When accidents occur, citizens often are the real first responders. This has been acknowledged and studied from an international perspective, particularly in relation to large crises and disasters, but remains relatively unstudied from a Swedish perspective. This thesis takes its point of departure from people who have been emergency callers or witnesses to traffic accidents, studying their actions and interactions at the scene of an accident in terms of boundaries, positioning and emergence. The aim of this thesis is to study how people’s actions in a specific situation are affected by their interactions with both real and imagined others and how their actions are affected by the spatial context. The thesis consists of four individual studies that relate differently to the main aim of the thesis. The first study focuses on first responders’ options to act in a place that simultaneously is the workplace of emergency personnel: the incident site. This study shows how first responders’ options to act are governed in large part by their interaction with emergency personnel and their boundary practices at the incident site. In this study, we apply theories of boundary practices from Nippert-Eng and the concept of boundary work from Gieryn to explain how emergency personnel control their place of work through boundary practices and through that process control those first responders who are present at the site. In other words, people’s actions at the incident site are affected by both the social and the spatial context. The second study focuses on a limited selection of first responders: those who have placed emergency calls. Through interviews with callers and transcriptions of their emergency calls, this study explores how the callers frame their decision to stop and place the call through different presentations of self. These presentations are constructed through moral positioning, in which the callers position themselves and their actions in relation to both real and imagined others. Thus, the callers also construct normative accounts of what is considered a “preferable” and “non-preferable” way to act at the scene of an accident. The third study takes its point of departure from theories and previous research on emergence because they have been used by disaster sociologists to explain how citizens are the real first responders to crises and disasters. Through the concepts of emergent behavior and emergent norms, papers in this research field have argued that people in these situations act according to “new and not-yet-institutionalized behavior guidelines”. In this study, I argue that emergence, in other words, citizens as the real first responders, is also present in everyday emergencies. Through the narratives of citizen first responders, I explore how they frame their actions through different normative narratives. These normative narratives are not necessarily emergent, however. Rather, the interviewees use past experience and presentations of self to justify their actions at the scene of an accident. The fourth study is an ethnographic reflection of the researcher’s place-bounded identity in a field study that revolves around several different places. Rather than focusing on a story of first responders, this study focuses on the researcher’s, i.e., my own, story from the scene of an accident, the fire truck and the fire station. What I have been able to study through these different studies are stories of actions rather than “actual” actions or behaviors. In these stories, it becomes clear that first responders relate to both a social and spatial context as they provide accounts of their actions at the scene of an accident. They relate to a social context because they frame their actions through their interactions with different actors and position themselves in relation to those actors—and in relation to a spatial context. That is, they perform their actions in a place that is someone else’s place of work, with jurisdictional claims of both legitimacy and control. In summary, this thesis contributes a deeper knowledge of how citizen first responders interpret, understand and tell the story of their actions at the scene of an accident. The contribution considers the fact that citizen first responders are something of a “blind spot”, not only in the field of emergency research but also for emergency personnel who do not always acknowledge the experience of first responders at the scene of accidents.

It is important to understand the entire spectrum of somatic variants to gain more insight into mutations that occur in different cancers for development of better diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic tools. This thesis outlines our work in understanding somatic variant calling, improving the identification of somatic variants from whole genome and whole exome platforms and identification of biomarkers for lung cancer. Integrating somatic variants from whole genome and whole exome platforms poses a challenge as variants identified in the exonic regions of the whole genome platform may not be identified on the whole exome platform and vice-versa. Taking a simple union or intersection of the somatic variants from both platforms would lead to inclusion of many false positives (through union) and exclusion of many true variants (through intersection). We develop the first framework to improve the identification of somatic variants on whole genome and exome platforms using a machine learning approach by combining the results from two popular somatic variant callers. Testing on simulated and real data sets shows that our framework identifies variants more accurately than using only one somatic variant caller or using variants from only one platform. Short tandem repeats (STRs) are repetitive units of 2-6 nucleotides. STRs make up approximately 1% of the human genome and have been traditionally used as genetic markers in population studies. We conduct a series of in silico analyses using the exome data of 32 individuals with lung cancer to identify 103 STRs that could potentially serve as cancer diagnostic markers and 624 STRs that could potentially serve as cancer predisposition markers. Overall these studies improve the accuracy in identification of somatic variants and highlight the association of STRs to lung cancer. / Ph. D.

(in English) The aim of this work is to perform an in-depth analysis of the workplace of the children's crisis line - Linka bezpečí, focusing on the work of consultants with repeat callers of this line. The chosen subject was processed by a quantitative method (finding the number of calls with long-term clients on the crisis line during the six-month period, the duration of these calls, the topics that repeat callers bring to the calls on the line, etc.) and the qualitative method - organization a focus group with Linka bezpečí line's staff to find out their potential to work with long-term clients. The main result of the thesis is a summary of the findings, which make the work with the long-term calling clients easy for the workers and which, on the contrary, make it difficult, along with practical tips for practice.