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.

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.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:20:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 MariaDB_DISSERT.pdf: 1137270 bytes, checksum: 558407b63f2b998ab90dfd7537409987 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-12-17 / The presented research however has as object to apprehend the contribution of the Social Trust of Agricultural Youth in Is Jo?o of the Sabugi, in the individual and collective projects of life of the agricultural young. In it interests to know them which are the dreams and desires of these young, its relation with familiar agriculture, its desires of permanence in the field, as well as the relation of the trust with the fortalecimento of its projects of life. Thus, the general objective is to argue the contribution and influence of the Social Trust of Agricultural Youth in Is Jo?o of the Sabugi, in the individual and collective projects of life of the young of the city. The construction of the subject on agricultural youth to the contact with the land and the work in familiar agriculture were one strong expression identified in this research, exactly leading in consideration that nor all possess the desire to remain young agricultural , or at least young agriculturists. For the young, agricultural being is express through not only the contact with the agricultural work, but also the process of sociability, formation of affective bows, possibilities of new learnings, valuation of the agricultural way and its potentialities, of that the corporeal property and cultural is possible to be young in the agricultural way with access, historicamente denied / A pesquisa ora apresentada tem como objeto apreender a contribui??o do Cons?rcio Social da Juventude Rural em S?o Jo?o do Sabugi, nos projetos de vida individuais e coletivos dos jovens rurais. Nos interessa saber quais s?o os sonhos e desejos desses jovens, sua rela??o com a agricultura familiar, seus desejos de perman?ncia no campo, bem como a rela??o do cons?rcio com o fortalecimento dos seus projetos de vida. Assim, o objetivo geral ? discutir a contribui??o e influ?ncia do Cons?rcio Social da Juventude Rural em S?o Jo?o do Sabugi, nos projetos de vida individuais e coletivos dos jovens do munic?pio. A constru??o do tema juventude rural ligada ao contato com a terra e com o trabalho na agricultura familiar foi uma forte express?o identificada nessa pesquisa, mesmo levando em considera??o que nem todos possuem o desejo de permanecerem jovens rurais , ou pelo menos jovens agricultores. Para os jovens, ser rural ? expresso atrav?s n?o apenas do contato com o trabalho rural, mas tamb?m do processo de sociabilidade, forma??o de la?os afetivos, possibilidades de novos aprendizados, valoriza??o do meio rural e suas potencialidades, de que ? poss?vel ser jovem no meio rural com acesso a bens materiais e culturais, historicamente negados

While the literature on democracy and its relationship to trust provides little consensus regarding the role of trust, researchers have emphasized the importance of generalized trust over particularized in relation to democracy. This research marks a departure from this consensus, and exposes the neglected role of personal relationships in fostering successful democracy. One of the key measurements of democracy in a country is social trust. There are three forms of trust: generalized, particularized and institutional. Previously, the measurement of social trust focused on the importance of generalized trust, that is, trust in those we do not know (Putnam, 1993; Fukuyama, 1995, et. al). Generalized trust is marked as having the greatest benefits for democracy. Those who are generalized trusters have the will to bridge across ethnicities and join civic groups in larger numbers. Institutional trust is society's trust in its institutions. Countries ranking high on institutional trust are also believed to have positive democratic outcomes. By contrast, particularized trust is often dismissed because it is seen as highly atomizing and, therefore, incapable of making bridges to ethnic others resulting in a bankruptcy of democratic values. Thus, the combination of institutional and generalized trust has been the main crux of measurement and understanding in relation to a country's ability to democratize. The problem with this approach is two fold: first, it assumes the unidimensionality of trust and ultimately resigns a country of trusters to one category or the other with often negative impacts. The reality is, we are not solely one truster or the other: we are a combination of each form of trust. Secondly, this approach is Western in focus and does not account for the differentiation within cultures and is therefore unable to truly account for trust in a society. Nor does it account for new forms of trust and civil society in the new digital age. Recently, some questions about the legitimacy of this approach have surfaced and new methods have been employed to ascertain the true nature of social trust, however these methods have also fallen short (Gibson 2001; Bhary, et. al. 2005). Because trust is one measure used to determine the amount of democracy in a nation or the ability for it, accurate description is vital. Here, the author will take a new approach and focus on the importance of the often overlooked particularized trust, as well as control for the importance of institutionalized trust. Using Khodyakov's (2007) research on trust and the Soviet case as the launching pad, the author will empirically examine trust in the former Soviet Union today. Using the most recent World Values Survey data, a new trust variable will be constructed that will be better able to capture the true, dynamic nature of trust. Placing this new trust variable in a Bayesian hierarchical linear model which will control for country level variables, it will be revealed that particularized trust can and does have positive impacts on support for democracy, debunking current notions to the contrary.

Social trust is one of the building stones for democratic societies. It builds on mutual understanding of the collective commonly shared norms. However, how it associates to political trust on the individual level is still ambiguous, as such this paper hopes expand the knowledge of how it is related to political trust in Sweden on an individual level.  Aim: This paper aims to explore how political trust in Sweden relates to social trust. Furthermore, it aims to study how the relationship varies by educational attainment. Data and methods: This study has used ordinary least square (OLS) to estimate to what degree political trust associated with social trust. It has also in the regression analysis included an interaction term to see how political trust interacts with educational attainment. Results: It is hypothesized that higher levels of political trust are associated with higher levels of social trust. The result from this study finds significant results that higher levels of political trust are associated with higher levels of social trust. Indicating to a positive correlation. It is also hypothesized that higher educated would express stronger effect of political trust on social trust. The estimations showed no significant interaction term. The relationship between political trust and social trust does not vary by educational attainment. Discussion: This paper found that the first hypothesis was in line with the findings of previous research and theory. As such, it was confirmed. The second hypothesis was not in line with previous findings or theory and suggested that there is no interaction effect, at least not for Sweden. The differences in methods and how the contextual and institutional differences are handled in this study compared to previous studies are discussed and highlighted. These discussions are then culminated into a proposal for future research. / Social tillit är en av byggstenarna för demokratiska samhällen. Den bygger på ömsesidig förståelse för de kollektiva gemensamt delade normerna. Hur det associeras till politisk tillit på individnivå är dock fortfarande tvetydigt, och det är denna studies förhoppning att utöka kunskapen om hur den förhåller sig till politisk tillit i Sverige på individnivå.  Syfte: Denna studie syftar till att undersöka hur politisk tillit i Sverige förhåller sig till social tillit. Vidare syftar den till att studera hur sambandet varierar beroende på utbildningsnivå.  Data och metod: Denna studie har använt minsta kvadratmetoden för att uppskatta i vilken grad politisk tillit relaterar till social tillit. Det har också i regressionsanalysen inkluderats en interaktionsterm för att se hur politiskt tillit interagerar med utbildningsnivå. Resultat: Det hypotiseras att högre nivåer av politisk tillit är associerade med högre nivåer av social tillit. Resultatet från denna studie finner signifikanta resultat att högre nivåer av politisk tillit är associerade med högre nivåer av social tillit. Detta indikerar till en positiv korrelation. Det hypotiseras också att högre utbildade skulle uttrycka starkare effekt av politisk tillit på social tillit. Skattningarna visade ingen signifikant interaktionsterm. Förhållandet mellan politisk tillit och social tillit varierar inte beroende på utbildningsnivå. Diskussion: Denna uppsats fann att den första hypotesen var i linje med resultaten från tidigare forskning och teori. Som sådan bekräftades den. Den andra hypotesen var inte i linje med tidigare resultat eller teori och visade att det inte fanns någon interaktionseffekt, åtminstone inte för Sverige. Skillnaderna i metod och hur kontextuella och institutionella skillnader hanteras i denna studie jämfört med tidigare studier diskuteras och belyses. Dessa diskussioner mynnar sedan ut i förslag till framtida forskning.