Knowing some of the cultural tenets that may be related to depression can help inform counseling. Culture will be measured using collectivism, which is defined as being more orientated to others, rather than to oneself. It was hypothesized that shyness and social support would be related to both collectivism and depression. Shyness would be associated with an increase in collectivism and depression, while social support would be associated with an increase in collectivism and a decrease in depression. Social support however, would be more strongly related to depression than shyness. It was found that more social support was indeed significantly related to lower depression, and higher levels of collectivism. Shyness was significantly related to higher levels of depression but it was also related to a lower collectivistic level, though not significantly. An interaction was found between shyness and social support on the outcome of depression, which means that the higher the social support, the less impact shyness has on depression. Further studies should focus on research that more clearly defines a relationship between depression and collectivism using shyness and social support as predictors. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

In Online Social Networks (OSNs), users are often overwhelmed with a huge amount of social data, most of which are irrelevant to their interest. Filtering of the social data stream is the common way to deal with this problem, and it has already been applied by OSNs, such as Facebook and Google+. Unfortunately, personalized filtering leads to “the filter bubble” problem where the user is trapped inside a world within the limited boundaries of her interests and cannot be exposed to any surprising, desirable information. Moreover, these OSNs are black boxes, providing no transparency for the user about how the filtering mechanism decides what is to be shown in the activity stream. As a result, the user trust in the system can decline. This thesis presents an interactive method to visualize the personalized stream filtering in OSNs. The proposed visualization helps to create awareness, explanation, and control of personalized stream filtering to alleviate “the filter bubble” problem and increase the users’ trust in the system. The visualization is implemented in MADMICA – a new privacy-aware decentralized OSN, based on the Friendica P2P protocol, which filters the social updates stream of users based on their interests. The results of three user evaluations are presented in this thesis: small-scale pilot study, qualitative study and large-scale quantitative study with 326 participants. The results of the small-scale study show that the filter bubble visualization makes the users aware of the filtering mechanism, engages them in actions to correct and change it, and as a result, increases the users’ trust in the system. The qualitative study reveals a generally higher proportion of desirable user perceptions for the awareness, explanation and control of the filter bubble provided by the visualization. Moreover, the results of the quantitative study demonstrate that the visualization leads to increased users’ awareness of the filter bubble, understandability of the filtering mechanism and to a feeling of control over the data stream they are seeing.

In this work, we study the problem of clearing contamination spreading through a large network where we model the problem as a graph searching game. The problem can be summarized as constructing a search strategy that will leave the graph clear of any contamination at the end of the searching process in as few steps as possible. We show that this problem is NP-hard even on directed acyclic graphs and provide an efficient approximation algorithm. We experimentally observe the performance of our approximation algorithm in relation to the lower bound on several large online networks including Slashdot, Epinions and Twitter. The experiments reveal that in most cases our algorithm performs near optimally. / Graduate

Social network sites are becoming increasingly popular and useful as well as relevant means for serious social research. However, despite their user appeal and wide adoption, the current generation of sites are hard to query and explore, offering limited views of local network neighbourhoods. Moreover these sites are disconnected islands of information due to application and interface differences. We describe SociQL: a query language along with a prototype implementation that enables for the representation, querying and exploration of disparate social networks. Unlike generic web query languages, SociQL is designed to support the examination of sociological questions, incorporating social theory and integration of networks that form a single unified source of information. The thesis discusses the design and rationale for the elements in the language, and reports on our experiences in querying real social network sites with it.

Social capital is a relatively new concept compared to welfare, though debates on the advantages of different welfare regimes and the links between state provision and social participation are tentatively connecting the two areas. Esping-Andersen classifies welfare regimes into three types - market-focused liberal, status-focused corporatist, and equality-focused social democratic regimes. Each has been well studied with regards to the effects of commodification (market dependency), stratification (inequality and stigma), and familialisation (paternalistic family dependency). However, such focus largely upon economic rather than social concerns. This thesis examines the proposition that welfare can ???build society??? by promoting these social aspects otherwise known as social capital. The social capital concept has definition and measurement problems with causality and the capture of social activities rather than just norms. Acknowledging, this, social capital is preferably defined from the literature as norms of trust, networks of association membership, and practices of volunteering and socialising. A critical reading highlights the importance of separating bonding social capital, as captured in Bourdieu and Coleman???s exclusive networks, from bridging social capital, more akin to Putnam???s civil society and thus closer to social welfare. This thesis examines numerous empirical measures of bridging social capital, by looking at norms and networks through the World Values Survey, and practices through the Multinational Time Use Study across nine OECD countries. Results show that social democratic welfare regimes do promote social capital, with high levels of trust, membership and social activity. Corporatist welfare regimes show low but constant levels of social capital, whilst liberal welfare regimes have experienced declines in trust. Increasingly means-tested liberal regimes register high levels of commodification, with poor work-leisure balances, and are also more stratified with higher levels of inequality, whilst attitudes stigmatising immigrants and the poor are apparent amongst all less trusting countries. Familialisation is explicit in corporatist values and male/female work imbalances, and implicit in liberal values and poor family payments, with reduced social capital contributions from women as a result. Overall empirical testing of relations between welfare regimes and social capital show that both are linked most positively under universal rather than meanstested conditions.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Toledo, 2007. / Typescript. "Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Health Education." Bibliography: leaves 126-144.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on April 7, 2008) Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 40-45).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Paula E. Stephan, committee chair; Gregory B. Lewis, Albert J. Sumell, Erdal Tekin, Mary Frank Fox, committee members. Electronic text (158 p. : ill. (some col.)) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Sept. 18, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 154-158).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2008. / Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 180 p. : 1 col. ill. Includes bibliographical references.