The motivation of the study was to explore the problems of families in South Africa who struggle to manage their children with autism and to find out whether they were receiving appropriate assistance. This was done by assessing the needs of the parents of children with autism by means of semi-structured interviews. Through these interviews, the parents were given the opportunity to express what information or recommendations they would like to have available to them. How the parents view their experience, their feelings about these experiences, and the strategies and actions that they take in order to cope with raising their child with autism, is important information. The aim of the study was to explore the problems South African families have so that this may form the base of information supplied to professionals such as psychologists, social workers, and educators thereby assisting in improving service delivery to parents of children with autism. / Social Work / M.Diac. (Play Therapy)

Through literature and personal experience it became apparent that cerebral palsy is a condition that poses physical challenges to the everyday lives of children diagnosed with this condition. Negative feedback from society and significant others in the lives of these children may lead to an emotional imbalance in these children. Although various models for addressing emotional issues in children with cerebral palsy exist, their needs within a therapeutic setting are not addressed. The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of the Schoeman model in therapy with the child with cerebral palsy. The Schoeman model is a therapeutic model that is based on the Gestalt philosophy and is used in conjunction with Gestalt play therapy. Through applying the different aspects of this model the study sheds light on the usefulness of the Schoeman model in therapy with the child diagnosed with cerebral palsy. / Social Work / M. Diac. (Spelterapie)

International students are becoming a more and more attractive group for tourism agencies, and for those responsible for regional development, some study is warranted to explore how one may effectively recognize their preferences, wants, needs, and constraints to draw their attention towards the destination or to experience tourism firm’s offerings specially in this research about their perception about risk, safety and security during their travelling. Perception of risk, safety and security of a tourist destination may create a broader platform of preferences, and associated constraints. Perceived risk is defined as a consumer’s perception of the overall negativity of a course of action based upon an assessment of the possible negative outcomes and the likelihood that those outcomes will occur. Tourism, exclusively international tourism, is highly delicate to safety and security issues. It is one of the enterprise most exposed to changes in the world stage that may produce alteration in tourist behavior. A clearer perceptive of the traveler’s decision-making process and the role of intervening variables are compulsory, notably respecting travel inhibitors, such as risk perception, to assist develop enhanced destination development or recovery strategies. Constructing conditions for tourists to feel safe before and during the trip may be demanding to the success of a destination competing internationally. The current study attempts to fill a gap by exploring risk perceptions of individual international students who engaged in tourism and try to explore the concerned safety measure among them. The findings revealed that the most common risk perception and endeavors were transportation, fraudulent behavior of locals towards tourists, losing valuables, health issues and sexual harassment. However, the international students with experience with travelling themselves gave the safety and security precautions needed to minimize these risks. The safety and security features involve avoiding informal sectors, taking care of personal belongings, being always cautious about the situation happening around, educating themselves about the destination they are visiting, proper health care and proper authority to report any mishaps. After this research it could be understood that international student tourist is concerned about their safety and they would improve the situation of risk they perceive if given the chance to.

The diploma thesis focuses on the topic of reading literacy of pupils at the second period of elementary school. The focus of the thesis is a reflexion of chosen literacy workshops. The thesis is divided into theoretical and practical parts. The theoretical part deals with the basic terms connected to the topic such as literacy, reading literacy and it also describes the method of literacy workshop. The theoretical part includes also the international researches dealing with the reading literacy and with the methods used to develop the literacy. The practical part describes the realization and the proces of chosen literacy workshops based on direct observation and on reflexion of their development. The last parti of the thesis offers the real interviews with the teachers.

Background: Social medias have contributed to big changes in the way firms and customers interact with each other. Due to the great amount of people using social medias, firms have understood the importance of incorporating social medias in their marketing strategy. However, due to increasing competition, customer engagement on social medias has become important. To generate customer engagement, firms must create engaging social media content that is worth the customer’s time and effort. The micro-sized firms are under researched and therefore the authors have chosen micro-sized firms as a study subject and hence the sender of the content. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to describe the key components of creating customer engagement on social medias for micro-sized firms. Methodology: This research took a qualitative approach in a deductive nature with a descriptive purpose and a cross-sectional research design. The need of primary data was collected by conducting seven semi-structured interviews with social media managers- and consultants. Participants were purposely sampled and the empirical findings were coded, concepts were identified and further categorised while trustworthiness was set to be a criterion for the quality of the research. Conclusion: The research provided seven key components of engaging social media content for micro-sized firms and further recommendations on how to implement them in the micro-sized firms social media management. The components are described together with an illustration. Keywords: Micro-sized firms, social media managers, social media, customer engagement, content appeals, social media targeting, social media timing and frequency, qualitative research, semi-structured interviews.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-14T12:36:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 1730516 bytes, checksum: 167ec230d84a25e110ad4386ec5aae74 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-04-20 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The explosive growth of web-based information systems has created various sources and vast quantities of semi-structured data, which need to be indexed by search engines in order to allow the retrieval of documents according to user needs. However, one of the major challenges in the development of indexing techniques for semi-structured data is related to how to index not only textual but also structural content. The main issue is how to efficiently handle branching path expressions without introducing precision loss as well as undesired growth of query processing costs and index file sizes. Several proposals for indexing semistructured data can be found in the literature. Despite their relevant contributions, existing proposals suffer from at least one of the problems related to precision loss, storage space requirements and query processing costs. In such a context, this thesis proposes an efficient, lossless path-based indexing technique (named as BranchGuide) for semi-structured data, which deals with a well-defined class of branching path expressions. This well-defined class includes branching paths that allow expressing parent-child dependencies between elements in which may be imposed restrictions over the textual value of attributes of such elements. As evinced by experimental evaluation, the adoption of the BranchGuide technique results in excellent query processing time and generates smaller index file sizes than a structural join indexing technique. / O surgimento de sistemas baseados na Web tem gerado uma vasta quantidade de fontes de documentos semi-estruturados, os quais necessitam ser indexados por sistemas de busca a fim de possibilitar a descoberta de documentos de acordo com necessidades de informação do usuário. Entretanto, um dos maiores desafios no desenvolvimento de técnicas de indexação para documentos semi-estruturados diz respeito a como indexar não somente o conteúdo textual, mas também a informação estrutural dos documentos. O principal problema está em prover suporte para consultas com ramificação sem introduzir fatores que causem perda de precisão aos resultados de pesquisa, bem como, o crescimento indesejado do tempo de processamento de consultas e dos tamanhos de índice. Várias técnicas de indexação para dados semi-estruturados são encontradas na literatura. Apesar das relevantes contribuições, as propostas existentes sofrem com problemas relacionados à perda de precisão, requisitos de armazenamento ou custos de processamento de consultas. Neste contexto, nesta dissertação é proposta uma técnica de indexação (denominada BranchGuide) para dados semi-estruturados que suporta uma bem definida classe de consultas com ramificação sem perda de precisão. Esta classe compreende caminhos com ramificação que permitem expressar dependências paifilho entre elementos nos quais podem ser impostas restrições sob os valores de atributos de tais elementos. Como evidenciado experimentalmente, a adoção da técnica BranchGuide gera excelentes tempos de processamento de consulta e tamanhos de índice menores do que os gerados por uma técnica de interseção estrutural.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Semi-Structured Information Retrieval is an intermediate way to retrieve information between Textual Retrieval and Structured Retrieval (typical in relational database systems). In structured retrieval systems, users generally know the available data structure and query languages, so they can formulate queries that produce more accurate results. In textual retrieval users dont known the data structure and formulate queries with keywords only, which produces not so accurate results. In Semi-Structured Retrieval, users generally dont known the data structure and formulate queries that mix textual search and structured retrieval mechanisms. In this context, the problem of how to improve the results accuracy using the structure inside semi-structured documents appears. Semi-structured data is usually stored as XML documents and can be seen as trees. Internal nodes of these trees have the structure of documents, while leaf nodes contain text. The design of interfaces for users in this context is one of the biggest challenges in semi-structured information retrieval. This occurs especially because the users dont known the document structure and have problems in formulating structured queries. This dissertation presents a proposal and a prototype interface developed to help users in the process of formulation of structured queries. The aim is to increase the precision in the results of the queries. The proposal is validated by experiments involving volunteers users and by comparing the results of textual queries and structured queries made with the help of the interface. The improvement reaches 440% for well structured queries, with a user who knows the interface, and 179.75% for reasonably structured queries, by users without experience to use the interface. / A Recuperação Semi-Estruturada é uma forma de recuperação de informação intermediária entre a Recuperação Textual e a Recuperação Estruturada (típica em sistemas de banco de dados relacionais). Em sistemas de recuperação estruturada, o usuário geralmente conhece a estrutura dos dados e as linguagens de consulta disponíveis, conseguindo assim formular consultas que produzem resultados mais precisos. Na Recuperação Textual o usuário não conhece a estrutura dos dados e formula as consultas apenas com palavraschaves, as quais geram resultados não tão precisos. Na Recuperação Semi-Estruturada, o usuário geralmente desconhece a estrutura dos dados e formula consultas que mesclam buscas textuais e mecanismos de recuperação estruturada. Neste contexto, surge o problema de como melhorar a precisão dos resultados aproveitando a estrutura contida nos documentos semi-estruturados. Dados semi-estruturados são comummente armazenados como documentos XML, os quais podem ser vistos como árvores. Nós internos dessas árvores contem a estrutura do documento enquanto os nós folhas contêm os dados. O projeto de interfaces para usuários neste contexto é um dos grandes desafios na recuperação semi-estruturada. Isso ocorre especialmente porque os usuários não conhecem a estrutura do documento e têm dificuldade na formulação de consultas estruturadas. Este trabalho apresenta uma proposta e um protótipo de interface desenvolvido para auxiliar os usuários no processo de formulação de consultas estruturadas. Pretende-se com isso aumentar a precisão nos resultados das consultas. A proposta é validada por meio de experimentos envolvendo usuários voluntários e pela comparação de resultados obtidos com consultas textuais e consultas estruturadas formuladas com o auxílio da ferramenta. A melhoria atinge 440% para consultas bem estruturadas, realizadas por usuário que conhece bem a interface, e 179,75% para consultas razoavelmente estruturadas, realizadas por usuários sem experiência no uso da interface. / Mestre em Ciência da Computação

Mental illness is one of the major public health issues in Europe and one of the biggest challenges Sweden facing is the growing mental illness among people younger than 25 years. Statistics shows that the self-reported mental illness has increased mainly among young women between 18-25 years. The underlying reasons for the increase in mental illness is relatively unknown, more knowledge is required in this field to develop preventive interventions and strategies. The aim of this study was to examine which thoughts young women have about the future and how those are perceived to affect their mental health. A qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews have been applied. The sample consisted of women who were working or studying and were born between the years 1993-1996. Altogether six individual interviews were carried out and data analysis consisted of a manifest content analysis. The result showed that young woman’s thoughts about the future include both individual thoughts and more general thoughts about Sweden and the world. An optimistic attitude towards their own future were evident while a pessimistic attitude towards Sweden and the future of the world emerged. Thoughts of the future in relation to their own future is a contributing factor to why young girls feeling depressed and anxious. / Psykisk ohälsa är ett omfattande folkhälsoproblem i Europa och en av de största utmaningarna Sverige står inför är den växande psykiska ohälsan bland invånare som är yngre än 25 år. Vid granskning av statistik framgår det att den självrapporterade psykiska ohälsan främst har ökat bland tjejer i åldrarna 18-25 år. Bakomliggande motiv till den ökade ohälsan är relativt okänd, mer kunskap krävs inom området för att kunna utveckla förebyggande åtgärder och strategier. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka vilka tankar unga tjejer har om framtiden och hur dessa upplevs påverka deras psykiska hälsa. För att genomföra studien har en kvalitativ ansats med semistrukturerade intervjuer tillämpats. Urvalet bestod av arbetande och studerande tjejer födda mellan åren 1993-1996. Sammanlagt genomfördes sex enskilda intervjuer och dataanalysen utgjordes av en manifest innehållsanalys. I resultatet framkom att unga tjejers framtidstankar utgörs av både individuella tankar och mer övergripande tankar som inkluderar Sverige och världen. En optimistisk inställning till den egna framtiden framfördes samtidigt som en pessimistisk inställning till Sverige och världens framtid framkom. Framtidstankar i förhållande till den egna framtiden är en bidragande faktor till att unga tjejer känner sig oroliga, nedstämda och ångestfyllda.

Magister Artium (Psychology) - MA(Psych) / This study is about intimate femicide: The murder of a woman by a male intimate partner, namely her husband, boyfriend (dating or cohabiting), ex-husband (divorced or separated), ex-boyfriend or a rejected would-be lover. Intimate femicide has been identified as a dire social problem in South Africa. Although intimate femicide has been researched from a range of perspectives, there is a paucity of research on the discourses that women draw on to understand this crime in the context of South Africa. The primary aim of this study was to explore how women survivors of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) understand intimate femicide. This aim crystallised into the following objectives: 1) to explore how women survivors of IPV construct and understand the term intimate femicide, 2) to ascertain how women survivors of IPV understand the issue of risk of intimate femicide within an abusive relationship and 3) to investigate the discourses that women survivors of IPV draw on to understand intimate femicide. This thesis is couched in a feminist poststructuralist epistemology. Data was gathered through a qualitative approach, using in-depth semi-structured interviews. A Foucauldian discourse analysis was conducted on seven interviews with heterosexual women who had been in violent romantic relationships. In addition, ethical principles of anonymity and confidentiality were strictly adhered to. The findings of this study illuminate the immense difficulties that women experience in attempting to understand their level of risk while in an abusive relationship and the complexities experienced in attempting to understand intimate femicide. The discourse analysis revealed that fairy tale romance narratives present women with the idea that there is always hope for their relationships regardless of abusive circumstances, while dark romance discourses position romantic relationships as naturally abusive and present abuse as an invalid reason to leave a relationship. These justifications, beliefs, and understandings of the abuse hamper women’s ability to understand intimate femicide. This has significant implications for scholarship in general and feminist scholarship in particular. These findings emphasise the need for additional engagement in women’s understandings of intimate femicide - a group that has largely been consigned to the periphery. Moreover, given the excessive rates of intimate femicide in South Africa, it is critical that more research is conducted in order to increase awareness of intimate femicide amongst women in violent relationships.

The purpose of this research project was to explore the experiences of mature women students in juggling the multiplicity of roles they faced during the adulthood stage of life. The lack of literature, particularly on the African woman’s experiences of being a student while also dealing with the roles of being a mother, wife and employee, inspired this research. I explored the women’s experiences using a qualitative approach and semi-structured individual interviews, and did a thematic analysis of the textual data. The average age of the women who participated in this project was 36.8, and except for two of the 10 interviewees, all women were enrolled for a postgraduate studies. The majority of women enrolled for further studies because they wanted to increase their opportunities in the work environment, while one woman did so because of a career change. The stories of the ten mature women students that I interviewed revealed five major themes. In describing their experiences of juggling multiple roles, the mature women students mentioned that they studied while also maintaining a job because of the financial obligations and the lifestyle of their age group. They experienced role strain from the many roles that required an equal share of their time, but managed to cope because they had personal goals to achieve and would not relinquish those. Both congruent and incongruent experiences emerged between work and study, particularly when they could not attribute equal time to work and study. Although they were encouraged and supported by their partners and children, and sometimes also their families and the community, they still had to deal with the lack of support from the institutions where they were enrolled. Extreme tiredness and guilt because of conflicting role demands were found to be most common among all ten women. For the most part the women had to deal with an increase in their role responsibilities and experienced different emotions regarding the influence of studying on family life. By managing their time well they were able to cope and had thus far been successful in balancing their different roles. Above all the mature women student were able to cope with the multiplicity of roles because they had determination, were focused and committed, and wanted to achieve success in their educational goals. Perseverance and dedication to their goals emerged as mature women students’ most powerful tool for coping with multiple roles. / Dissertation (MA (Psychology))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Psychology / unrestricted