During the last decade, there has been an increase in the use of technology-based self-services within the retail sector. The increase is particularly noticeable within the grocery market. The reason behind the increased use of these systems is partially due to the fact that companies within highly competitive retail markets continually look for ways of decreasing costs while upholding efficiency. The problem is that it is difficult to understand the true economical implications of investments relating to these machines. The purpose of this study is to investigate and contribute with new insights regarding the cost-structures of the stationary self-checkout systems and traditional cashier desks, within the retail grocery market.

Juvenile criminality has been widely discussed in the public debate. But what is there to do about a phenomenon like juvenile criminality in Sweden. Many studies have shown the potential of lowering juvenile criminality if different actors would collaborate. This research aims to explore preventive work and cooperation between different actors working with youth in risk of crime in Angered, with a focus on Hjällbo and Hammarkullen. The study is based on social and situational theory.

Online dating and ?People nearby applications? (PNA) has become more popular in today?s society. With PNA you can easily find people who are nearby you that you can socialize with and maybe even meet. In this paper we study the mobile application Badoo and explore how it is used for dating in clubs in Stockholm through observations that we participated in. We also had a group interview with five Badoo users about their usage of the application.

The purpose of this thesis is to study the usage of and attitudes towards electronic books among graduate and PhD students at Karlstad University. The main questions are: How do graduate and PhD students use electronic books? To what extent are electronic books used compared to printed books? To find the answers, a user study was carried out at Karlstad University library. The results show that a majority of the respondents are aware of the possibility to use electronic books but prefer to use printed ones if they have to choose. Many respondents also complained about difficulties reading a text on the computer screen.

Since the mid 60?s, Germany has seen dropping fertility rates and yet next to nothinghas been done to combat this trend until the current regime led by Angela Merkel andher minister of family affairs, Ursula von der Leyen initiated a number ofcomprehensive reforms of Germany?s family policies.Family policy in Germany is being reformed in three ways. First of all parents arenow eligible to receive substantial financial support in order to compensate the loss ofincome associated with a pregnancy and or parental leave. Second, the all but nonexistentpublic child care services are being vastly expanded with the goal of beingable to offer child care service for every child age 0-3. Thirdly the tradition of schoolsending classes midday is being reformed with the aim of letting kids stay in schoolmuch longer thus enabling parents to work full-time as opposed to part-time in orderto be able to take care of kids returning from school.The hopes for these ambitious reforms are tremendous.

Nordic Summer Evening is a theoretical painting, today an important icon of Nordic art from the turn of the century. The purpose of this essay is to analyse the painting, and to investigate and identify its declaration of program, and in a wider context, the emergence of a program of the nationalistic art at the turn of the last century. The essay also investigates how the painting has become more popular throughout the century, and why Americans tend to see the painting as an exposé over a quarrel, filled with sexual tension, while Swedes tend to make a point out of the harmony and stillness of the painting..

In this paper we take a look at digital applications to help the user with public transportation. The main goal was to evaluate the problem a user can face when aiming to use the public transportation system, and to create a application for Apple Iphone that can enhance and help the user, no matter if he is familiar with the local public transportation system, or if he is less familiar with it. The aim was that the user wouldnt need any previous knowledge to be able to use our application. We combined Location-Based Services with Realtime-travelinformation and trip planning to examine if this combination could make both of the two different user-groups satisfied. To understand the problematics a user faces when approaching the public transportation-scene, Scenario-Based Design is evaluated as a method to grasp this problem.

This thesis presents a new way of providing library users with reference services, namely chat (text based digital reference service in real time). Our research questions focus on the role of reference service, a comparison of chat reference to other reference forms, and the interest for real-time, digital reference. Our literature review covered the areas of digital reference and reference theory, the results of which showed that an ongoing debate hardly exists among Swedish librarians on the topic of reference work. We interviewed librarians from the three different Swedish chat reference projects existing at the time of our study. Most interviewees were very positive about chat reference.

The purpose of our study is to see how the interaction between the social services and police work when a child under 15 years is suspected of crimes.What happens to the child from an agency perspective? How is the experience for the child and how do they get their voices heard? How is the professional perspective for a child when a child is suspected of a crime? What do the various authorities for short-term and long-term measures for the child?We have chosen to do a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews. The study includes six interviews with two police officers, three field secretaries and a social worker in two different municipalities. A medium sized municipality, and a larger community.The people we interviewed think differently about collaboration. The municipality have different workforms.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how social workers perceive the concept of knowledge within social services, particularly within children and youth services. Our goal is also to study the employer's expectations and demands on graduate social workers. The main questions we address in this thesis are; What knowledge is seen as useful by employers and graduate social workers working in social welfare offices? To what extent does university education bring useful knowledge to the work being done by social workers? What practical knowledge is there in the workplace for social workers to learn? When recruiting, what expectations does the employer have of graduate social workers? What challenges are there with recruiting a graduate social worker?We have interviewed six social workers and four employers in the social childcare division in different municipalities in Skåne region, Sweden. We have used epistemology in our analysis.

This study is based on a qualitative study with 8 semi-structured interviews. The aim of thestudy was to describe how social workers in the individual- and family section in socialservices in two different municipalities in Sweden reason about reporting obligations and tounderstand what lex Sarah means in the decisions making to report incongruity or not. Weinterviewed social workers that work in the department of individual- and family section, amunicipality worker who works with state governance with all kinds people in the society.We asked the social workers altered questions about how they handle lex Sarah in their work.Three different topics were identified in our study and became the themes: Description,management and conflicting thoughts. Our analysis is based on two different theories, oneabout the choices a person make being in an organization, the other about how a professionalindividual have altered pressures to handle in their everyday work. By doing a semi-structuredstudy of the social workers opinions, we found out that the description of incongruity was notthe focus just in managing lex Sarah.

När det på 1990-talet uppmärksammades att barn kunde utsätta andra barn för sexuella övergrepp stod behandlingspersonal handfallna. Detta var något som det aldrig tidigare pratats om och ingen visste hur man egentligen skulle tackla problemet. Tack vare Rädda Barnen, Börje Svensson och Anders Nyman kunde ett behandlingsarbete utvecklas. Svensson och Nyman startade upp Rädda Barnens Pojkmottagning och tog emot både flickor och pojkar med sexuella problembeteenden. Efter att denna målgrupp uppmärksammades började så sakterliga utvecklingen av behandlingsmodeller.

Due to an increased population in cities the need of densification of cities increases. This means that the amount of ecological elements in the city is at risk of decreasing. Ecological services contribute to the city?s climate by softening the negative impacts that densification of cities means. Thus increases the will and ambition in city planning in to preserve greenery.This is an interdisciplinary thesis within the subject of geography that studies Biotope Area Factor (BAF), a planning tool that is used in city planning with the purpose of compensating for lost ecological services associated with new housing estate.

?Din katalog ? tjänster från Konsult och Service? presenterar de tjänster som förvaltningen Konsult och Service inom Västerås Stad (läs kommun) erbjuder. Katalogen är två år gammal och mitt examensarbete har gått ut på att uppdatera och omarbeta katalogen efter de förhållanden som råder nu.Jag har analyserat katalogen, såväl text- som bildmässigt. Katalogens sändare, chefer inom Konsult och Service, har i intervjuer givit sina synpunkter på befintlig katalog. De har även bidragit med underlag till nya texter.

Miljonprogram is a Swedish building program from 1964 to 1975. During that time about a million homes were constructed. Now, almost 50 years later, they are in desperate need of renovation. In order to fulfil the Swedish environmental objective to decrease energy consumption 50 per cent until 2050, considerable housing stock built under the Miljonprogram has to be renovated.Focus in this thesis is on the building services and theirs profitability that can decrease energy consumption in households build during the Miljonprogram. Building construction is not considered in this report.