Collaboration and sharing of information are the basis of modern social web system. Users in the social web systems are establishing and joining online communities, in order to collectively share their content with a group of people having common topic of interest. Group or community activities have increased exponentially in modern social Web systems. With the explosive growth of social communities, users of social Web systems have experienced considerable difficulty with discovering communities relevant to their interests. In this study, we address the problem of recommending communities to individual users. Recommender techniques that are based solely on community affiliation, may fail to find a wide range of proper communities for users when their available data are insufficient. We regard this problem as tag-based personalized searches. Based on social tags used by members of communities, we first represent communities in a low-dimensional space, the so-called latent semantic space, by using Latent Semantic Analysis. Then, for recommending communities to a given user, we capture how each community is relevant to both user’s personal tag usage and other community members’ tagging patterns in the latent space. We specially focus on the challenging problem of recommending communities to users who have joined very few communities or having no prior community membership. Our evaluation on two heterogeneous datasets shows that our approach can significantly improve the recommendation quality.

Collaboration and sharing of information are the basis of modern social web system. Users in the social web systems are establishing and joining online communities, in order to collectively share their content with a group of people having common topic of interest. Group or community activities have increased exponentially in modern social Web systems. With the explosive growth of social communities, users of social Web systems have experienced considerable difficulty with discovering communities relevant to their interests. In this study, we address the problem of recommending communities to individual users. Recommender techniques that are based solely on community affiliation, may fail to find a wide range of proper communities for users when their available data are insufficient. We regard this problem as tag-based personalized searches. Based on social tags used by members of communities, we first represent communities in a low-dimensional space, the so-called latent semantic space, by using Latent Semantic Analysis. Then, for recommending communities to a given user, we capture how each community is relevant to both user’s personal tag usage and other community members’ tagging patterns in the latent space. We specially focus on the challenging problem of recommending communities to users who have joined very few communities or having no prior community membership. Our evaluation on two heterogeneous datasets shows that our approach can significantly improve the recommendation quality.

Collaboration and sharing of information are the basis of modern social web system. Users in the social web systems are establishing and joining online communities, in order to collectively share their content with a group of people having common topic of interest. Group or community activities have increased exponentially in modern social Web systems. With the explosive growth of social communities, users of social Web systems have experienced considerable difficulty with discovering communities relevant to their interests. In this study, we address the problem of recommending communities to individual users. Recommender techniques that are based solely on community affiliation, may fail to find a wide range of proper communities for users when their available data are insufficient. We regard this problem as tag-based personalized searches. Based on social tags used by members of communities, we first represent communities in a low-dimensional space, the so-called latent semantic space, by using Latent Semantic Analysis. Then, for recommending communities to a given user, we capture how each community is relevant to both user’s personal tag usage and other community members’ tagging patterns in the latent space. We specially focus on the challenging problem of recommending communities to users who have joined very few communities or having no prior community membership. Our evaluation on two heterogeneous datasets shows that our approach can significantly improve the recommendation quality.

Hälsoutveckling i Sverige går framåt, men den självskattade hälsan är låg. Självskattning är ett mått som baseras på individens egen uppfattning av sin hälsa. Hälsa är en subjektiv uppskattning där varje individ har sin syn på upplevelse av hälsa. Autonomi, social gemenskap och begriplighet är olika dimensioner av hälsobegreppet som baseras på patienters upplevelse av hälsa. Många mätinstrument inom sjukvården idag har för avsikt att mäta hälsa genom frånvaro av symtom. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka hur patienter på en allmänpsykiatrisk öppenvårdsmottagning självskattar sin hälsa utifrån dimensionerna autonomi, social gemenskap och begriplighet. Metoden som användes var en tvärsnittsstudie med kvantitativ ansats. En enkätundersökning utfördes under tre veckor. Resultatet baseras på 49 stycken enkäter. Resultatet visar att autonomidimensionen skattades lägst medelvärde samt att deltagarna skattade högst medelvärde på påståendet ”kan bry mig om andra”. Slutsatsen i denna studie visar att det låga värdet inom dimensionen autonomi kan bero på sjuksköterskornas arbetsklimat och medicinska synsätt. Implikationer i vården som fynden kan medföra kan vara en ökad medvetenhet kring självskattad hälsa både hos patienter och hos sjuksköterskor. / Health development in Sweden is advancing, but the self-rated health is low. Self-assessment is a measure based on the individual's own perception of their health. Health is a subjective estimate where each individual has his views on the experience of health. Autonomy, social community and understandability are different dimensions of the concept of health based on the patients' experience of health. Many measuring devices in healthcare today intends to measure  health by the absence of symptoms. The purpose of this study was to ask how patients in a general psychiatric outpatient clinic self-rate their health on the basis of the dimensions of autonomy, social community and comprehensibility. The method used was a cross-sectional study with quantitative approach. A survey was conducted over three weeks. The result is based on 49 questionnaires. The result shows that the autonomy dimension were estimated lowest average and that the participants estimated highest average on the claim "can care about others." The conclusion of this study is that one reason to low value in the dimension autonomy may depend on the nurses' working environment and medical approaches. Implications of care is that the findings may lead to an increased awareness of self-rated health among both patients and nurses.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the cultural processes of how national identity is supported and/or created through sports in South Africa. To get a basic understanding of the South African sports culture data have been collected by using cartographic methods such as reading newspapers, watching sports on television and visiting live sport events. The final part of the method was to conduct interviews about sports as an additional way to collect data and understand the processes of national identity. The theories originates from social scientists like Èmile Durkheim and Karl Marx combined with post traditional perspectives that offers some explanations on how sports and national identity function as an important part that holds societies together.   The conclusion of the study shows that sports are strong factors in the creation and reproduction of national identities in the South African culture. The sport institutions with their norms and regulations on the one hand gives clear directions for how society and sports are organized. On the other hand the South Africans identities mold between a traditional identity and a modern identity where good sport performance can offer class journeys to western society and better opportunities.

Name of Dissertation: Civil Participation in Social Planning: Limits and Possibilities Name: Petr Čech Field of Study: Sociology Leader of Dissertation: PhDr. Richard Růžička, CSc. Keywords: citizen, community, participation, social service, social/community planning The dissertation focused on participative element of democracy. The author aimed at the way of participation in the selected districts and attempted to analyze the way of communication of the events relating to the social planning process. The theoretical part of the dissertation began with the chapter "Citizen and Society". This chapter dealed the citizenship concept and the civil society concept. The general and the participation was dealed in connection with the citizenship and the civil society. The next chapter "Community and Change" defined in particular sections the term community and the incidental terms - community work and community care, community developement. The considerable part of this chapter was the treatise on community planning with regard to community planning of social services. The non-profit sector and social services were the themes of the final chapter. The section community planning of social servical was placed as concluding section as the terminological unravelment. The research within the framework of...

The subject of this thesis is a study of the use of the social networking site Facebook in relation to a selected social community from the point of view of the author. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the selected social community and to address this issue, four aspects concerning the selected community are analysed; structure, sociopreferential relationships, social capital and social integration. In the first part of the thesis, I describe the existing theoretical knowledge about social integration, the sociological concept of social community, social capital and its theories and the history and basic characteristics of social networking sites. In the second part of the thesis, I describe the selected community's structure and the processing of data, obtained from research, exploring the frequency of social interactions in this community during a defined period of time. Through chosen sociometric methods, I draw conclusions which address the four aspects outlined above, thus fulfilling the aim of this thesis. The outcome and significance of this thesis is to provide inspiration to companies to achieve greater efficiency of performance by working more effectively with their employee teams.

AbstractThere are only a few studies in Sweden concerning migrants who have converted from Islam to Christianity through Swedish churches and the integration of those converts into Swedish society. The present study therefore concerns the integration of converts and new Christians through congregations and religious community. The main purpose of the thesis is to gain a deeper understanding of how new Christians experience the process of integrating through community, and whether the religious/social community is helpful in promoting and facilitating the integration of new Christians into Swedish society.The study was conducted in two Persian churches and nonprofits, EFS Missionary Association, in the Stockholm region which offers a number of different religious and social activities for Christian Iranians. The study is based on an ethnographic methodological approach: interviews with four church pastors and leaders, participant observation and informal conversations. Drawing on the theoretical perspectives of Pierre Bourdieu – field, habitus and capital - the study analyzes how migration affects the individual, and how religious and social communities can compensate for the consequences of migration,destabilisations of networks, habitus or the embodied preferences. It also analyzes, to some extent, how these communities enrich converts’ lives with what they are missing due to theirmigrant experience.The work of integration by missionary groups aims to help immigrants become integrated into Swedish society. But that means, at first, a person becoming a part of the Christian family or being folded into the body of believers [the local church body] and building relationships within the fellowship of the church. This means a person assimilates religious by conversion, and being a part of the community as the way to unity and integration. The study shows how church staff and pastors engage in promoting integration and the employment of converts, and how they go about helping in this way. This happens, for instance, through Bible studies, church classes, counselling, social and cultural gatherings, and help with work.The study shows that missionaries and churches serve to integrate converts largely through religious and social communities, where converts are taken into the fellowship and led to an internal network. This network makes them more inclined to engage outside the church context. Religious and social community is also a place where a new Christian develops social and cultural competencies for future interactions and relationships within Swedish society. In addition, the study analyzes the convert's opportunities and challenges in this process, where the Swedish language, fears, anxiety, lack of motivation, and socializing across ethnic boundaries are considered significant challenges. A side effect of these challenges is disintegration or expanding differences and repulsion.

This dissertation focuses on social interaction patterns between young people in an online chat room, analyzing how social order is displayed and constituted. An overall issue concerns when and how the participants manage to co-create social communities within this setting. The data draw on an ethnographic study, where chat room observations and online recordings were carried out during three years. Methodological guidelines from discursive psychology and conversation analysis have been used in making detailed sequential analyses of chat room interactions. The thesis builds on social practice theories, including sociocultural theorizing and studies of language socialization, and work on positionings. The findings show that familiarity with chat language, including the use of emoticons and leet speak, as well as familiarity with netiquette and conversational routines such as greeting- and parting routines, are vital for the participants in order to become parts of local groups and alignments. Playful improvisation is an important feature in the chat room intercourse. Moreover, full participation requires involvement in the lives of co-participants and extended dialogues over time. In the process of moving from peripheral to more central participation, the participants formed alignments with other participants and positioned themselves and their co-participants in the chat room. Such alignments were often founded on a shared taste in, for example musical genres and everyday consumption patterns. Shared views on school, sex and relationships, as well as age or gender alignments also played a role in the creation of local communities. Conversely, issues of exclusion were recurrent features of chat room interplay. All considered this created participation patterns that formed local hierarchies which were not fixed or static, but rather fleeting and dynamic. And yet, the participants generally did not transcend or challenge contemporary age and gender boundaries.

My purpose with this paper is to investigate how yong girls with immigrant backgrounds experience the social citizenship. I have focused on civil rights and obligations but also on the experience of access to education, employment and social community. Finally, I have chosen to look at the social citizenship from a gender perspective.