Monty

So what have happened since last time? Some things but in overall nothing that would blow your skirt up. The last couple of weeks I have taken it easy and slept for all the days and nights I have missed during Spring 2006. The downside of this have made me feel unproductive, so I applied for a history course in order to get my thinking going. It seems as if I cannot stop thinking since vacation is out of the question. Why is that, you may ask? Because I have to save up as much as possible to enjoy my trip to the US and A during Spring 2008.The best thing about this history course is that I will be able to account for a teacher specialization when I take out my degree. I cannot wait until that day. 2 majors in Computer Science and Psychology, 1 master in Psychology and 3 specialization in Religion, History and English.

Recently I have talked to alot of people about why they feel so ashmed of studying or talking about school. The reason for this problem is fear. The fear that other people will think that you do not know anything beside school. If people only knew one better. But you can never expect so much of other people because they judge whether you like it or not before they even have met you. This is how people work, not all of them of course.

Several days ago I paid something called the SEVIS fee to the US Department of Justice. This fee is obligatory in order to enter their Student and Exchange Visitor Program. It took me about 30 minutes to fill in the form and it cost me $100 dollar. What did I get for it? A receipt, nothing more. Is this a moment where you think “what a ripoff!”. Yes, indeed it is. After a couple of minutes I was thinking of what I had done and came to the conclusion:

So it is not enough that USA is taking all oil from my home country, now I am giving them my money for free as well.. good work son!.

I sure hope it will be worth it. My parents are in Paris right now, yes I do want to be there as well, but my time will probably come. And I am stuck in Växjö, good old Växjö. A friend of mine showed me her pool in Barchelona some day ago and I just wanted to go to the airport for the next flight to Barchelona. Hopefully this thought will not be far away from realistic. Anyhow, more to come soon.

Almost forgot, I would like to show you Harry the hampster. Be careful, after a while my chest started to hurt as much as I was laughing. Enjoy!

That’s right. Today I went on another exciting adventure together with the Psychology Department at College of Kristianstad. Went up 04.30 am and it was one of the earliest days that I have ever woken up, but I did not know by then that this would be the best day of June. After I exercised for 30 minutes, I took a shower, put my clothes on and packed my laptop to head of to the bus. Suprisingly I met one of my friends who studied in my psychology class during Spring 2007. Did not think anyone was up so early as myself, after some small talk he told me he was heading toward Enköping where his parents live.

He is such a great guy. On the train to Alvesta we talked alot about the admission for the Police Academy at Vaxjo University and I was happy when he told me that he passed through to the physical tests which is test 2 out of 4. Let’s hope he pass it and gets to the next level. He asked me if I was considering to apply to the Police Academy but I answered that I had slight change of plans since I am going away to the USA during entire 2008.

Oh, yeah. Did I tell you about it? I thought I was just going to be in Wisconsin University - La Crosse during Spring 2008, but now I got a possibility to stay at Connecticut University during Fall 2008 to write my Master thesis. Well, maybe I told you that before, but here it goes again. While being in the USA I am going to take my Master in Psychology and hopefully it will open up a door for the PhD education.

However, I came to Hässleholm at 07.18 and there was suppose to be a train headed to Kristianstad at 07.29, sure. Everyone who have travelled with the Swedish Railroad company SJ know how good they are. Exactly! But after a phone call I had my appointment, with Bo Persson, changed. We were going to a small town called Kivik, which is a very small town in a place called Österlen in south east Sweden.

After some presentation we ate dinner together, best dinner I have ever eaten in a long time, below you can see some pictures of me together with people from the psychology department.

And here is another view of myself and to the right, professor Georg Stenberg. To my left, Dr. Elia Psouni, who is from Greece. A really interesting person to exchange thoughts with, also a bit like me, very curious!

So what did I do there among these people? That is the final question to ask. I was invited by professor Georg Stenberg to inform about psychological experimental instruments which can be used through the web. I spoke of web techniques such as PHP, MySQL, Flash, XML and Ajax. I also talked a bit about ActiveX control and how one can develop tools which measure the respondents response time to a certain stimuli. This is based on the IAT method.

During my presentation I took into account certain software dealing with these kind of issues and hopefully for some time to come we will be able to make this realistic. Another thing is that professor Georg Stenberg offered to be my supervisor during my Bachelor Thesis in Psychology which made me very happy. I really like how he thinks and how I developed my scientific ability since I met him!

On my way home, I stopped and bought a special thing for a special someone. I hope she likes it, we’ll see in a couple of days. However, when I was on my way to the train my phone rang and it was one of my best friends since many years back. My dear polish friend! Really enjoyed talking to you, as always. Probably the only person who really understands me and knows what goes on in my rat maze of brain.

Finally home at 20.22 and now its time for rest in order to cope up with the upcoming hard work in my summer course, which happens to be an Education course within my Teacher Education program.

I am all finished up.

Final note: If you want to relax then listen to Above & Beyond - Can’t Sleep (Sonorous Remix), the female voice makes your knees weak and your heart calm.

Finally, after three months of hard work the thesis is finally done. It has been an amazing adventure to write the thesis because this has not only been “another thesis” to write, it was an experience.

The thesis is titled “Attitudes and police visibility” and is written during March to the beginning of June 2007. The 5th of June was the day for the opposition seminar and it went very well. My examiner, Mikael Rennemark, praised me for my proficiency in English and how persistent I was in accomplishing my goal. The purpose of this thesis was to measure whether police visibility affect youths’ attitudes towards the Swedish police force and if there are any attitude differences between the genders.

I used the method IAT (Implicit Association Test) which was developed by Dr. Greenwald from Washington University. In short, this method measure your underlying attitudes which makes it difficult to self-report. This means that the respondents respond faster when the concept and attribute are strongly associated (e.g., flower and pleasant) than when they are weakly associated (e.g., insect and pleasant). Special thanks goes to professor Georg Stenberg for his help with this method.

The results showed that there was no significant correlation for either of my hypotheses but revealed that youths had a moderate positive attitude towards the Swedish police force (d’ = .28). I could probably write alot about the thesis but I hope that you could discover the world of police psychology after your own interest.

Download “Attitudes and police visibility” in full text [PDF document]
Download “Attitudes and police visibility” in full text [Word document]

Feel free to send feedback regarding the thesis.