Are individuals that trust strangers more likely to have children, and can they be expected to have more children than their lower trusting counterparts? This article assesses two perspectives that hold this as a likely outcome. One perspective has trusting individuals as more likely to hand over the care of their children to strangers, thereby reconciling work and family dilemmas for women. In the Five-Factor Model of Personality, trusting individuals increase their odds of parenthood through several paths, including better relationship quality and outward behavior. The two perspectives also suggest different macro-level conditions for the associations. The former maintains that trust is more important for fertility in high trusting countries and where women have a high share of highly educated. The latter holds that trust is more important in low trusting countries. It also suggests that men benefit more from being trusting. This article tests these two perspectives quantitatively using a sample of eight countries that participated in the Generations and Genders Survey. The method being logistic regression with a longitudinal design. The second perspective found most support from the analysis. A positive significant association between trust and the likelihood of parenthood was more clearly found among male respondents. This result suggests that researchers on fertility and personality can be recommended to include generalized trust in their statistical models.

Wireless mobile internet market is still an unprecedented, uncaptured territory for cellular service providers. The shortage and high cost of downlink data bandwidth in a cellular network has remained a huge factor for the slow growth of data services in mobile devices. Although there has been a significant evolution in telephony infrastructures in form of 3G and 4G systems, the potential of high speed ad hoc network for sharing cellular spectrum have not been realized to its full potential. Like (e.g. Verizon) users can share voice minutes with friends, there is a potential for sharing the unutilized cellular bandwidth among friends to increase net data speed. In a scenario like a football stadium where people visit in groups, although a lone phone cannot stream a high quality replay video, unused cellular bandwidth of proximate friend’s devices can automatically be used in real time to view the replays. An available secondary ad hoc network such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth in phone can be used for sharing this cellular bandwidth. Thus, we propose BuddyShare, a novel social-based automatic bandwidth sharing overlay platform on short range ad hoc devices to increase net data speed. The motivation stems from the fact that the location of mobile users tends to be clustered to form “people hotspots” such as conferences, stadiums, stations, buses and trains. For example, in a scenario like a football stadium where people visit in groups, although a lone phone cannot stream a high quality replay video, unused cellular bandwidth of proximate friends’ devices can automatically be used in real time to view the replays. Our work creates an overlay on horizontal ad hoc network to enable users to form a group among socially trusted members who can collaboratively share their data connections. Social trust is automatically derived from social relationships obtained by mining mobile-phone behavior pattern. This work aims to improve the overall utilization of the data connection, and increase the data rate of individual users without compromising their privacy and unauthenticated usage. The user privacy is preserved by using the bandwidth resources of only socially trusted member of the user, which also guarantees against unauthenticated exploitation of expensive bandwidth. Our proposed work promises to deliver win-win situation to users, content providers and service providers. The advantages of users are: 1) Increased data rate for the same cost.2) Secure and trusted overlay based communication for sharing resources. The advantages for the service providers are manifold: 1) Customer increase: More customers will avail the data plan due to social influence. 2) Customer retention: [18] Customers part of the social-cum-adhoc network are least likely to leave the network.3) Group subscription: Service provider can get bulk subscriptions as collaborative groups increase data rate. In this work, we address some key technical issues of developing a socially aware overlay collaborating medium. Some of the addressed functionalities associated with the overlay formations are group discovery, creation, management and actual data distribution. This proposal also accounts the computation of social trustworthiness by using standard social networking analytics. We also account the several key technical challenges associated with management of overlay on mobile nodes and trust computation using abstract social network. In order to verify the usefulness of BuddyShare, we collected realistic datasets from various sources (questionnaires, mobile device logs, social networking portal) and conducted analyses and simulations on it. The analyses concluded that sample users from the dataset shared sufficient social trustworthiness. The real events from the datasets were captured in the simulations. These simulations showed that, by using Bluetooth as a horizontal ad hoc medium, an user can scale his data speed three times on average for sufficient duration per day. This thesis achieves the following objectives: 1) It presents a comprehensive design for an overlaid social based internet sharing platform called BuddyShare. 2) It presents a social analysis to validate the concept of social trust among users. 3) It delivers a flexible simulation platform to realistically simulate mobile phones with dual interfaces. 4) It presents the results of simulations of real events captured from the device logs of sample users. These results conclude the usefulness of BuddyShare work.

Having a large amount of social and institutional trust is a goal for big democratic states like Sweden. Women have more confidence in the Swedish judiciary, but the trust can vary along different class variables such as gender, age, education level, income level, and political opinion. Using data from the European Social Survey, this paper is a quantitative study of those various class factors in connection to women's trust in the judiciary and the police. By analyzing the variables in both a bivariate standard linear regression and a multivariate regression analysis, this thesis's purpose is to see how the variables collaborate. The data were analyzed with Putnam and Rothstein's theory about social trust, institutional trust, and Bourdieu's class theory.  Results show that not all variables affect a woman's trust in the judiciary and police. Their income and education level have a strong significant correlation with a woman's trust in the judiciary. Only the income variable has a significant correlation with confidence for the police when all variables are used in the analysis. The other variables have little to no correlation with the dependent variables and are not significant.

The evolution of the Internet has connected people worldwide through various social media applications (i.e. Facebook, Instagram). One of which is the trending and controversial social media platform known for its short-form content, TikTok. Additionally, social capital theory pertains to a person's capacity to acquire benefits and valuable goods through meaningful social relationships and group affiliations. This quantitative study explores how the emergence of TikTok impacts social capital theory among young adults. The respondents were 18 to 25-year-olds who use TikTok (N = 490). The findings demonstrate that TikTok cultivates trust in content creators' authenticity and credibility, fostering meaningful interactions and communication dynamics among users. Interactions on TikTok, including likes, comments, and shares, serve as expressions of social support. Users engage actively by creating and sharing short videos, participating in trends and challenges, and directly interacting with content creators. This research contributes to our understanding of digital social interactions and highlights the importance of tailored engagement strategies to enhance social capital in online environments.

This thesis investigates the relationship between generalised trust, heterogeneity and fairness in the EU. High levels of generalised trust have been found to be linked to economic growth and lower transaction costs, while heterogeneous populations have been found to be linked to lower levels of trust. As the world is diversifying on virtually all fronts, a negative relationship between heterogeneity and generalised trust could have dire implications. Other empirical studies have found that heterogenety loses its importance when accounting for societal fairness, speaking to the fact that a fair and democratic society is what determines generalised trust, rather than inter-group differences. But as no such studies have been conducted on contemporary data, it is unknown how the relationship between generalised trust, heterogeneity and fairness holds today. To investigate this relationship, we conducted two-step hierarchical logit regressions on contemporary data, including over 40.000 observations from 23 EU countries. To capture contemporary heterogeneity, we constructed our own fractionalisation indices on this data, as the fractionalisation in- dices most commonly used in previous studies were constructed on data from the 1990s and early 2000s. Our results indicate that both fairness and heterogeneity are significant predictors for generalised trust in the EU. We theorise that this might be because the importance of heterogeneity for generalised trust is context-dependent, only mattering once countries have established a certain level of fairness.

Heightened perceptions of threat, along with the proximity and nature of terrorist attacks, can influence trust dynamics. This dynamic often increases due to heightened social cohesion and collective resilience. This study examines the influence of jihadist terrorist attacks on social trust within communities in the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and Germany. The study hypothesized and theorized about how jihadist terrorism influences shifts in societal trust among the affected populations. Utilizing a "multiple unexpected events during survey" (MUESD) research design and integrating individual-level responses from the European Social Survey (ESS) with event-specific data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). The findings indicate a statistically significant increase in social trust shortly after the attacks, within the first to two weeks. This emphasizes the link between external security threats and internal social cohesion. By providing a nuanced understanding of the resilience responses activated during crises, the study contributes to the knowledge of the socio-political impact of terrorism and offers insights into the shifts in societal trust among affected populations. This research underscores the importance of understanding how societies react to and recover from terrorist threats, shedding light on the dynamics of trust and community solidarity in the face of adversity.

No description available.

“Filter bubble” became one of the most topical words of 2016 and it was even included in the Swedish Language Council's list of new Swedish words that was presented at the end of the year. Referring to algorithmically adapted media bubbles, this phenomenon has particularly been discussed in relation to the UK Brexit referendum and the US election as scholars and journalist argue that the phenomenon, in combination with a fragmented media usage, contribute to a political polarization where each side of the political spectrum is encapsulated in “echo chambers” where opinions and beliefs are repeated like an echo rather than contested and challenged.  In a Swedish context, filter bubbles and echo chambers have mainly been discussed in relation to anti-immigration internet media (AIIM), such as Avpixlat, Fria Tider and Exponerat, as these, through their critique of established journalistic media's (EJM) reporting, appear to constitute one side of a polarized debate around immigration. Through online interviews with 13 users of AIIM, this thesis is aimed at understanding why people consume such media and if the consumers are affected by echo chambers.  Drawing on theories on online echo chambers and radical media critique, the study's findings suggest that even though the respondents’ appear to thrive on a siege mentality where anti-immigration groups are excluded sub-groups with AIIM as their only solution, the respondents' consumption of AIIM (and critique of EJM) is more likely to be based on a combination of a low level of trust in society and strong political (right-wing) beliefs. Furthermore, the study shows that the respondents are likely to be affected by both fragmentation and filter bubbles, but that they are not completely isolated in an anti-immigration media bubbles as they also rely on EJM's reporting in several ways.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if and what effect universal and means-tested welfare programs have on people's (different forms of) trust. This is done through an experimental design in order to be able to demonstrate a causal relationship between the design of welfare programs and the perceived level of trustin individuals. A total of 98 students from Midsweden University in Sundsvall, Sweden, participated in the experiment. The respondents were divided into two experimental groups that had to fill out a trust-survey that was preceded by one out of two separate welfare scenarios – a means-tested one or a universal one. The results confirms the hypothesis that universal welfare programs create a statistically significantly higher universal trust than means-tested programs, but not the hypothesis that means-tested programs create a statistically significantly higher particularized trust than universal welfare programs. At the same time the results show that universal welfare programs create a statistically significantly higher universal trust than particularized trust and that means-tested programs create a statistically significantly higher partizularized trust than universal trust. Finally the results also provide empirical support for the existence of a causal relationship between the design of welfare programs and the level of trust in individuals and society. / <p>2019-06-04</p>

In order to combat the potential threats of climate change, effective policy setting and implementation is crucial. A variable which has been shown to have significant explanatory power on the success of different public policy areas is social capital; a multidimensional concept encompassing social relationships and norms ability to mobilize and facilitate common goals. In the context of climate change related research, the relationship between social capital or some of its components to environmental variables typically is studied in a vacuum. This using factor analysis or SEM, at times in combination with other statistical techniques. In this study a more extensive SEM is investigated, examining the potential effect of social capital on environmental policy attitudes, with the mediating component climate change beliefs. The relationship between all three concepts were found to be significant, with the proportion of the total effect which is due to the indirect effect being 23%. This present study contributes to the literature by introducing the use of more extensive models, taking the complex relationships in the area into account to a higher degree, in order for more efficient policy making.