Browsing by Subject "tietämys"

Food literacy is a noteworthy topic to be studied due to food’s considerable environmental and health effects. When food literacy and its characteristics are known, food literacy can be used as a tool to improve people’s health and the condition of the environment. Thus, this thesis aims to reveal the extent of food literacy among Finnish upper secondary school students. In this context, food literacy emphasises food-related environmental and health knowledge. Environmental knowledge is understanding of the global environmental impact of food. Health knowledge, on the other hand, is the familiarity with the relationship between excessive meat consumption and Finnish common diseases along with beliefs regarding diets and food products as a source of protein. This thesis also aims to identify to what extent does the food literacy differ based on gender, study year and living area. This study was performed as a quantitative sample survey and the data was collected using an online Typeform -questionnaire. The questionnaire reached respondents from many different Finnish localities, mainly from cities. The final data consisted of 1320 individuals and it was analysed using IMB SPSS Statistics 24 software. The following methods were used to analyse data: frequency analysis, an Independent Samples t Test, a One-way ANOVA, and a Post-hoc LSD test. Gender, study year and living area were used as grouping variables to examine the differences between groups. The results show that the students named school as the main source of food literacy. Moreover, the results indicate that awareness regarding food production, dietary health and proteins increase significantly from the first to the third study year. The students acknowledged food production causing environmental problems and that the share of food in the consumer’s climatic impact is considerable. Nevertheless, the students underestimated the climatic impact of cheese and they were unaware of the more specific characteristics of food’s environmental impacts. They also had food-related environmental misconceptions considering packaging, transportation and meat consumption. Moreover, approximately half or more of the students were aware of the connection between excessive meat consumption and the increased risk of distinct common diseases. Most of the students acknowledged a versatile vegetarian diet as being a healthy choice. The study also reveals that female students had notably higher dietary health knowledge than male students. This Master’s thesis study mainly supports the findings of previous studies on food-related knowledge. The results elucidate the extent, characteristics, gaps and misconceptions of students’ food literacy. These findings may be utilized to improve school education on food literacy, alter misconceptions and fill the gaps of knowledge in pursuit of improving the health of people and the condition of the environment.

The aim for this research was to describe practices for knowledge management and learning processes of case company's customer service. In addition this research examined current challenges and listed development ideas. The aim was to make practices visible in order to develop working procedures. In the context of this research knowledge management processes included knowledge storing and distributing. Learning processes included different learning processes through which people assimilate know-how knowledge. The research questions were: 1. What kinds of practices for knowledge management and learning processes can be found in the customer service? 2. What kinds of challenges can be found in these processes? 3. How the examined processes can be developed? In this kind of customer service context, that is done via phone, it is important to emphasize sales negotiators' knowledge and competences that are essential to ensure customer satisfaction. The data was collected among 6 sales negotiators, which were interviewed with theme-interview. Interviews were recorded and data was analyzed with theme-analysis. The research showed that current practices included many challenging processes and working procedures. Storing knowledge was based on retaining knowledge in people's minds. This was said to be burdening both to the person who searches for knowledge but also for the person who retains the knowledge. There were no singular system for sharing knowledge. Thus knowledge sharing was based almost entirely in face-to-face social interaction. The challenge was based on different levels of basic knowledge but also in the burden of few key persons who retained great amount of knowledge. When it came to learning processes, apprenticeship training of new sales negotiators was considered functional but there was lack of documented material that would have supported the training process. Also trainers' possible lack of competence was seen problematic. The main concern was that wrong knowledge was delivered to new employees. Based on this research it can be concluded that development of customer service practices the following aspects should be taken into account; development of training procedures, processes of storing knowledge, deburdening of key sales negotiators and standardization of procedures. These developmental aspects could be supported by a technological solution in which documented knowledge could be easily retained and shared.