Purpose/Aim: The aim of this thesis was to study the construction of gender and to compare Media?s portrayal of male and female athletes.Material/Method: 140 articles covering seven famous Swedish male and female athletes were selected from two Swedish newspapers (Aftonbladet and Expressen). The articles has been analysed within the frames of Norman Faircloughs Critical Discourse Analysis.Main results: Male athletes are often described in powerful ways and are framed as being strong and successful. Skills and strengths of women athletes are often devalued in comparison to standards of hegemonic masculinity and self-control. They are often framed as women and girlfriends in advantage of the fact that they are athletes..

This study used a qualitative interview design to explore the experiences of seven Swedish female elite athletes and their career retirement. The athletes were engaged in three different sports; track and field (athletics), handball and golf and five of them are former professional or semi-professional athletes. The process of their athletic role exit was based on the theoretical findings of Ebaugh (1988) and her four phases: First Doubts, Seeking Alternatives, The Turning Point and Creating the Ex-Role. The findings reveal that for these female former elite athletes Seeking Alternatives already starts before the First Doubts and that possibly the athletes at an early stage have insights of the discontinuity of their athletic career. The importance of transferring their role residual to future paths in life was stressed among the female athletes in order to be able to have a smooth transition process.

This report is an analysis from a gender perspective of more than three hundred minutes in sports broadcasting on SVT and TV4. The study explains how air time is divided between male and female athletes as well as which sports, male or female, get the most air time. The sports are also categorized according to attitudes about the sports being masculine, feminine or neutral. In this way the study also shows the categories of sports that are given the most airtime.Our view before the study was that from a media perspective, the Swedish sports world was very male dominated. The results show that male athletes get more exposure than female athletes on both channels, this despite the fact that the membership of the Swedish sports clubs is fairly evenly divided between men and women. .

The aim of this study is to explore how sports journalism can include and/or exclude athletics from a national community. This study put emphasis on finding patterns from articles by Swedish sport media on non-ethnic Swedish athletics. The theories central to this study are ethnicity and nationalism, as these concepts contain reflections on why certain groups of people are excluded and/or included. Norman Faircloghs critical discourse analytical model has been selected for the study method that analyzes texts in three levels: the text level, discursive practice and social practice. Four non-ethnic Swedish athletes have been chosen to explore how they were portrayed in the media.

Retiring from elite sport can be a difficult and disruptive process for an elite athlete. To improve the quality of the transition after retirement, elite athletes are recommended to have dual careers which mean they combine their sport with education to be prepared for a new career when they retire from elite sport. To help elite student-athletes with this combination, universities and sport organizations provide different kind of support. This study was conducted and aimed to investigate elite athletes? perceptions of support offered by a university in Sweden and the elite athletes? perceptions of combining top level sport and academic studies.

Our aim is to analyse and discuss Swedish sport federations´ view about talent. We are analysing material, mainly in digital form, with focus on the identification of talents, development of talents and talents in a wider perspective. The first one is about when and how federations identify talents. The second one is about how they work with development of talents, for example, what is the most significant aspect to develop young people to become successful athletes. The third one is about organizations questions, how they work to create an environment that enables Swedish athletes to become great in sports.

In todays society sports has become a major part in people?s life, with the emerging of professionalization it?s become a thriving business that generates big money. An outcome of this evolution of sports as meant that most athletes must put more time and energy in to their athletics to have a chance to reach their dreams of being a professional athlete. And if an athletes dream get cut short somehow, the process of moving out of sport has been shown to somtimes be a difficult process for athletes that don?t have anything to fall back on.

AimThe purpose of this study is to investigate whether there is scientific evidence that exercise and/or manual therapy can improve function, in terms of increased mobility and strength on shoulder impingement-like symptoms among athletes. Another aim is to investigate whether these interventions can reduce shoulder pain.MethodA systematic review was conducted in the databases PubMed, CINAHL, PEDro and Amed. A total of thirteen articles were selected for further review and compilation. They were then graded for level of evidence according to the PEDro scale and the Swedish Council on Technology Assessment (SBU).ResultsThe systematic review shows that there is strong scientific evidence that acupuncture and heat can reduce pain in athletes diagnosed with supraspinatus-tendiopathy. There is limited scientific evidence that exercise increases strength, limited scientific evidence that stretching increases mobility and insufficient scientific evidence that a combination of treatments, with both exercise and stretching, reduces pain and increases function in overhead athletes.ConclusionsExercise and manual therapy can reduce pain and/or improve function in terms of increased mobility and strength in athletes with shoulder impingement-like symptoms.

The main purpose of this study was to examine own and social influence on perfectionismwith individual athletes. The participants (n= 96) of this study represented ten different sportsand their ages was between 15 and 44. An interview with four of the participant wasconducted. The instruments used for this study was the Positive and Negative PerfectionismScale (Terry-Short et al., 1995) and for the interviews questions was based on own and socialinfluence. The results showed that there was a relationship between positive perfectionismand own influence, negative perfectionism and own influence, negative perfectionism andsocial influence.

The purpose of this essay, entitled ?Heja Sverige! Heia Norge?, was to study the difference in nationalistic tendencies between Swedish and Norwegian news coverage of the 2015 FIS Nordic World Ski Championships in Falun, Sweden, which took place between 18 February and 1 March 2015. It was the fourth time the event took place in Falun, previous games having been held in 1954, 1974 and 1993.I performed a critical discourse analysis of a total of twelve articles split over two race days ? one where Swedish athletes outperformed Norwegian athletes and vice versa. I did this order to study if the news coverage in each of the two countries? most promininent sports papers; Sportbladet in Sweden and VG Sport in Norway, was charaterized by a nationalistic discourse, as well as comparing the two to find similarities and differences between them.Having based my analysis on theories and previous research regarding media events, nationalism, national identities, ?us and them?, imagined communities et cetera, I came to the conclusion that a nationalistic discourse is, without a doubt, present in the news coverage ? something very unique for sports journalism as a genre.

The aim of the study was to a) examine what leader behaviors individual and team athletes prefer and b) examine what leader behaviors men and women prefer. A questionnaire (The Leadership Scale for Sports) was distributed to 168 individuals, from which 130 were included in the study. The data was analyzed in SPSS, in which a three-way and a two-way variance analysis were performed. The results showed that individual athletes preferred the behavior dimensions ?Training and instruction?, ?Positive feedback? and ?Democratic behavior? to a higher degree than did team athletes.

The purpose of this study is to show which content that is most common in the Swedish News Agency TT Nyhetsbyrån?s sports coverage. It also shows if the coverage is concentrated to for example any special sports, clubs, people or topics.This study uses a quantitative content analysis and the result is based on texts from 28 systematically selected days during one year. In total, the study includes 906 texts.The result of this study shows that the sports content of TT Nyhetsbyrån?s news feed is mainly concentrated to two sports, football/soccer and ice hockey.

ECG-Screening for young elite athletesAbstractBackgroundSudden cardiac death (SCD) during physical activity is a frightening and emotional tragedy that draws huge media attentions when it occurs. Fortunately it is a relatively uncommon occurrence but happens nonetheless to young athletes who often seems to be in perfect health. SCD is used as a term for sudden unexpected complications on the cardiovascular system that leads to a deadly outcome normally within the first hour of onset of symptoms and the cause is some sort of underlying cardiovascular disease that gets triggered by physical activity.Normally athletes gets divided into two groups dependent on age, over and under 35 years, and this studies focus is on the younger group since it is often during this period athletes are at the elite level. It is also in this category the most unexpected sudden deaths occur that is not due to coronary atherosclerosis, which is the dominant cause of death, and drastically increases, for people over 35 years old.AimThe aim of this study was to scientific and unbiased analyze peer-reviewed clinical articles todescribe the pros, cons and cost to implement an ECG-screening as a standard before physicalactivities for specifically defined elite athletes.MethodA systematic review was performed and after all data collection 21 articles was chosen to beused as a base for both background and analyze. At the end 10 articles was fulfilling the criteria to be used at the analyze and later the results.ResultsThe implementation of ECG-screening has reduced SCD in Italy by 89 % between the years 1979-2004.

ECG-Screening for young elite athletesAbstractBackgroundSudden cardiac death (SCD) during physical activity is a frightening and emotional tragedy that draws huge media attentions when it occurs. Fortunately it is a relatively uncommon occurrence but happens nonetheless to young athletes who often seems to be in perfect health. SCD is used as a term for sudden unexpected complications on the cardiovascular system that leads to a deadly outcome normally within the first hour of onset of symptoms and the cause is some sort of underlying cardiovascular disease that gets triggered by physical activity.Normally athletes gets divided into two groups dependent on age, over and under 35 years, and this studies focus is on the younger group since it is often during this period athletes are at the elite level. It is also in this category the most unexpected sudden deaths occur that is not due to coronary atherosclerosis, which is the dominant cause of death, and drastically increases, for people over 35 years old.AimThe aim of this study was to scientific and unbiased analyze peer-reviewed clinical articles todescribe the pros, cons and cost to implement an ECG-screening as a standard before physicalactivities for specifically defined elite athletes.MethodA systematic review was performed and after all data collection 21 articles was chosen to beused as a base for both background and analyze. At the end 10 articles was fulfilling the criteria to be used at the analyze and later the results.ResultsThe implementation of ECG-screening has reduced SCD in Italy by 89 % between the years 1979-2004.

The goal with our research has been to describe how often and in what way female athletes are represented in the sport section in Sweden?s biggest evening newspaper Aftonbladet. The material we?ve used are the newspapers that we collected during two weeks in 2008, the 3rd of November to the 9th of November and the 11th of November to the 17th of November. We?ve conduced two qualitative researches ? a text analysis and an image analysis ? and one quantitative analysis on our material.