Department of Education, University of Stockholm. Second year research project, autumn term 2009. The transformation of Swedish officer´s training into an academic professional education – a study of professional identity in alteration. The study is a part of the Research Project; Discussion for collaboration - from vocational training to academic professional education. By Michael Larm The purpose of this study is to analyse in what way the process of transforming Swedish officer´s training into an academic professional education are perceived in terms of professional identity, alteration and synergies. The theoretical framework is based on social constructivism from the perspective symbolic interactionism focusing on notions such as heteroglossin, dialogicality, alterity and selfidentity. The data derives from a qualitative research and the collection of data was made by inviting students and teachers from the Swedish National Defence Collage to Focus group discussions. The discussions are audio-recorded and transcribed in its entirety as close to the oral language as possible. The data is analysed with regard to heteroglossin, dialogicality, alterity and selfidentity, and with regard to professional identity, alteration and synergies based on the transformation mentioned above. The results from the Focus group discussions shows that the participants conception of the process of transforming Swedish officer’s training into an academic professional education and of the term professional identity is closely related to their own field of practice. / Syftet med studien är att undersöka lärares och studerandes uppfattningar om officersutbild-ningens akademisering vid Försvarshögskolan, dess synergieffekter och påverkan på en yrkes-identitet i förändring. Studien utgår ifrån ett socialkonstruktivistiskt perspektiv enligt Bakhtin, Giddens och Wertsch där språket, samtalet, står i fokus för identiten. Studien tar också stöd i ett socialpsykologiskt perspektiv utgående från symbolisk interaktionism utvecklat av Mezirow där fokus ligger på att individen i samspelet med den sociala omgivningen utvecklar sin identitet. Data inhämtas från kvalitativ forskning i form av fokusgruppsamtal med studerande och lärare vid FHS. Samtalen dokumenteras genom ljudinspelning och transkriberas i sin helhet. Insamlade data analyseras med de teoretiska begreppen: Heteroglossin, Dialogicitet, Alteritet och Självidentitet kopplat till identitet, förändring och synergieffekter. Studien visar att deltagarnas uppfattning om den förändringsprocess som akademiseringen för med sig och av begreppet identitet är nära relaterad till aktörens bakgrund och roll i akademin. / Samtal för samverkan - från yrkesspecifik till akademisk professionsinriktad utbildning

The aim of the thesis is to explore socially shared ideas about mental illness in everyday contexts. Drawing on social representation theory, organizations for users of mental health services and self-help groups are regarded as communities where social knowledge is constructed that makes intersubjective understanding of illness experiences possible. In order to investigate such knowledge as a resource in joint construction of meaning, a theoretical model is introduced where a distinction is made between a discursive level of situated ‘representational work’ and an underlying level of sociocultural resources. A focus group study was carried out with 27 participants who label their health problems as anxiety, depression or bipolar disorder, and were members of service user organizations. The focus group conversations were analysed with regard to thematic, interactional and discursive features to answer the questions: 1) how is mental illness represented, 2) how is the mentally ill person represented, and 3) how are others’ views on mental illness represented. The results show how mental illness is represented as a complex phenomenon that is contextualised to a number of frames of reference. Further, the analysis identified different types of resources that are utilized in representational work: local knowledge of the communities, medical concepts, different explanatory models, narrative structures, metaphors and conceptual dichotomies. It also revealed dialogical properties of the representational work that have rhetorical functions for self-presentation as a team performance. The discussion suggests that widely shared resources are put to use in group- and situation-specific representational projects, and that representations that are produced in group discourse can be characterised as ‘polemical social representations’ that respond to a double stigma of mental illness in everyday life where mental illness is regarded as a sign of ‘weakness’ as well as ‘otherness’.