The purpose of this thesis was to increase the understanding of Swedish consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions of functional food for marketers by using the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). It was discovered that previous research conducted in Sweden concerning functional food centered largely on motivational factors for adoption, and perception of the health claims made by these products; however there was a lack in research concerning purchase intentions and a use of theory to evaluate both attitudes and purchase intentions. Both qualitative and quantitative research methodology were utilized in this thesis. The qualitative research data consisted of 14 short interviews designed to elicit beliefs about purchasing functional food. The quantitative research data was gathered using a questionnaire specifically designed for the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). A total of 257 responses were received from students, employees, and members of the general public. The results from the questionnaire revealed that Swedish consumers had slightly positive attitudes towards purchasing functional food and neutral intentions to purchase functional food. The results from the interviews revealed that amongst other things, Swedish consumers believed that functional foods provide beneficial health benefits, but they are quite expensive. Doctors and family were viewed as important when considering the purchase of functional food. And price and knowledge were viewed as controlling factors of whether or not these foods were purchased. The results provided by this thesis will be helpful to marketers of functional food as they plan marketing related activities aimed at Swedish consumers

Using focus group methodology, this research identifies the behavioural, normative and control beliefs associated with consuming a local diet. Using these findings as a platform, a questionnaire was developed to quantify attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control, the theoretical constructs of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). In addition, moral obligations were measured for the first time in relation to local food consumption in an extended TPB model. The sample consisted of 114 individuals consuming various levels of local food in the Austin, TX area. Results indicate that perceived behavioural control and moral obligations had both a direct effect on intention to consume local food, as well as an indirect effect on intention, which is mediated via current behaviour. Dietary analysis was conducted using an online dietary assessment tool, the National Cancer Institute's Automated Self-Administered 24-hr recall. Between one and four recalls were collected from participants and a mean Healthy Eating Index (HEI) score was applied. Findings suggest that while controlling for age, sex, income and education, as the amount of local food in the diet increases, the total HEI score and the Dark Green and Orange Vegetables and Legumes (DOLs) component score also increases. In addition, the Saturated Fat component score increases, indicating lower intakes of saturated fat are associated with higher local food intake. This suggests that saturated fat in the diet is being displaced by local vegetable intake, particularly DOLs.

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the incidence of instability in out-of-home care for children and how children experience this instability. The dissertation consists of two studies. The quantitative study is based on an examination of social work case files of 213 children who began 317 placements in 2005 and 2006. Every placement was followed for a maximum of two years. The qualitative study used interpretive phenomenology as method and is based on interviews with 12 purposively selected children who had experienced placement breakdown at some point during 2011 or 2012.   The quantitative study shows that the majority of children had experienced problems in their home environments prior to placement. Most commonly reported was parents’ substance abuse or mental health problems. Preschool and schoolchildren were more often placed in care due to neglect whereas adolescents were placed because of their own behavior problems or relational problems. Children in the qualitative study described that the problems they experienced prior to coming into care continued to influence them during their time in care. The quantitative study indicates that different types of instability are associated with children’s ages. That is, breakdown was most common for adolescents whereas preschool children more often experienced planned placements changes. Children in the qualitative study gave similar descriptions of planned placement changes and placement breakdown. The difficulty with which these children experienced the move from a foster family or group home depended on their relationship to caregivers. Therefore, planned placement changes from foster homes or institutional settings in which children reported being happy were described as more difficult than breakdown in placements from which children wanted to move. In children’s views, breakdown was caused by mismatches between them and caregivers, mistreatment in care settings, and their own behavior problems. However, children explained that when social workers did not listen to them, behavior problems in the form of running away, self-harming or behaving badly, were the only way of ending placements in which they were miserable. All children in the qualitative study described a wish for close relationships with consistent adults and an opportunity to feel that they belong somewhere. These fundamental needs were difficult for them to have satisfied due to their parents’ problematic life histories, instability in care which repeatedly placed children in new care situations, and a lack of continuity of social workers.

Objectives. The purpose of this study is to determine whether or not the mainstream reproductive rights organization Planned Parenthood of the Atlanta Area (PPAA) considered reproductive justice issues typically advocated for by non-traditional reproductive rights organizations. Methods. This research was a qualitative content analysis of discourse internal to PPAA (meeting minutes) and discourse communicated to the public externally via print media channels. Results. A total of 105 documents were analyzed as part of this study: 57 meeting minutes and 48 press clippings. The analysis revealed that, internally, PPAA did consider reproductive justice issues but that this was not directly communicated to the public via print media channels. Most noticeably, press characterizations of PPAA were slanted too heavily on the organization’s proliferation of population control as a goal and did not give enough consideration to its consideration of racial diversity.

This thesis considers the social, economic and ideological climate in the German Democratic Republic in the last decade of its existence (the 1980s) when excessive labor demands lead the country to import tens of thousands of “contract workers” from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Focusing primarily on theoretical contradictions in GDR socialism, and their impact on the day to day lives Vietnamese workers, I will argue that ideologically freighted pronouncements of “socialist fraternity” with Vietnam functioned to obscure the true, economic reasons for labor importation.

Swedish households are getting deeper in debt and house prices keeps on rising. This is what happened in USA and it was one of the major causes of the recent financial crisis. To avoid a similar crisis in Sweden we think one part of the solution is to make sure that those who are students today and soon will get jobs, buy houses, take loans etcetera have necessary knowledge to do so. Students’ saving is an area that almost completely lacked researchers’ attention, and one goal with this thesis is to point out why it’s an important subject and to increase interest among other researchers. We want to give other researcher a foundation to start from, to give an idea of what students saving looks like, so they can continue to explore this important subject. Our research is using theories developed on private saving in American households as a background, and two psychological theories, The theory of planned behavior by Ajzen (1991) and Self-determination theory by Deci and Ryan (2000) as a foundation. This thesis primary focus is on researching students attitude towards saving, students attitude towards stocks and students motivation towards saving. This is researched by distributing a Likert Scale based questionnaire to two groups, business students and technical energy students, a total of 133 students. The answers were collected in two classrooms and all students agreed to fill in the questionnaire leaving us with no non-response bias. The result was very positive and quite surprising. A majority of the students in our study have a positive attitude towards saving, a slightly positive attitude towards stocks and they are motivated to save. Our conclusion is that although the result is positive students saving and students knowledge about saving can be further improved by more education.

Due to the increased number of niched retail banks in Sweden, the competition for the customers has become severe. Bank customers in the Swedish bank market tend to stay with their bank. The challenge of how to manage to attract new customers is a central part of the retail banks’ management tasks. The research area on which we have been focusing on is the area of consumer behavior. We have been focusing on student switching behavior of financial services provided by retail banks in general and ICA banken in particular. To strengthen the practical connection, we choose to focus on the case of ICA banken. Our objective was to investigate which predictors that affect switching intention and investigate how these predictors affect students’ switching behavior, which in the extension will contribute to how retail banks can work towards manage these rising issues. We formulated the following research question: How do the predictors of switching intention affect switching behavior in the retail banking context? Our purpose was to investigate the predictors of switching intention and their effects on switching behavior in the retail banking context. The study was performed with a quantitative method and a deductive approach. By using a convenience sampling technique, we collected the data electronically. The population examined was the student segment at Umeå University. Our questionnaire was constructed with the theoretical chapter as framework, and the discussion, conclusion and practical implications are based on our empirical findings. Our study was geographically limited to Umeå University. The ability to generalize our findings was also limited, due to our chosen sampling technique. We reached a conclusion that the greatest predictor of switching intention was attitude towards switching. Additionally, the greatest predictors of switching behavior was a combination of attitude towards switching and customer satisfaction. Our practical implications consisted of the recommendation for retail banks to focus on developing marketing strategies that would bank customers more positive towards the act of switching bank in order to attract new customers. Our findings showed that bank customers in general were neither negative nor positive towards the act of switching bank. For ICA banken we gave three proposals; to attract new customers, to transform customers that only partly use the bank to customers that use ICA banken for the majority of their financial transactions and to maintain current customers. These actions are made by managing customer satisfaction, brand image, the relational investment between ICA banken and customers, and subjective norms since these should affect the attitude towards switching bank.

Denna studie grundar sig på en enkätundersökning av 59 gymnasieungdomars intentioner till att inom de närmaste 5 åren påbörja studier vid högskola eller universitet. Undersökningen är baserad på Theory of planned behavior och syftar till att testa teorins pålitlighet i att besvara vilken av de socialt betingade bakgrundsfaktorerna attityd, subjektiv norm och upplevd beteendekontroll som utgör den bästa prediktorn för undersökningsdeltagarnas intentioner. Därtill undersöks dessa faktorers samband med föräldrarnas utbildningsnivå. Theory of planned behavior visade sig vara ett reliabelt mätinstrument gällande studiens övriga frågor, där den upplevda beteendekontrollen och den subjektiva normen utgjorde signifikanta prediktorer gällande undersökningsdeltagarnas intentioner. Därtill påvisades samband mellan föräldrars utbildningsnivå och deltagarnas intentioner samt subjektiva norm. Författaren menar att studier likt denna ger ett värdefullt bidrag till det viktiga arbetet med att förverkliga den svenska skolans likvärdighetsmål.

De flesta organisationer är idag målstyrda där måluppföljning sker genom resultatbaserade styrsystem. Utvecklingen av styrsätt och styrsystem har gått från regelstyrning till fokus på prestationer. Tidigare studier visar att inre motivation skapar bättre attityder till arbetet. Det leder till bättre prestationer om medarbetaren känner delaktighet och får regelbunden återkoppling. I uppsatsen undersöktes hur medarbetare upplever att mål- och resultatstyrning påverkar motivationen och arbetsutförandet i en bankverksamhet, samt hur detta tar sig i uttryck i handling. Fyra intervjuer med anställda och två informativa samtal med chefer genomfördes på två bankkontor. Resultatet analyserades i teman formade ur det empiriska materialet. Prestationsjakt, kundnöjdhet och tekniska problem är faktorer som påverkar motivation och arbetsutförande. Individanpassade och sporrande mål, tydliga system och återkoppling visade sig i den här studien vara förutsättningar för en väl fungerande mål- och resultatstyrning. Studiens bidrag till ett relativt outforskat område, är att synliggöra och öka förståelsen för attityder till mål- och resultatstyrning ur ett medarbetarperspektiv.

Purpose This paper is to discuss social respsonsibility of SMEs in Taiwan through ISO 26000. The main purpose of the study is to explore the relationship between Prin-ciples of social responsibility of cognition, implementation and self-regulation ISO 26000 from the behavior of perspective. Study Design This paper is base on framework of ISO 26000. The scales of "Principles of social responsibility," "Political Pressure", "Economic Attitude", "Fundamental prac-tices of social responsibility" and ¡§Social responsibility core subjects¡¨ are developed. This study maps the relation between the scals through a Taiwan survey of 266 SMEs. Using factor analysis, path analysis and mean tests for statistical analysis. Findings SMEs in Taiwan have highly recognized carrying out SR. The study finds that SMEs have higher awareness of social responsibility, their implementations of social responsibility are better. Implications and contributions This paper draws the linkage between ¡§awareness of social responsibility, ¡§so-cial responsibility behavior¡¨ and ¡§self-regulatory ISO 26000¡¨. The relationship is positive. This provides the government a way to promote social responsibility. ISO 26000 is the most influential initiative in CSR area in recent years, this study adopted the structure of social responsibility indicators, can provide business information and make their awareness of social responsibility better.