Through comparative and qualitative research method, this dissertation first analyzes the individual values in political freedom and equality emphasized by modern Western individualism, will further discuss collective consciousness in the form of emotional and moral achievements as emphasized by traditional Chinese Confucianism as comparative reference basis and finally lists common grounds and differences between these two. This dissertation researches political thought and philosophy, mainly aiming at the political objectives of argument foundations, essential connotations and achievements in traditional Chinese political thought, illuminates collective sentiment thinking and will analyze and explain the reasons for a lack of Western individualism in traditional Chinese political thought, caused by the environmental conditions created by that thinking. The author hopes to be able to offer a comparison of nature and characteristics of Chinese and Western culture and thinking and a few answers and explanations regarding the problems the Chinese society is facing since it encountered and started to learn from Western democratic political systems more than 100 years ago.

Adopting the view that a virtual community is an influential social entity, this study provides a theoretical framework that identifies a linkage among the individual values of virtual community members, commercial orientation of virtual communities and attitudes towards the information provided by virtual communities. The present study suggests that individual values (i.e., purposive, self-discovery, social and entertainment) influence the selection of virtual communities. The community's commercial orientation (i.e., commercial or noncommercial), in turn, influences the individual attitudes towards the information provided by the communities. Credibility, relevance and empathy are the proposed attitudes that individuals may form towards the information provided in virtual communities. The proposed model provides valuable implications for marketers and business people who want to source virtual communities as viable marketing channels.

The diploma thesis describes the bootstrap method and its applications in the confidence intervals generation, in the testing of statistical hypotheses and in the regression analysis. We present the confidence interval for individual value. Further the method of discrete probability estimation of the categorical quantity is presented, making use the gradient and the line estimate.