The aim of this paper is to examine the experience of two Swedish women who survived the tsunami catastrophe in Thailand 2004. Through their biographies, Sävstam and Ernsth-Ohlsson have revealed their experiences, before, during and after the tsunami catastrophe. Coping theory is used to explain how they cope with the consequences of the tsunami catastrophe, and how culture affects the coping process. Pargament´s (1997) theories in coping are used to examine this paper. Pargament argues that the coping process is influenced by the culture context of the individual.

The family and relatives caring for older people in Sweden lies on an old tradition. The responsibility to care for older family members has gone from family to the society. The aim of this study was to examine the needs of family caregivers and their experience of municipality support. This study includes only the family caregivers who have the main responsibility for the care of relatives and have support from the municipality. The caregivers were not allowed to work more than 50 percent in another job.

Background: Today small business firms represent a considerable part of swedish economy, and the number of small firms has steadily increased the last ten years in relation to the total employment. The fact that there are firms willing to grow, it ought to be interesting observing their motives of growth, and what kind of strategies that can be identifiable in these firms. Purpose: To examine the motives of growth in small business firms, and to study which growth strategies the firms use when expanding their business. Realization: The study is accomplished through telephone interviews with six small business firms in the province of Jönköping. The firms contain between 10-49 employees.

The aim of the study was to investigate peer interaction among toddlers 12 to 30 months of age and the teachers? ways to direct the children?s play in outdoor free play situations in a Swedish preschool. Data was gathered through direct observation, and the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty in combination with the assumption of children as social actors built the theoretical framework of the study. The results showed that the toddlers used different strategies to invite peers to interaction and made use of strategies in entering ongoing play that previously have been observed among older preschoolers. These strategies, bodily and therefore in accordance with the phenomenological approach, support the assumption of toddlers as social actors that actively engage in and make sense of their life worlds in the preschool.

Background: The nursing profession involves meetings and situations which can be stressful. The work environment can cause additional stress in the form of time pressure, lack of support from colleagues, management or disgruntled family members and patients. This places the nurse in a position that requires a sharpened ability to handle stress. It can become overwhelming and unmanageable and cause a serious threat to the nurse's health and wellbeing. To handle stress the nurses uses different coping strategies.Aim: The aim of the review was to gain a better understanding of how nurses deal with occupational stress.Method: A systematic literature overview study based on eleven articles, including both qualitative and quantitative studies.Results: Nurses deal with stress in different ways based on their own resources.

Fifty employees at a local industrial company answered a questionnaire about coping strategies and personality traits. One purpose of the study was to investigate if officials and public employees used different coping strategies in stressful work situations. Another purpose of the study was to investigate if there was a relationship between the personality traits of the officials and the public employees and their chosen coping strategies. Ten Item Personality Inventory and Brief COPE were used to examine personality traits and coping strategies respectively. The results showed a difference in exhibited personality traits where conscientiousness was higher among the official employees than the public employees.

Much of the everyday work of teachers in pre-schools, schools and youth centers is based on experience. This study is a qualitative interview study intended to make visible the experiences of pre-school teachers in situations when children are considered to be in need of special support. I have looked at pre-school teachers? descriptions of the kinds of situations in which a child is estimated to be in need of special support, what teachers look for in a child to identify it as a child in need of special support in a specific situation, and how the teachers define special support. Both this study and previous research show that children?s estimated need of support depends on the situation and context the child is in. The pre-school teachers in this study identify common situations where children are estimated to be in need of special support, namely: in interaction with others, in structured situations, during changes of activities and during free play.

The purpose of this study is to improve our understanding of how immigrant children become included in some preschools. With immigrant children we meant those children who immigrated to Sweden. In order to achieve our purpose we have chosen to find out some educators' perceptions about inclusion and which strategies they use to include immigrant children.To realize the study purpose, we have chosen to use qualitative interviews as a method. We conducted interviews with sex educators who worked in two preschools. The empirical materials we got from the interviews formed the basis for our analysis.The analysis of our collected data was based on our theories and conceptions.

Objective: The aim of this work is to find out how a number of educators work when giving children support and opportunities for language development.Questions:What have preschool for policy to monitor/assess the children?s language development?What experiences do teachers have of children who need support in language development?How do educator?s regard support from specialised educator?s? Do these efforts support the children to enhance language development?Methods: Qualitative methodology, Interviews with six teachers and two specialised educators from three kindergartens in the municipality.Summary of conclusions: The municipality in which the survey was conducted has a document that provides guide lines on how to work with children?s language development in school and preschool. Pedagogical documentation is a tool that teachers use in nursery school which educators and parents can follow, which shows children?s learning processes and learn strategies. Research shows that through play, music, creative activities, photos, etc.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate 7 different search strategies for content-based image retrieval with respect to retrieval effectiveness. The strategies are based on different levels of resolution implemented by the Haar transformation. The result of the study shows an improvement in both mean average precision and mean recall in strategies based on lower levels of resolution..

The study's purpose is to describe students' experiences of help and support in mathematics. To investigate this, I adopted the questions: What does it mean, according to the students, to get "help and support in mathematics?" Are there differences in the description of help and support depending on the age of the students? What different kinds of help and support do students feel that they get from their math teachers? What different kinds of help and support would they like to have? The study is based on a qualitative method, group interviews, with three groups of students, one from each stage of primary school in one municipality in Sweden. The students were at the time of the interview in grade 3, 5 and 8. The interviews were analysed from a sociocultural perspective. The results show that what the students primarily consider as the meaning of help and support it is to get individual support from their teacher.

This study will examine if caregivers, working with people with dementia problems, is in need of support and in what way they see how the support should be designed. Previous research shows that there are many factors in elderly care that affect all of the caregivers. Working with people in this sort if dependence, requires a lot of the caregivers, both mentally and physically. To study if the caregivers consider themselves to be in need of support, and in what way they see how the support should be designed, the study employs a qualitative approach using to types of interviews, one focus group with four assistant nurses, and two individual in-depth interviews with the administrative personnel and one nurse. The results show that the need for support for the caregivers exists. Caregivers working with people with dementia problems, daily face difficulties, some more difficult to handle than others.

Our findings show that depending on the contextual setting and what sort of merger an organization goes through, the identity strategies will differ. We see that symbols and values are two objects of relevance in our case companies? identity strategies, but that there are differences in how they are being used. There is consensus around the fact that values are important to have, however their meaning to each organization differs and it has also proven to be dependent on what position you possess in the company. We have developed a four-fielder in order to further illustrate our findings.

Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka vilka effekter två olika läsförståelsemodeller, Reciprocal Teaching och Transactional Strategies Instruction, har på elevers läsförståelse. Den metod som användes i studien var kvalitativ textanalys som applicerades på 7 forskningsartiklar. Resultatet visar att modellerna gett effekt, i olika åldrar, länder och grupper. Detta resultat visar att Reciprocal Teaching och Transactional Strategies Instruction är effektiva modeller att arbeta med för läsförståelseutveckling..

The aim of this qualitative study was to examine bereaved individuals? experiences of support from their social networks and participation in support groups. The theoretical framework is based on theories about social support and parts of the attachment theory. Data were collected from four interviews and analysed by the study?s theoretical framework.