.Erving Goffman's theory of social interaction was central to illustrate how young peoplepresents themselves based on the prevailing discourses. It is clear that they adjust theirrepresentations of themselves depending on the context.

  The use of social media has increased in recent years and has become a part of everyday life.  Through  the  use  of  social  media  grows  new  opportunities   for  constructing  ones identity, this enables individuals  to selective self-presentation.  The social media trend has gone from largely consisting of a linguistic communication  to become directed towards a more visual form of communication,  this encourages individuals to be more visual in their self-presentation.  This study aims to create an understanding  of how individuals  present their  identity  through  visual  self-presentation,  more  precisely  via  Instagram.  Previous research  has  shown  differences  between  men's  and  women's  use  of  social  media.

It is widely recognized that the town of Södertälje, a small Swedish town of 85 000 inhabitants, has alone received more war refugees from Iraq than the US and Canada have put together. Whilst writing this thesis had nearly 6000 Iraqi refugees sought their way to Södertälje since the US invasion in Iraq 2003.Nevertheless, life is not what the media and the government retail. Six of these Iraqi refugees who resided in Södertälje share their life stories in the following thesis. They discuss their escape from Iraq and the difficulties of living in the segregated parts of Södertälje where they solely speak Arabic and Assyrian, whilst learning Swedish at sfi (Svenska för invandrare, Swedish for immigrants). Another distress is related to the unsecure future in Sweden waiting ahead.      The aim of this thesis is to engage in, and highlight the studies of six sfi-students in their endeavor to learn Swedish, whilst struggling through Swedish bureaucracy and experiencing despair due to their situation and uncertain future.       .

In an international perspective the Russian children s library is a unique institution, being solely committed to children up to 14 years of age. In Russia of today it is, however, being exposed to hard pressure as the economical and social conditions have changed dramatically since the collapse of the USSR. My interest lies in examining this change of living conditions for the children s libraries and how this in turn affect their work and role in the present state. In order to view this change in a longer perspective, I compare the situation for children s libraries during the time of communist regime with that of today using documents about and from children s libraries. I have studied its legal position and conditions, financial and political state, and how the modern society affects children and youth, especially their daily cultural life.

In the late 20th century the Soviet Union collapsed and the eastern European countries were freed from the communist Russian oppression. However, during the Soviet period Marxism was a recurring life stance in the Swedish textbooks for religious education in the gymnasieskola. Today the Soviet Union has collapsed, but the Marxist philosophy has had a huge effect on both single individuals and the modern society as a whole. Nonetheless, the Marxist life stance is nowadays often being replaced by other non- religious life stances in the textbooks of religious education.Therefore, this analysis is a hermeneutic study of the presentation of the Marxist life stance in textbooks for Swedish religious education. The purpose of the paper is to investigate how these textbooks portray the Marxist life stance, and to prove that the societal context and the individual author have an immense effect in the portrayal of both religions and life stances in religious education.