| Summary: | This Master’s thesis aims to study how the concept “youth” is understood and used in papers and publications about public libraries, written at The Swedish School of Library and Information Science from 1972 to 2002. It does this by answering three questions: Firstly, how is the concept “youth” formulated in papers and publications at SSLIS from 1972 - 2002? Secondly, has the concept “youth” changed in the analysed texts during the chosen time and, if that is the case, what constitutes this change? And, finally, what types of consequences for the understanding of the users can this have for the writers and readers of these texts? Discourse analysis is used to analyze how this concept is constituted, transformed and understood. Among the things studied in the discourse analysis is the interdiscursivity and intertextuality of the texts, as well as the meaning of the word, the wordings and modality of the analysed texts. This analysis has resulted in the identification of three different discursive perspectives: the general education perspective, the youth culture perspective and the market economy perspective. A change can be detected from the general education perspective in the 1970’s to the youth culture perspective in the end of the 1980´s and, with the beginning of the 1990’s, to the market economy perspective of today.
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