The Swedish population is today exposed to more ads than ever. The number of advertising channels is growing, as well as the number of companies and their advertising expenses. As the products are becoming more alike, the harder it gets for the companies to convince the consumers their product is better than their competitors?. In order to succeed they need to understand what they communicate to the consumers through their different marketing activities, and how that affects the consumers? view of the brand and the product.

This Master Thesis has been carried out in cooperation with Silva Sweden AB. A companywhich manufactures products like compasses, pedometers, headlamps, hiking poles and otherequipment for the out door life and navigation. The purpose of the project has been toassemble methods and models which support user involvement in Silva?s design process.Thus, to increase the number of products with purchasing power, enhance product quality aswell as increase foundation for new product ideas.The focus through out the project has been to assemble a pallet with methods for userinvolvement and from this select a few methods that will fit the company. The purpose of thepallet is to be accessible for the company during their work of change with the design processthat has been going on and will be in the future.

This is a study of seven men that have suffered from a cruel punishment. The punishment involved getting their ear/ears cut off, prison with more torture and their families being deported from their homes to another town.My sample involved seven Iraqi men who suffered from this punishment during Saddams regime, they got this punishment because they refused to fight against Iran and Kuwait. I went to Iraq and met with the men in person and did interviews with them to understand the effect of the punishment on their personalities, and how the punishment have influenced their lives and interaction with other people in the society and around them.The study focuses on their suffering and how they have been able to live with this stigma. The method the study has used is the kvalitative method that involved interviewing them in their country Iraq and analyse their answers and then come to the results. My study was between 26 of March 2004 to 26 of April 2004.My study is based on the theory of social interaction and especially the symbolic interaction theories of G.H.

Urban planning is not only a matter of architectural trends; it is first and foremost political. This thesis seeks to understand the links between political ideas and visions for the city and the physical structure of the city. The study aims to construct a model to help understand these links, a helpful tool in analysing a city, focusing on the one hand at the physical structure of what I call "The City as a Welfare Provider" and on the other hand at "The City as a Growth Engine". It also sets out to test this model in an empirical study of Stockholm and the soon-to-be built district of Norra Station in the same city.The analysis shows that Stockholm has ambitions to be a welfare provider to its citizens, but have also adopted to a discourse of interurban competition which stresses the importance for the city to enhance economical growth. What is interesting is that the physical structures promoted in the planning documents of Stockholm are nearly exclusively those associated with the model of "The City as a Growth Engine"..

In order to accomplish that a construction is correctly built, it is critical to obtain a well functioning control mechanism throughout the project. The way to enable this is not by having an independent inspector constantly at your side. Today it is praxis to use check lists and have people responsible of quality to make sure that these are followed. This is where discretionary inspections play their part. These among others are documents needed to com-plete the check list.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and analyse the private researchers encounter with the Royal Library, national library of Sweden. The main focus is on answering the two questions: who is the private researcher and what is his/her impression of the Royal Library? These questions are answered from the vantage point of the following theoretical perspectives: library anxiety, Bourdieu, library architecture, gender studies and service management. The methods used are qualitative interviews, and textual analysis using the printout of these taped interviews along with notes and an earlier user study as material. The conclusions are that barriers with staff is the most frequent factor of library anxiety in the private researcher at the Royal Library, and mechanical barriers the least frequent.

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine the picture book canonization process in pre-schools. To succeed in this I have examined what pre-school staff believe to be the criteria of a good picture book. Together with an observation of the pre-schools current collection, other factors which can influence the collection of the picture book are included. This constitutes the foundation for a description of the pre-school picture book canon. To pursue this goal, I have used the methodology of focus group interviews with staff from two pre-schools in a middle-sized town.

Objectives. The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between the personality variables Multidimensional Health Locus of Control (MHLC), Negativ affect and Social inhibition (the D-personality), and health behavior and attitudes toward keep-fit measures.Methods. The participants in this study were 170 embloyees at a regional social insurance office in a midsize town in the south of Sweden. Scales concerning health behavior and attitudes toward keep-fit measures were constructed and the participants completed these scales as well as those of MHLC and D-personality.Results. Participants with strong beliefs that other people, such as doctors or family-members, are responsible for their health, showed a more positive attitude as to keep-fit measures than those with a belief that health is controlled by themselves.

The market-leading wage and PA-.system for the Swedish public sector Palasso is developed in Karlstad. In order to achieve the highest quality of code , the developing team behind Palasso has been conducting extensive testing. Testing is done to ensure that the software does what it should do. However, the testing has been done at a high level. In order to continue to evolve, the group that develops Palasso has started to look at the new development methods that have become popular in the computer industry in recent years.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to investigate why and how projects with children participating in selecting media at children s sections are made and how the projects effect the collections and the usage of these collections. We have studied literature dealing with how the selection at children s sections traditionally are made, how children participate in society and the question of quality. We have also made a survey to find out whether it is common to do projects like this in Sweden. In addition to this we have studied the discussion of patrons participating in library activities, having found mostly Danish material. Our study deals with five Danish projects, the reports of which we have read, and five Swedish projects, whose responsible librarians and assistants we have interviewed.

AbstractThe purpose for this essay has been to illuminate some teachers opinions of integration of students with Aspergers syndrom in the compulsory school, then compare it with the statue documents and see similarities and differences.The studie has been of a quality character, based on quality intervjues to get the teachers understanding at a deeper level. The questions in the intervju are based on open questions with purpose not to control the person during the intervju.The most obvious result which was that it appered two perspective of integration of students with Aspergers syndrom. One in the short run and one in the long run.In the long run it was the integration of the individual into the society and in the short run integration in school.For the perspective in the long run, the opinions from the teachers in compulsory school is good corresponding to the statue documents, that the integration is necessary for our democratic and human values that our sociaty are based on.In the short run, during the years when the students are in school, it came out great difficulties to integrate children with Aspergers syndrom. To proceed an integration that works out for the students, the teachers took site from the individual and not from the society. If we do not look at integration from an individual base we are probably not going to succeed to integrate in society.Searchwords: Aspergers syndrom, neuropsychiatric funktional disorders, integration, inclusion, segregation..

Background:Studies show that when nurses are experiencing problems in the care of non-Swedish speaking patients, it is often due to obstacles in the communication. Studies also show that a prerequisite for adequate care is that there is a basis for a direct communication. Nurses perceive interpreters as an important link to the patient when they do not share a mutual language, the nurses perceive interpreters as a bridge in the conversation.Aim:The purpose of the study is to describe nurses' experiences of the quality of assessments done with the help of an interpreter.Method:The study was conducted through interviews with ten nurses, working at psychiatric clinics. Qualitative content analysis was used for the analysis, which resulted in five categories.Results:The analysis resulted in one theme: "it´s the interpreter who tells me and have not the feeling that the patient has" and five categories: "shades of the language", "conversation structure", "the interpreter's competence", "interpreting implementing" and "the interpreter's gender and origin". The nurses experience working with interpreters as a challenge.

 Car seats for smaller children, offers very good protection incase of a collision. Unfortunately for the parents? sake , these car seats is heavy to handle outside the car. For example back and forth home and short errands around town. In other words, all those times when you decide to just take out the car seat and carry it instead of place the baby in a baby carrier.

The level of increased central government that we have experienced during the last decades in school, for the purpose of increasing equality and to adapt the Swedish school to a certain international standard, clearly shows that increased control scarcely leads to improvement.The aim of this paper is to examine whether teachers believe that national tests contribute to equivalent assessment and increased goal attainment. Furthermore the teachers? attitude towards and work with national tests is described. The paper is written from a school improvement perspective, where good examples from current research on what creates increased quality in school meaning increased goal attainment and equivalent assessment are related to research on school effectiveness and increased testing in schools. The study builds upon a quantitative survey among teachers in upper primary - and secondary school in a medium-sized municipality in Sweden.The result shows that the teachers have a somewhat more positive than negative attitude towards national tests, as a whole.

AbstractObjective: To investigate the occurrence of and the risk factors for falls and to  investigate level of fall-related self-efficacy and health-related quality of life in people living in community living, 75 years or older within Uppsala and Västmanlands county. A further aim was to identify predictive risk factors for falls. Design: A cross-section study with a descriptive, comparative and correlative design based on a questionnaire was used. Participants: The participants were recruited from Uppsala and Västmanlands county. A random selection on 525 individuals was done, from a population based sample, in the detailed municipalities.