Students who participate in study abroad programs have the opportunity to interact with native speakers in a variety of settings. "Composition and Formation of Social Networks during Study Abroad Programs" explores the kinds of social networks that students form while abroad focusing on the areas of host families, church, school, community, and friends from the program. The kind of network that students form is heavily influenced by the nature of their program. Students from the same program often have social networks similar to those of their peers in the same program. Students who went abroad generally made friends in categories that were most accessible to them. Apart from the program structure, individual initiative also plays an important role in the size and composition of a student's social network. Also, students who had more intense friendships were found to be more likely to create second order networks and meet more friends through their established friendships. Children who grow up exposed to two dialects of the same language may become bidialectal giving them an extra set of choices when they speak. The decision of which dialectal features to use is often socially motivated and demonstrates the speaker's perceived identity. In "Bidialectalism and Language Attitudes: A Case Study of a Bolivian-Argentine Family in the United States," two sisters were interviewed regarding their language use and attitudes. One of the sisters felt a strong connection to her Argentine heritage and thus chose to use an accent and words that would identify her as Argentine. The other sister in this study does not feel the need to identify herself as Argentine and prefers to simply fit in. She thus strives to employ a regionally unmarked variety of Spanish when she speaks. Both sisters are able to accommodate their speech to that of their interlocutors, but have preferred dialectal features based on their language attitudes.

This study was designed to collect and evaluate the social networks of 32 study abroad students participating in the 2009 BYU study abroad program in Amman, Jordan. Survey data, language journals, and test scores were analyzed to determine how they successfully built social networks with native speakers, the relationship between students' social networks and time spent using Arabic outside of class, and the relationship between students' social networks and their acquisition of Arabic. The experiment provided a number of insights into how study abroad students meet potential conversation partners, select which relationships to pursue, and develop relationships in order to build social networks. The study also found that the intensity of students' social relationships as well as the number of clusters in their social networks were predictors of language gains. Additionally, the findings show that social network dispersion and the size of the largest cluster in a network predicted time spent using Arabic outside of class.

Language acquisition in the digital realm is currently being explored by members of the second language acquisition community. Social networks in particular are well suited to provide the modern language learner and educator with collaborative tools. This study explores the potential of the Facebook group utility in assisting university language learners from a variety of language proficiency levels in their language learning endeavors. Participants represented four different Spanish classes at the university level. The results of the study indicate that resource sharing, student collaboration, and continuous learning are among the more fascinating benefits for pedagogical exchange in the selected common digital space.

The Armed Forces of the United States and specifically the U.S. Army seek to have a racial/ethnic mix of officers (leaders) who match the racial/ethnic mix of the soldiers they lead and the country they defend. Currently Hispanic Americans are under-represented in the officer corps especially at senior levels. Social network theory was used to facilitate understanding a potential officer candidate's network of alters (people they interact with) and their relationships when they are seeking to make decisions related to enrolling in college and Army ROTC. When making the decision to enroll in Army ROTC, there is a complex social network of multiple alters who influence those decisions. This study identified those actors and defined the types of relational embeddedness (social relationships which demonstrate dyadic interaction, personal relationships and/or social capital) each role had in their relationship with the ego resulting in influencing their decisions to enroll in college and Army ROTC. This qualitative research engaged Hispanic American cadets enrolled in Army ROTC at four universities and compared them to a representative group of non-Hispanic American cadets using UCINet and NVIVO software. The findings provide insight about the Hispanic American cadets' social network of influence and the level of relational embeddedness which defined the relationships. The findings indicate the need for those who seek out the best candidates (recruiters) to educate the members of a candidate's social network about the opportunities for future officers and the process to access college education and leader development training through programs like Army ROTC. Some alters have greater relational embeddedness and could provide greater positive influence on identifying the best candidates for officer accessions programs, but few members of the network have actual experience in ROTC, as officers, or in any capacity in the Armed Forces, making it difficult for them to provide informed guidance unless they are educated by people knowledgeable about the military. The greatest application of this research is that it will assist Professors of Military Science and others tasked to find and recruit Hispanic American cadets as future officers who beyond the actual candidate they should be engaging to influence the best quality and an increase in quality of officer candidates. The research is also potentially powerful for other organizations seeking to better understand decision making by young people and their social networks of influence which impact those decisions.

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Objectives: The aim of this study was to gain a thorough understanding of parents’ perceptions of and experiences with the care networks surrounding young children (<=12 years) with inherited metabolic diseases (IMDs). Methods: In this mixed methods study, parent participants created a ‘care map’ depicting their child’s network of care providers. We analyzed care maps using social network analysis. A subset of parents participated in a semi-structured interview. We analyzed interviews thematically and integrated quantitative and qualitative results narratively. Results: Sixty parents contributed care maps and 10 participated in interviews. Parent-drawn care networks were large with few connections between providers. Parents felt responsible for creating and maintaining care networks and for coordinating care. They valued providers who trusted them as part of their child’s health care team. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the complexity of care for children with IMDs and can inform the design of interventions to improve care.

Over the recent years, we have seen an immense increase in technology. Though the Internet can be convenient to students, it can also bear negative repercussions. Cyberbullying has impacted millions of people across the nation hindering them in many ways. The Bullying occurs through different outlets, from websites, emails to text messages. Victims cannot truly escape the matter because it follows them wherever they may go. The intent of this thesis was to see who the victims of cyberbullying are, what the aftermath effect is, and whether they notify an adult about their situation. Using data from the School Crime Supplement based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, the findings suggest that females are victims of cyber bullying more frequently than males and that adults are not commonly notified when victimization occurs. Furthermore, the repercussions of victimization include fear of harm or attack, as well as skipping classes to avoid the problem. By exploring cyberbullying and its effect, through time studies such as this one will raise awareness in society and contribute towards the solution of cyberbullying.

Genom en systematisk litteraturöversikt i kombination med en intervju är syftet med denna uppsats att försöka beskriva varför den sociala nätverksanalysen är lämplig i brottsutredningssammanhang samt hur den sociala nätverksanalysen används i brottsutredningar. Tanken är också att översikten ska kunna bidra till att se vilka möjligheter det finns att praktiskt utveckla metoden. Det finns en hel del forskning kring både social nätverksanalys (SNA) som metod och som teori och det används idag inom en mängd olika områden. Som teori handlar SNA om hur vi människor är sociala varelser som påverkar varandra i de tankar vi har och i de val som vi gör. Som metod är SNA istället olika matematiska uträkningar som kan användas för att beskriva mänskliga relationer. Inom kriminologin är SNA relativt nytt trots att brott i sig ofta är ett ”nätverksfenomen”. Flera kriminologiska teorier trycker också på betydelsen av att den egna brottsligheten har ett samband med de personer som vi umgås med. Resultatet visar att det finns klara fördelar med att använda sig av SNA i en brottsutredning, strukturer och nyckelpersoner kan identifieras, något som inte alltid hade kunnat ske utan teknikens hjälp. Den data som i utredningssammanhang används till nätverksanalyser är vanligtvis kvantitativa data, exempelvis telefontrafik. Olika typer av data kan ge väldigt olika resultat och blir det fel i datainsamling kan det sabotera för hela analysen. Det behövs mer teoretisk forskning kring SNA för att den som metod ska kunna appliceras på kriminologisk teori och på sikt även kunna användas bättre i utredningssammanhang. Ett stort problem med att forska om metoden är att den kvantitativa datan kan vara svår att få tag på, det finns därför väldigt lite litteratur om hur social nätverksanalys kan användas i brottsutredningar. / With a systematic literature review and an interview, the aim of this essay is to try to describe how the social network analysis (SNA) is used in criminal investigations. Hopefully, the essay can also help in pointing out why future research is needed and in what direction that research should go. As a theory, SNA focuses on man as a social being and how we affect each other in the way we think and act. As a method SNA is a number of mathematical computations that aims to explain relationships. There is a large amount of research about social network analysis, both as a theory and as a method but in the criminological field SNA is still relatively new. That is surprising as many criminological theories focuses on the importance of the people we engage with and our own delinquency. The result in this essay shows that there are many advantages with using SNA in a criminal investigation, structures and key-persons becomes more visible which sometimes is hard without technology. Different types of data can generate very different results and if something goes wrong in the collection of data it can sabotage the entire analysis. There is a need for more theoretical research on SNA so that it, as a method, can be applied to criminological theory and later to criminal investigations. There is a big problem when doing research about social networks, the access to network-data. It is very hard to collect and is usually only available to police-officers or other qualified groups. Therefore the amount of literature in the subject is limited.

Currently the network centric operation and network centric warfare have generated a new area of research focused on determining how hierarchical organizations composed by human beings and machines make decisions over collaborative environments. One of the most stressful scenarios for these kinds of organizations is the so-called extreme events. This dissertation provides a hybrid simulation methodology based on classical simulation paradigms combined with social network analysis for evaluating and improving the organizational structures and procedures, mainly the incident command systems and plans for facing those extreme events. According to this, we provide a methodology for generating hypotheses and afterwards testing organizational procedures either in real training systems or simulation models with validated data. As long as the organization changes their dyadic relationships dynamically over time, we propose to capture the longitudinal digraph in time and analyze it by means of its adjacency matrix. Thus, by using an object oriented approach, three domains are proposed for better understanding the performance and the surrounding environment of an emergency management organization. System dynamics is used for modeling the critical infrastructure linked to the warning alerts of a given organization at federal, state and local levels. Discrete simulations based on the defined concept of "community of state" enables us to control the complete model. Discrete event simulation allows us to create entities that represent the data and resource flows within the organization. We propose that cognitive models might well be suited in our methodology. For instance, we show how the team performance decays in time, according to the Yerkes-Dodson curve, affecting the measures of performance of the whole organizational system. Accordingly we suggest that the hybrid model could be applied to other types of organizations, such as military peacekeeping operations and joint task forces. Along with providing insight about organizations, the methodology supports the analysis of the "after action review" (AAR), based on collection of data obtained from the command and control systems or the so-called training scenarios. Furthermore, a rich set of mathematical measures arises from the hybrid models such as triad census, dyad census, eigenvalues, utilization, feedback loops, etc., which provides a strong foundation for studying an emergency management organization. Future research will be necessary for analyzing real data and validating the proposed methodology.

Mentoring is an important means of developing talent. Typically, mentoring involves two individuals – a mentor, who provides career development and psychosocial support to a less experienced counterpart (the protégé). Because mentoring is related to several desired outcomes such as career advancement, and job satisfaction, it is important to understand which individual characteristics are important to obtaining or providing effective mentoring. It is also necessary to examine potential but unconfirmed outcomes of mentoring such as social network status. This study examined the relationships between several individual characteristics, namely social intelligence and emotional intelligence, and mentoring relationships. In addition, this study examined the relationships between mentoring and social network status. In this nonexperimental study, there were several unique relationships among these constructs. The results indicate a person‟s social intelligence is indicative of their status as a mentor (or not a mentor) but is not related to status as a protégé (or not a protégé). In addition, a mentor‟s perception of the costs and benefits of mentoring were explained by the protégé‟s social intelligence and emotional intelligence. A mentor‟s social intelligence also explained the quality of the mentoring given. Finally, a mentor‟s social network status was related to the protégé‟s social network status but this relationship was not due to the mentoring received. This study provides one of the first examinations of the relationship between mentoring and social network status and provides areas for future research and practical considerations.