Örebro UniversityDepartment of Social SciencesSociology and social psychology, Continuation course, 61-90 p.Essay 15 p, Spring -08.Title: ?Youth (work)seekers?Author: Karolina LindellAbstractThis essay focuses on young people?s Social background when they apply for their first job. I have interviewed four young people from a small town in Sweden, to see how Social background and identity affects their vital conditions in general. I?m interested understanding the relationship between structure and agency.

The aim of this study was to examine how social workers relate to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, regarding their cultural background and potential social issues. In order to achieve a more profound and comprehensive view of the social workers views regarding the separated children, we selected to execute semi structured interviews with social workers. These interviews were aimed at those social workers who performed assessments and investigations concerning unaccompanied children. We completed nine interviews which we recorded and transcribed in a strict manor. When we analyzed the empirical material, certain themes where identified as more protuberant and thus we our selection was based on what we regarded as the most relevant topics, in accordance to the aim of the study.

The purpose of this study was to increase knowledge about what the lives of the unemployed youth of immigrant background looks like, and what the views of the unemployed young people are about work and employment. The study is a qualitative study where the empirical material is based on interviews with seven unemployed immigrant youth between the ages of 19 and 25 years. A study where the central questions was to explore how the informants' living conditions and identity are affected by being unemployed. The other issues aimed at how informants background affected their ability to enter the labour market, and the job expectations the informants had about the future and the Swedish labour market. Empirin have been analyzed with regard to methodology tool based theory, as well as theoretical starting points, such as social capital, formal and informal channels, ethnicity and stigma theory.

In our bachelor thesis we have strived to examine the representation of journalism students in Nicaragua. The freedom of press is much lower compared to Sweden and the journalist profession is protected by a certificate. It is also a high level of corruption within the country. Our investigation concerns who has access to the journalist education and the goal is to compare that with the public in Nicaragua. To be able to examine the representation among the journalism students we have chosen seven different aspects to examine, the sex of the student, witch social class they belong to, their academic background, religion, ethnicity, geographical belonging and political view.

This thesis examines the relationship between recognition of prior learning and the aim to increase social and ethnical diversity in higher education. Recognition of prior learning is a result of educational politics aiming to broaden social and ethnical recruitment to higher education. By examining if recognition of prior learning rather can, and shall, be seen as part of what Pierre Bourdieu calls educational social reproduction I try to question whether it fulfils education policy goals or not. My results show that persons responsible for recognition of prior learning rather recognise knowledge from prior educational institutions than knowledge gained outside the educational system. Considering this, recognition of prior learning does not quite live up to the aims.

This paper examines the impact of the congruence between the background music and the brand image on the customer behaviour in retail store. The essay's hypotheses are built after the famous S-O-R-model that unveils if congruence background music affects the customers' emotions, brand image and response. The aim of the study is mainly to answer if the congruent background music stimuli in the retail store environment will affect the customer's emotions and if it will increase spent time and money. The congruent background music has been selected through two pre-studies based on consumers' brand image. A quantitative study has been conducted where triangulation was applied in a real store environment, where in total 201 surveys was collected for the main study.

The focus of our dissertation is masculinity which is often a topic of debate in today?s society concerning areas such as violence, sport and paternal leave. Male studies are a relatively new field which means there is a lot remaining to be explored. We have chosen to explore how social class reflects on male identity. The reason we have chosen social class as a variable is due to a focus in the general debate of identity amongst the social sciences towards identities formed through consumption in the world of global mass-media.

Title: How do music students with different genre backgrounds perceive the same music? In this paper I report a study about how music students with different genre background perceive the same music. I let twentyone classical music upper secondary school pupils and twentyone rock music upper secondary school pupils listen to ten short music pieces of different character and styles. While listening, they were asked to answer four questions about which instruments they could perceive, what they could tell about pulse, rhythm and beat in the music, which component they thought was the most important in the piece and what word they thought best described the feeling of the piece. All four questions had to be answered for each piece of music to facilitate analysis of differences connected to genre background in those answers.

This study aimed to explore how 31 collage students' cognitive performance and their ability to create false memories were affected by the exposure of an extraneous background noise. The studies main hypotheses were based on previous research on how extraneous noise affect the cognitive ability and the creation of false memories: 1) that an extraneous background noise increases the ability to create false memories, 2) that an extraneous background noise impairs the learning of cognitive information, 3) that an extraneous background noise contributes to an increased representation of fictional words, 4) that an extraneous background noise impedes the ability to understand speech . The results showed a tendency in which false memories increased in the condition without background noise, a result which goes in the opposite direction of the hypothesis. Furthermore, the result supported the hypothesis that the extraneous background noise impairs the learning of cognitive information. The results also showed that there was no effect between the conditions regarding the representation of fictional information.

This paper aims to investigate how human beings uses food to found an identity, with regards to how social class affects their choice of food and if trends play a part when it comes to cooking and purchasing food. The paper applies theorist Pierre Bourdieu's concepts such as habitus, capital and field.The main part of the material is composed of four interviews with seven informants; all of which is middle class. The paper also looks at how lifestyle, taste and attitudes to consumption are used when the informants build identity. The empirical part is split into three main subjects, where I first seek to find each informants food habits. What do they eat, and what do they not eat?It showed that a large part was due to their varied lifestyles, however generally speaking the day to day meals should be quick while meals during the weekends could take longer and also cost more.

Aim: The study aims to investigate the distribution of grades between students in a practical subject and in a theoretical subject.The problem:What is the grade distribution in physical education and mathematics, with respect to gender, socioeconomic background, parental education, ethnicity, and physical activity?Method:To answer the aim of the study a quantitative method was chosen. As the collection method used was questionnaires to 620 students in the 9th grade in Stockholm. Of the 620 questionnaires, 597 questionnaires were used for the static analysis. The method of analysis used cross tables and logistic regression analysis.

The title of this study came about from the title of Robert Putnams book Bowling Alone, where Putnam mentions that less people are bowling in teams than before. Bowling is still a large leisure activity in the USA but people tend to bowl more and more in small groups and less in organized teams. This study deals with social capital and leisure time. Its aim is to find out if some Swedish people create social capital on their leisure time and also how do they spend their leisure time. Robert Putnams book Bowling Alone serves as main background material along with the work by Bo Rothstein.

 Background and aim: Media development and digitalization has expanded the PR industry's working area. More participants are on the media market and it is becoming more and more difficult to define what PR really is and what the PR agencies/departments really do. Is PR marketing, information, event marketing or maybe propaganda? We believe that the complexity to define the term PR can lead to a loss of critical approach to the business, especially among young people. Has the PR industry managed to eliminate their negative image among students in upper secondary school and what do they associate with PR today? The aim of this essay is to examine what a selection of students associate with the term PR and if they are critical to the PR industry or not.Method/Material: The method is a quantitative survey.

 Why is it that we still live in a society where an individual's Social background plays such a big part in their chances of reaching a higher education? Despite the numerous educational policy reforms, especially in Sweden, it still seems that an individual's career choices are pretty much related to what kind of social class they grew up in. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu claimed that social class is reproduced in the school system, and that students from the lower classes are much less likely to reach a further education than students from the middle or upper classes due to injustice in the school system. One thing that plays a big part in this "Catch-22" situation is the concept that Bourdieu calls habitus. Habitus could be explained as an individual's taste, knowledge, ability to master the spoken language, etc. Your habitus is manifested in the choices you make, the music you listen to, how you dress and the way you speak, and it determines your relation to the education system and life in general. As part of my essay, I wanted to interview students from lower or working class at my school, Konstfack, to see if they have had any negative or positive experiences from their encounter with a higher education. And if so, could they be linked directly to their Social background? As a reaction to my own and my interviewees? experiences and frustration, I use the concept of habitus in my practical work.

Background: People diagnosed with psychosis are often described as introvert, isolated and with little or no ability to create and maintain social relationships. While every angle of a phenomena is valid and important, we believe that the first-person perspective provides the only direct access to the diagnosed persons? feelings and experiences.Aims: The aim of this study is to explore how a few people diagnosed with psychosis describe their experiences of social interaction.Method: This study is conducted in a Grounded Theory manner. An analysis has been performed on interviews made with five individuals, all diagnosed with a psychosis diagnosis.Results: The main result of this study is that the self-image is a core factor in the individuals experiences of, and initiative to, social interaction. The social interactions are linked to the individuals own relation to their diagnosis in a dynamic process where all components affect each other in the creating of the self-image.Conclusion: This study concludes that people diagnosed with psychosis is no different than other people when it comes to dreaming and longing for functional social relationships, but that they have some difficulties in actually finding them due to both social stigma and a poor self-image..