The aim of the study was to investigate whether the phenomenon of internet drugs should be considered as a moral panic or as a real danger. We have mainly focused on how society perceives young people's use of these drugs. The study is based on a qualitative approach and we have used structured interviews. The interviews were conducted with three different categories of professionals who in different ways have contact with parts of our study in their professional capacity. These are: officials, commentators, and researchers. We chose these respondents to get a chance to see the phenomenon from different perspectives. The study's starting point is moral panic and youth culture. The results and analysis section showed that the professionals had differing opinions on how to consider the phenomenon. The majority of respondents felt that there are elements of both moral panic and real danger; however, there were those who felt it was merely a moral panic, while others felt that it was solely a real danger. With this background, our conclusion is that probably internet drugs should be seen as both - a moral panic and a real danger.

Purpose/aim: This study was performed in order to describe how Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is reported in Swedish daily newspapers during a five-year period. MMA is a relative new sport in Sweden and it is important that the description by the Swedish daily newspapers is accurate and balanced. Then this sport will have the same opportunities to grow as already well-established sports in Sweden.  Material/Method: The material consists of 159 articles from six different daily newspapers gathered from 2006-12-07 to 2011-12-07. Quantitative content analysis is used to investigate how the newspapers describe MMA. The result from this quantitative analysis are then compiled, analysed and discussed by applying theories of agenda setting, framing and moral panic.  Main results: The result shows that the Swedish daily newspapers give a relative neutral and balanced picture in their coverage of MMA but they are affected to a certain degree of moral panic. A neutral framing of MMA was common in the majority of the newspapers. Swedish newspapers have fulfilled the requirements that you should have on balanced journalism. A majority of the articles described MMA with more or less deviancy and therefore made MMA “Folk Devils”. Further there was a consensus among politicians and other right-thinking people that MMA is a threat to and is dangerous to society. The negative reporting of MMA in the daily newspapers is volatile with one-year cycles with start in late 2009. With one quarter of the articles describing MMA as a problem, there is preconception that MMA is likely to have a negative impact on society. There is a disproportion in the reporting of MMA as a threat as “Swedish Sports” have approved MMA as a sport, but still report it as a problem. Therefore there is some kind of moral panic about MMA in Swedish daily newspaper.

Social media has come to play an increasingly important role in today's society. It’s hard in today’s world not to talk about youth culture without mentioning social media. Large amounts of research show that this type of media adversely affects young people, but at the same time, much of this research is written from an adult perspective. Our purpose in this bachelor thesis is to examine and highlight a young persons own perspective on this type of media. We have chosen to focus on younger people that use Instagram between the ages of thirteen through sixteen. The teens are most active on Instagram and it's their main social media platform. We have been studying Instagram accounts and have had interviews with focus groups to explore the culture that prevails on Instagram today. The study shows that young people today use Instagram in order to take advantage of the sharing of their everyday lives. All of the respondents believe that girls and boys use Instagram in different ways. The main difference is that girls seem to care more about their social media lives than boys do. Something that is demonstrated by all the girls is that they use two different accounts for two different audiences. In the discussion, we review why the culture looks like it does and how young people today jointly build rules about how to behave in this social medium. Then we finally arrive to the point that young people today have a better eye on social media than previous researchhas shown. We believe that the concerns many parents have about their children on social media in many cases is excessive. / Sociala medier har kommit att spela en allt större roll i dagens samhälle. Det går idag inte att prata om ungdomskulturen utan att nämna de sociala medierna. Mycket forskning visar att ungdomar påverkas negativt av denna typ av media men samtidigt är mycket av denna forskning skriven ur ett vuxenperspektiv. Vårt syfte med denna studie är därför att undersöka och belysa de ungas egna perspektiv på denna typ av medier. Vi har valt att inrikta oss på ungdomar och Instagram då det är unga mellan 13-16 som är mest aktiva på sociala medier och Instagram är deras största plattform. Vi har genom att studera Instagram-konton och intervjuer i fokusgrupper undersökt kulturen som råder på Instagram idag. Studien visar att ungdomar idag använder Instagram i syfte att ta del av samt själva dela med sig av sin vardag. Samtliga respondenter menar att Instagram används på olika sätt av tjejer och killar. Främsta skillnaden är att tjejer verkar bry sig mer än vad killar gör. Något som styrks av att samtliga tjejer använder sig av två olika konton för två olika målgrupper. I diskussionen går vi igenom varför kulturen ser ut som den gör idag och hur de unga idag tillsammans bygger regelverk kring hur man ska bete sig på detta sociala medium. Det vi till sist kommer fram till är att unga idag har bättre koll på sociala medier än vad tidigare forskning visat. Vi anser att den oro många föräldrar känner över sina barn på sociala medier i många fall är överdriven.

Each new medium of communication that has emerged over the past century and more has generated concern over its alleged negative effect on children. This concern has (in most cases) generated a moral panic, involving campaigning by moral guardians and office spokespeople, calls for greater regulation and subsequent response from the government or designated regulators. Based on continued inconclusive media effects research and debates over adults' and children's rights, regulation has become increasingly problematic. Such questions as how far you should restrict and protect children and how it may be possible to balance protection with rights, are complex and fraught with practical difficulties. These are the kind of questions that regulators have currently to consider. In addition, media convergence and internet technology threaten traditional regulatory structures. Such developments pose a further regulatory quandary. How are regulators attempting to tackle these issues? The thesis attempts to examine this question by exploring how regulators have responded to panics over children's media and whether their attempts have resulted in robust regulatory systems. The regulation systems analysed embrace advertising and obesity, internet chat-rooms and grooming, video games and violence and cinema regulation (the 12A classification). Case studies of these particular areas of current concern show how regulation has developed and how it works in practice, assess whether such regulation is effective and if not, recommends ways in which it could be improved.

The aim of this study is to examine what social workers consider as ‘challenging behaviour’ among adolescents, but also to examine the connection between investigation and intervention in cases where such behaviour is being displayed. The questions of the study are to examine what social workers think of the instrument of assessment BBIC (Children’s Needs in Focus) and how the usage of BBIC affect social workers understanding of challenging behaviour. Moreover, it is a qualitative study and the respondents are all social workers with various length of professional experience who work with making decisions in juvenile welfare cases. The social workers’ opinion about which behaviours among adolescents that were important to intervene in could be understood with what was considered as moral panic for some behaviour. The social workers use of and opinion towards BBIC could be understood in relation to practical theory, tacit knowledge and naïve theories.

The principal aim of this doctoral thesis is to describe the evolution of juvenile delinquency as a social problem during the post-war period. Through its four empirical studies the thesis advocates an understanding based on a contextual constructionism, which represents a compromise position between the objectivist and constructivist perspectives that dominate the field of social problems. The first study (Chapter 2) comprises an analysis of the development of juvenile delinquency in Sweden after 1975. The study is based on official crime statistics, victim surveys, insurance statistics and surveys of the alcohol and drug habits of young persons. The analyses do not allow for an exact determination of the actual trends in juvenile crime, but the indicators suggest that at worst the number of juveniles offenders has remained more or less stable since the mid 1970s, whilst at best the number has diminished. Chapter 3 describes the trends in juvenile crime in ten European countries during the post-war period. The data comprise reports, articles, statistics and personal information from researchers in the countries analysed. The study concludes that in all the countries examined, juvenile crime increases sharply during the first decades of the post-war period (1950-75). After this point, however, these trends level off in most countries. By means of a content analysis of editorials, Chapter 4 deals with the attention focused on juvenile delinquency in the Swedish daily press during the post-war period (1950-1994). The study shows both qualitative and quantitative changes in the way the press portray juvenile crime. Most importantly, 1986 saw the problem of juvenile violence suddenly becoming the dominant issue. Chapter 5 deals with the development of, and the societal response to, violence in schools (1980-1997). A content analysis of a journal for school employees indicates that responses to problems of violence in school underwent a transformation at the end of the 1980s. A study of police reports shows that reported cases of violence in schools have increased considerably. The explanation for this rise is to be found in a change in the size of the dark figure. Besides the response-sensitive official crime statistics, there is very little to indicate any substantial change in the number of juveniles being subjected to, or subjecting others to violence. Chapter 6 discusses the main finding produced by the thesis – namely that there has been a change in the way society reacts to juveniles who commit criminal offences that cannot be explained by the crime trends. Three alternative explanations are discussed: the media and moral panics, the ”racialisation” of the crime problem and the structural crisis of legitimacy faced by the welfare state.

Sociala medier tar en allt större plats i ungdomars vardag, men hur stor plats tar den egentligen. Vi läser i media om hur allt fler ungdomar utsätts för övergrepp, kränkningar och mobbning via sina sociala medier. Vi vill genom vår studie visa hur några ungdomar själva resonerar kring sin användning av sociala medier. Vi vill även lyfta fram deras tankar kring risker och möjligheter som de själva kan se med sociala medier. Vi har intervjuat sju ungdomar från olika områden i Stockholm i åldrarna 15–19 år. Slutsatsen av studien är att ungdomarna kan se att det finns risker med sociala medier. De ser samtidigt att möjligheterna som finns med sociala medier, som till exempel att det är en snabb kommunikationskanal till deras kompisar både nära och långt bort, och att de även har tillgång till nyheter och information från hela världen, överväger riskerna. / Young people’s experience of social media’s risks and opportunities Social media is taking an ever-bigger place in the everyday life of young people, but how much space does it really take. We read in the media about how young people are being subjected to abuse, insults and bullying through their social media. Through our study, we want to show how some young people themselves argue about their use of social media. We also want to elevate their thoughts on the risks and opportunities they can see with social media. We have interviewed seven young people from different areas of Stockholm between the ages of 15-19 years. The conclusion of the study is that young people can see that there are risks with social media. At the same time, they see that the potential of social media, such as giving them a fast communication channel to their friends, both close and far away, and also having access to news and information from around the world, contemplates the risks.

Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur MMA framställs i svensk nyhetsmedia eftersom det historiskt sätt har varit en väldigt omtalad sport och nyhetsmedier tenderar att framställa den väldigt våldsamt, vilket tidigare forskning visar. Studien applicerar två teoretiska perspektiv för att undersöka detta, gestaltningsteorin och moralpanik. Genom en kvantitativ innehållsanalys kombinerat med gestaltningsanalys analyseras ett urval artiklar i från några av de största nyhetsmedierna i Sverige, Aftonbladet, Expressen och SVT Nyheter samt två MMA inriktade nyhetsmedier, Kimura och MMANytt. Detta görs för att undersöka hur olika sorters nyhetsmedier skildrar MMA och på så vis se skillnader ochlikheter för att skapa en helhetsbild av problemet. Resultatet visar att sporten har växt ochblivit mer legitim de senaste åren jämfört med tidigare studier. Trots detta förmedlas ändåen grad av moralpanik i sättet artiklarna ramar in både sporten och sportens utövare på. / The purpose of this study is to examine how MMA is portrayed in Swedish news mediasince historically speaking there has been a stigma about the sport and news media tends to depict it in a very violent manner, which previous studies also shows. The study appliestwo theoretical perspectives, framing theory and moral panic. Through a quantitativecontent analysis combined with a framing analysis a selection of articles are analyzed from some of the biggest sources of news media in Sweden, Aftonbladet, Expressen and SVT Nyheter as well as two MMA focused ones, Kimura and MMANytt. This is done toexamine how different types of news media depicts MMA and, in that way, see differencesand similarities to create a comprehensive understanding of the problem. The results show that the sport has grown and become more legitimate the last few years when compared to previous studies. Despite this a level of moral panic is being mediated in the way articles frame both the sport and its practitioners.

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Previous research demonstrated the phenomenon of moral panics on “dangerous” games mostly from Western perspectives, regarding media violence and deviant behaviour. With the development of media technology, the term “media panic” has evolved from moral panic, representing the debates and fearful emotion from the public when a new media technology has been created. Digital games as a form of media technology have been developed to be widely played on various platforms in recent decades, which have not only brought concerns to the Western but also to Chinese society. The present study will introduce media panic on digital games in China by analyzing news reports from three Chinese mainstream news media: People’s Daily, Xinhua Daily Telegraph and Wen Wei Po (Shanghai). Content analysis will be adopted as the main method to process the news data (N = 445) which are collected from five periods between 2002 and 2020 (2002-2004, 2007-2009, 2012-2014, 2017-2019, 2020). Different phases and features of the panic will be analyzed through the classical moral panic theories of Cohen, Goode and Ben-Yehuda, and the media panic theory of Drotner. Topics of game addiction, Internet cafes, policies on the game industry, cultural innovation, development of esports will be explored when investigating the changing media attitudes toward digital games in the Chinese context.