In Sweden there are laws and recommendations from The National Board of Health and Welfare about the importance of a user's involvement in and possibility of influencing services directed at them. Even with such good intentions the same board reports that it is hard to know if people experience that they do. The purpose of my study was to examine how professionals can use their knowledge to help users increase their sense of influence in services that they use. My focus has been on adults with neuropsychiatric disabilities within the autistic spectra, such as Asperger syndrome, and on the professionals working with them. The specific problem among people with neuropsychiatric disabilities is a lack of social skills.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate in what ways librarians and schoolteachers can co-operate and combine their professional skills in order to help and motivate children with reading and writing disabilities, and how audio books can be useful in this work. The main source of information is interviews with teachers from ten schools in the province of Scania, southern Sweden. Those teachers, their schools and their local libraries all took part in a project spanning from 1993 to 1996, aiming at increasing the use of audio books in combination with the corresponding printed versions in work regarding the here addressed problem. This study was made with a qualitative empirical method supported by a normative theory belonging to the new institutional theory school. There are no statistical conclusions in the report.

The study has answered the questions to what extent people with disabilities are involved in SVT- and TV4- news reports and how people with disabilities are represented in news reports. The material is based on 140 news items.The study has demonstrated that news reports SVT and TV4 have different grades of misconceptions about disabled people. Disabled people are constantly being reinforced by negative disabling terms, the disability being of central importance for the news broadcast and they still occur in stereotypical depictions. Through the image of disabled people forms the bed-rock on which the attitudes towards, assumptions and expectations of disabled people are based on. They are fundamental to discrimination and exploitation that people with disabilities face on a daily basis, and contributes significantly to their systematic exclusion from mainstream society.

This thesis examines why working time preferences differ between workers and nations, and explains the effect of working time regulation and working time flexibility on negotiating work-life balance. In five separate sections the following working time issues are examined: the number of hours worked by workers in Europe; factors affecting individual working time preferences; how working time preferences are negotiated in the national industrial relations systems of Sweden, France and the United Kingdom; how the institutions of the European Union have influenced working time negotiations through the Working Time Directive; and the benefits and practices available to organisations implementing working time flexibility. Broadly this paper views working time preferences as being a highly personal and influenced by factors such as wages, taxation, culture (national and workplace) and non-work responsibilities. It is argued that negotiating a preferred working time pattern is essential to achieving work-life balance and when such a balance is achieved, workers are more healthy, motivated and committed to their employer. Essentially this provides an incentive for businesses to voluntarily implement working time flexibility beyond the regulatory standards..

AbstractHow do pupils with intellectual disabilities experience participation and involvement in school work? It was a question I had in mind when I was formulating the thesis statement. I wanted to catch pupils? experiences and analyze them from the sociology of childhood. Do pupils want more involvement and what obstacles and opportunities do pupils find to exert participation and involvement?The study is based on six interviews conducted with pupils enrolled in the compulsory school for pupils with intellectual disabilities.

AbstractThe purpose of my study is to compare Sten Rydhs wiew of learning disabilities in mathematics and his education with current literature and research. I want to explore whether the education of ?Mattesmedjan?*, influenced by the Suzuki method, can be the solution for the students with maths problems. ?Mattesmedjan? is a privately-owned school of maths.

My essay begins with a story in which I portray different communicative situations at the preschool unit Myran. The children in my story are at an early stage of development and they all suffer from multiple disabilities which inhibit their ways of communicating. Through my story, I describe how I perceive different communication dilemmas in my work place. A difficulty I cover in my essay is how the educator knows if he or she has interpreted a child correctly when it does not have a verbal communication and therefore is completely dependent on the educators? interpretations of its communication efforts.

Today's labor market is characterized by flexibility. This applies to organizations, forms of employment and working time. Unregulated working time is such an adaptation and the main subject of this essay. The purpose of this study was to investigate the conditions that underpin unregulated working time, in relation to the Swedish legislation and to EU legislation. The intention has been to investigate the work environment impacts of unregulated working time, and what differences there are from a gender perspective.The conclusion is that workers who enter into agreements for unregulated working time have significantly different terms from traditional workers.

AbstractThe aim of the study was to examine how a school team works with formative assessment in compulsory school for pupils with intellectual disabilities. The study had a particular focus on formative assessment in relation to pupils with moderate and severe intellectual disabilities. Since there is a lack of research within the field of formative assessment and pupils with moderate and severe disabilities this study may contribute to new knowledge in this field. A sociocultural perspective has been used as a theoretical framework. A central concept in the sociocultural perspective is that people develop knowledge in interaction with other people and that communication and language is important.  The methodical framework was inspired by an ethnographic approach and the empirical material was concocted by participatory observations and by interviews.

Title: Collaboration in BoDa-units. A qualitative study about collaboration regarding people with disabilities. The purpose of this thesis was to internally examine the cooperation between different professions in municipal BoDa-units. By doing a qualitative study using focus-group-interviews in three municipalities, we were able to examine the personnel?s experience of cooperation issues and opportunities in BoDa-units.

The focus in this paper was on managers in the middle position in the care of the elderly and people with disabilities. The aim was to develop knowledge about the conditions of work among managers in the middle position and what they characterized as good leadership and which strategies they used in their work. The empirical data consisted of nine qualitative interviews with managers in the middle position in the municipality of Halmstad.The frameworks that mainly limited the middle managers' discretion were laws, political regulations and most of all it was the allocated budget. Their discretion was found closer to the operation such as working methods, recruitment and changes in job schedules. The middle managers spent the majority of their working hours with personnel administrative work and that they often had to prioritise among their tasks.

A QUALITATIVE STUDY ON THE EXPERIENCE OF ESCORT SERVICE UNDER THE ACT (SFS 1993:387) SUPPORT AND SERVICE FOR THE DISABLED The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of escort service under the Act (SFS 1993:387) concerning Support and Service for the disabled (LSS) for self-determination, participation and equality of living conditions. In the results of this study appears that the escort service fulfills its role in breaking the isolation of persons with disabilities. It gives a picture of the escort service is much more than to break the isolation of people with disabilities. The aspects that emerges is that escort service gives persons with disabilities the opportunity to develop their independence, increase their self-esteem and broaden their frames of reference through increased participation in community life. All users report that they experience autonomy in the choice and order of activities within their grant initiatives.

Background:Patients with mental disabilities are more prone to somatic illnesses than the general public. Unhealthier lifestyles and side effects of medication might be causes of conditions that lead to diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and premature death. According to the Social Board patients with mental disabilities receive poorer treatment than patients with only somatic diagnosis.Aim:The aim of the study was to describe nurses' experiences to identify, assess and manage somatic symptoms and problems within the psychiatric care.Method:The study is based on interviews with 12 nurses working in psychiatric outpatient and inpatient care. A qualitative content analysis was chosen.Result:The nurses performed nursing through talking, blood sampling and measuring for example blood pressure. They followed up side effects of medication.

This study aims to examine how families that during a long time have lived with neuropsychiatric disabilities have experienced their contact with different authorities. The study builds on qualitative interviews with two young people and five parents, from four different families. Focus in the paper lies mainly on the families' experiences of the school and different care sectors.The result shows that there is a great number of aspects as lack of information, lack of knowledge, dislodges between different authorities lack of support from school and care sectors, incorrect medication and shortage of long-term plans for treatment, which the families experienced as problematic. These aspects have also brought dramatic consequences that have strengthened the disabilities' negative effects.The result also shows that the parents are very active and bears a great responsibility for the child's health. The parents are in large extent alone in search for care, arranging meetings, searching for information, taking care of the children's medication etc.

The purpose of this thesis is to determine how well a student is prepared as a future librarian at BHS in Borås, when it comes to serving individuals with hearing disabilities at the libraries. The theory and combined methods is that of discourse theory, interviews and Webb searches. The source material for this thesis comprises course material from 2002 and 2003, with the main focus on the spring term 2003 and on what is called the users perspective användarperspektivet. The study is divided into two parts: firstly, to determine the students expected knowledge and his/her future professional identity through this knowledge. The user groups that were mentioned to the students during the education were also linked to the students knowledge.