The following study aims to examine how the Swedish journalism portrays the relationship between the Swedish police and the Romani people in Sweden in connection with the disclosure of the registration of thousands of Romani people during the autumn of 2013. The study proceeds from a series of articles written 2013 about what in Swedish media is known as “Registerskandalen” or “Romregistret”. The theories used in the study all originates from Postcolonial Theory and Ethnocentrism, and we used van Dijk's Critical Discourse Analysis for analysing the result. In the end of the study we find that the Swedish journalism portrays the Swedish police's view on the Romani people as negative in comparison to how they view the rest of the majority society in Sweden.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka vad ett antal människor har för åsikter och tankar kring fenomenet tiggeri. Syftet är uppdelat i fyra huvudfrågor: Vem tror informanterna är de som tigger? Hur tror informanterna att tiggarnas livssituation ser ut? Vad tror informanterna är orsakerna till tiggeri? Anser informanterna att tiggeri är ett problem? Det empiriska materialet består information av fyra öppna kvalitativa intervjuer med fyra olika människor i Sverige. Resultatet visar att det finns en slags spänning då informanterna beskrev tiggeri som en känsla av sympati för de som tigger men också att de beskrev egna känslor som kom upp hos dem när de pratar om tiggeri. När informanterna beskrev sin känslor om tiggeri och tiggare, uppdagades kategoriseringar och beskrivningar om vad de tyckte och tänkte. Vidare hade de flesta liknade tankar. Jag upptäckte ett tema av begrepp som kom upp under intervjuerna så som EU-migranter och romer. Informanterna beskrev deras livssituation som jobbig, deprimerande och förnedrande och att de som tigger oftast bor i tält i parker eller i baracker. När de beskrev orsakerna till tiggeri, ansåg samtliga informanter att det hade och göra med det svenska samhället och att tiggeri bör åtgärdas. Informanterna ansåg även att tiggeri är ett fenomen som alltid kommer att finnas. Resultaten av denna studie är gjord i samband med tidigare forskning, och med syfte att väcka nya frågor och tankar om tiggeri relaterat till socialt arbete och människors utsatthet i samhället. / The purpose of this study is to analyse what a number of people think and believe about the phenomenon begging. The purpose is broken down into four main questions: Who are the beggars in the opinion of the informants? What do the informants think the circumstance of life of the beggars looks like? What do the informants think is the cause of begging? Do the informants think that begging is a problem? The empirical material consists of four open qualitative interviews with four different people in Sweden. The results show that there is a kind of tension since the informants described begging as feeling sympathy for the beggars but also that them described feelings arising when talking about begging. When the informants described their thoughts about begging and beggars, the informants categorized and described what they believed. Further on, they had almost similar thoughts. I discovered a theme of conceptions that came up during the interviews like EU-migrants and Romani people. The informants described the circumstance of life of the beggars as troublesome, depressing, and degrading and that the beggars often live in tents in parks or in barracks. When describing the causes of begging the informants agreed on that it had to do with the society in Sweden, and also with the society in the home countries where the beggars come from. The informants think that begging is a problem for the beggars specific but also for the society and begging should be adjusted. However the informants did think that begging is a phenomenon that always is going to exist. I can conclude that the results of this study is done with previous research, and with the purpose to arouse new questions and thoughts about begging related to social work and humans’ vulnerability in the society.

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Between 1664 and 1885 labour in Sweden was regulated by compulsory-service statutes. Able-bodied but idle persons could be compelled to submit to em­ployment as a servant. Compulsory service was part of a larger system of laws and regulations that regulated mobility, settlement, begging, and poor relief, all of which aimed at restricting the labouring poor’s freedom and agency. Some parts of this system had medieval roots, such as vagrancy laws. From the per­spective of the propertied classes, this system of interacting regulations served several purposes, such as fighting idleness, labour shortage, high wages, begging, demands for poor relief, unwanted settlement in the parishes, and geographical movement. The obligation to serve was abolished in 1885. Failure to comply with these service statutes was punishable by being treated as a ‘vagrant’, which could mean being jailed in a house of correction, or simply being ordered to find employment within a specific time. In short, it was illegal to be without work or other means of supporting oneself, such as property. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the social practices of the compulsory-service statutes and related issues such as mobility and settlement. The thesis has dealt with four areas of inquiry: the judicial framework, the policing of ‘vagrancy’, in what situations people were exempt from having to comply with the compulsory service statues, and the identity of the ‘vagrant’. The system for dealing with ‘vagrancy’ has left a large number of sources, and different sources give different images of the poor. This applies most clearly in the case of the Swedish Romani population, the Resande.  The thesis deals with the county (län) of Västmanland during the 1830s. It highlights how the compulsory-service statutes and related vagrancy laws shaped the lives of people and points to how these institutions restricted poor people’s agency and formed their experiences.

The aim of this study has been to examine how a few members of the Finnish and non- Scandinavian Romani subgroups experience their own, and their groups, situation on the Housing- and Labour Market. We´ve studied our respondents’ experiences of discrimination, which difficulties they think there are, what strategies can be used to deal with these difficulties and also their own ideas on how to improve the situation for the Romani people in the Swedish society. This has been done by six individual structured interviews which have been analyzed with concepts from Symbolic Interactionism, including Goffman’s Dramaturgical Role Theory, definition of Stigma and Kelly’s theory of Personal Constructions. Our results show that the respondents either have been victims of discrimination themselves, or have family/friends that have, which has led to adjustments to the expectations of how an employee or a houseguest should be. Our respondents believe that difficulties getting/keeping a job/house are a result of prejudice towards the Romani people and the main strategy that can be used is hiding their ethnic identity on these arenas.  Ideas for improvement include members of the majority population and Romanies working together long term to develop knowledge about the Romani people.

This diploma thesis deals with the issue of the Romani children and their motivation for learning. It is based on a widely believed idea that motivation of the Romani ethnic group in general is different from the vast majority of population. In practice this problem may manifest itself when the children in question are unwilling to learn, they disrupt the educational process, they refuse to go to school and discontinue their further education as such. The theoretical part of the paper is focused on describing Romani people and their particularities connected with the family environment in which the Romani children are brought up and which strongly forms their attitudes. It also determines the amount of motivation for learning as a starting point for success in terms of education. Motivational factors depend on the value of education in the broader socio-cultural context of the Romani minority. The practical part of the thesis is based on the ethnographic research. The purpose of the research has been to analyze motivation of the Romani children for education. The method of observation has aimed to find the answers for the following research questions: To what extent does socio-cultural and completely different historical background reflect the Romani children's motivation for learning? Which are...

In order to gain an understanding of how begging is constructed as a societal problem in the local Swedish social context, the aim of this qualitative study was to investigate a number of municipal begging bans in order to make visible societal attitudes that hide behind written language of begging discourse. The data collection method was text collection, and the material was documents in the form of three municipal begging bans (in municipal regulations). The method of analysis was critical discourse analysis (CDA), a form of textual analysis, and the analytical focus was the written discourse in its social context. The municipal begging bans that were analysed testified to a very high degree linguistically about negative societal attitudes towards begging, and the conclusions that could be drawn on the basis of the results were presented in four summarising themes. These where: disruption of public order, a vulnerability that one does not want to contribute to maintaining, ”we and them” and passivity and criminality. These societal attitudes could be summarized as not our vulnerable/poor = not our problem, and were largely hidden behind references to disruption of public order in public spaces.