This study investigates verbal and visuospatial memory strategies used by individuals with perceptual or cognitive disabilities. The groups concentrated on in this study are deaf individuals who are native sign language users and individuals with dyslexia. The study comprises an experiment and an in-depth study in which a pre-test and a questionnaire were used. Nine deaf signers, two persons with dyslexia and 12 persons without any perceptual or cognitive constraints participated. Of these 23 persons, seven were selected to take part in the in-depth study.

Back and forth is a study on wayshowing at events focusing on the Siesta festivalin Hässleholm. For several years the interest in festivals has increased, whichhas contribute to expansion among festivals. The Siesta festival in Hässleholm istoday one of the major festivals in Sweden, attracting 10 000 visitors each year.The festival?s strong expansion has contributed to disorientation in the festivalarea, because it has never been constant from year to year. A side effect of this isthat the orientation is a constant problem.Therefore this study aims to investigate how a clearer route guidance systems onthe Siesta Festival can be designed based on existing designprinciples onguidance and orientation and how the information can be accessable towheelchair users and those with some kind of colourblindness?Surveys among festival visitors and interviews with the festival organizers for thefestival showed which navigation strategies that are most used on festivals.

This c-level essay examines how deaf and hearing impaired individuals use smartphones to live and communicate in a ?hearing world?. The main target is to find some understanding of the struggles of this population and smartphones have made it easier to adapt to the hearing worlds? demands with the applications that follow. To acquire the information for this essay, representatives from both the deaf and hearing impaired communities were interviewed.

Studies show that visual elements in store have a great impact on consumers. Of all the impressions that the brain receives the visual impressions count for 83 %. One of the visual elements that retailers can use in-store to influence consumers is signs. Today, there are a lot of studies on regular signs but this is very limited when it comes to motion displays. Motion displays are signs printed on electronic paper with animated messages.

The goal of this Master?s thesis is to explore the approach and general attitude of public libraries regarding Sign Language Literature. There is a need to study and advance how the deaf can find ways to read in their own language, as it is as important to them to be able to read in their language, as it is to the next hearing person. The purpose is to define and explain the full capacity of the problem. In the process of research, by investigating how library staff approaches and deal with deaf patrons, the nature of the patron-staff relationship is revealed.

Title: Elderly deaf - The significance of an own senior housing. A qualitative interview studyon how special senior housing affects the experience of well-being of elderly deaf [translated title]The purpose of the study was to examine how elderly deaf people experience living in aspecial senior housing, which is the country?s first and only housing with sign language fordeaf and deafblind in the region of Stockholm. The focus was to study how this seniorhousing affected the well-being of the residents and their experience of this accommodation.The study was based on a qualitative method with semi-structured interviews. Interviews wereconducted with four residents who have lived in the senior housing for deaf and deafblindpeople since it opened in spring 2013.

The phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard holds that readers, or viewers, relate to spatial imagery through the use of age-old archetypes. These archetypes form a collective image-memory that is employed when reading space. One such image is the house. The house for Bachelard is, however, never solely an image, but constitutes a familiar space that becomes inscribed in our bodies through the repeated physical contact with this domestic space. The house teaches us to interact with space, and comes to inform the way that human beings understand images of space.

The purpose of this study is to gain knowledge and a broader understanding for how pre-school teachers describe the importance of planned play environments including in what manner children are given influence. By qualitative interviews with five pre-school teachers from four different units I was able to gather data that shows how the planning process concerning a specific play environment had worked and why it looked as it did. The results show among other things that the pre-school teachers viewed the play environment as a vital part of the daily operation and pointed out that it was of vital importance that it came from the children?s interests. Depending on how the play environment had been organized and what its purpose was it offered different amounts of affordances..

AbstractAim: The aim of this study was to investigate if treatment with ?dry needling? in myofascial triggerpoints (MTrPs) in the rotatorcuff muscles may affect impingement symptoms such as pain during provocative tests, shoulder mobility, and function. The research questions were: Does the value of pain change on the Visual Analog Pain Scale (VAS) between before and after treatment? Do the positive provocative tests for impingement change between before and after treatment? Does the active shoulder mobility change between before and after treatment? Does the self-rated function change between before and after treatment?Method: The study was a prospective randomized intervention study and 19 persons with impingement symptoms (mean ± standard deviation; 58 ± 18 years, and shoulder pain duration 3.9 ± 1.6 months) were randomized into two groups. The groups were tested before, directly after and 3 weeks after treatment.

The purpose was to study what significance communication has for the psychosocial health of elderly deaf people who live in old peoples homes. I also explored how communication works between the staff.- How do the staff feel the communication works between members of the staff and between the staff and the residents?- How do the staffs think that the staffs' knowledge of the culture of the deaf community and sign language affects the psychological health of the residents?- What changes have the staff noticed in the residents since they moved to the ward?In order to accomplish study this area I have used semi-structured qualitative interviews and observations.The main conclusion of this paper was that the possibility to communicate in ones own language was fundamental for the psychosocial health of the residents. The people I interviewed expressed that communication between the residents and the staff worked well, but communication was a problem between the staff members. Knowledge of the culture of the deaf and sign language, within the staff, had a positive influence on the psychosocial health of the residents.

De senaste tre åren har ca 34000 personer i Sverige varit sjukskrivna för någon typ av stressreaktion, under det sammanfattande diagnosnumret F.34, anpassningsstörningar och svår stress, som i verkligheten kan rymma allt från lättare till mycket svåra tillstånd.Ett av de formulär som används vid arbetslivsrehabilitering är Maastricht Vital Exhaustion Index. Det används både vid kartläggning och vid värdering av insats. Det består av 23 frågor rörande förekomst av symtom och besvaras enligt 3-gradiga svarsalternativ (Ja=2, Vet ej=1, Nej=0). I en redan identifierad sjuk grupp har det visat sig att höga poäng (=hög stressnivå) på denna skala gav ökad risk för såväl hjärtinfarkt, depression samt stroke.SyfteAtt kartlägga en personalgrupp enligt Maastricht Vital Exhaustion Index hos personal vid ett bank/finansbolag med kontor i Stockholms innerstad. Metod och undersökt gruppStudien som var en enkätstudie gällde anställda som var i tjänst vecka 7 och 8 2008.Enkäten utdelades till 46 personer.

The aim of the thesis is to identify and investigate central themes in two video artworks, Poliisi and Pink Ball, by Swedish artist Annika Larsson. Moreover it is an investigation of the configurations of violence, and an enquiring whether these works have a social-minded intention.Elements in scenery, framing and narration are analysed with the term ?crystalline regime? (régim cristallin), described by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, which defines the artificial as opposed to the purely representational. Processes within the narrations of the two works are analysed as rituals, which leads to an investigation of an internal sign-system and to the question whether the rituals in these works have a function. Theory by French philosopher Georges Bataille is used to analyse the ritual with no external purpose, which aims at an intense experience of life.

AbstractThe purpose of this paper was to examine preschool teacher?s thoughts about using Manual Signs as Alternative and Augmentative Communication as an aid for children in/with communication disabilities. The method I?ve used in the survey is qualitative interview.The three interviewed preschool teachers use Manual Signs foremost for those children who have a poorly developed spoken language. Manual Signs are used as a complement to the spoken language and the preschool teachers use it to increase the children?s power of concentration.

AbstractThis essay investigates what knowledge members of staff in day care centres for grown up people with disabilities have about Alternative and Augmentative Communication, AAC (in Swedish, Alterantiv och Kompletterande Kommunikation, AKK). Day care centres are working places for people with disabilities who do not have the possibility, caused of their disability, to work in ordinary works in the open market.To communicate with other people is a human right for all people even if you have a disability, even if you don?t have a spoken language or if you, because of your disability, have difficulties to understand a spoken language. When you don?t have a spoken language you need different ways to be able to communicate, make choices and take part in activities in the community.

This thesis strives to demonstrate my increasingly phenomenological approach to musical composition in relation to the extensive body of musical works connected in different ways to the poetry collection ORDER by the Swedish author and play-wright Lars Norén. The hand, the touch, the voice, the space (environment) and its philosophical implications are scrutinised from a poetic perspective (my poetics). The question of language (the word), the sign (text), sound/noise/music and its immanent bodily qualities are focused and questioned in my own work as well as in primarily two case studies of the music of Pierluigi Billone (1960-) and Morton Feldman (1926-1987).The text reflects the emancipatory process my music has undergone the last 4- 5 years: moving away from language and text (representation) to body and sound, although preserving and nurturing the extended idea of the sign (as signification of sound and body) as a possible embodied vehicle in my composing and artistic thinking.The reader is invited through the extensive use of sketches and work methods to witness and follow this process as a manifestation of the ?doing? rather than the presentation or construction of an analysis in an academic sense.The thesis offers no solution and it fails to encapsulate all of the so-called ORDER-MUSIC (the music that is connected with Norén's collection of poetry) Instead it proposes a possible way of ?opening? the process to a basically phenomenological methodology inside the musical field of score based chamber music..