Adolescence marks a vulnerable developmental period for health behavior, and research demonstrates that social context and interpersonal relationships impact the health behavior choices of adolescents. In addition, theories of adolescent development suggest a bidirectional relationship between environmental factors, including social relationships, and health. Friendships are one of the most salient relationships during adolescence, and new methods from the field of social network analysis allow researchers to explicitly examine the mechanisms through which friends influence health behavior, and simultaneously, how health and health behavior impacts the formation of friendships. Importantly, social network methods (e.g., stochastic actor-based models, exponential random graph models) overcome statistical limitations of alternative methodology. For example, methods from social network analysis incorporate interdependencies between individuals in a social network (e.g., adolescents within a school) into the statistical modeling framework, and are capable of simultaneously estimating social and behavioral outcomes. Through a sequence of three distinct studies, this project applies rigorous methods from social network analysis to investigate: (1) the differential impact of adolescent friendships on health-risk (e.g., alcohol use) and health-protective (e.g., physical activity) behaviors; (2) the role of perceived social acceptability and peer influence in shaping adolescent cigarette use; and (3) the social consequences, including social withdrawal and social marginalization, of adolescents with chronic illness.

Much structured data of scientific interest can be represented as networks, where sets of nodes or vertices are joined together in pairs by links or edges. Although these networks may belong to different research areas, there is one property that many of them do have in common: the network community structure, which means that there exists densely connected groups of vertices, with only sparser connections between groups. The main goal of community mining is to discover these communities in social networks or other similar information network environments. We face many deficiencies in current community structure discovery methods. First, one similarity metric is typically applied in all networks, without considering the differences in network and application characteristics. Second, many existing methods assume the network information is fully available, and one node only belongs to one cluster. However, in reality, a social network can be huge thus it is hard to access the complete network. It is also common for social entities to belong to multiple communities. Finally, relations between entities are hard to understand in heterogeneous social networks, where multiple types of relations and entities exist. Therefore, the thesis of this research is to tackle these community mining problems, in order to discover and evaluate community structures in social networks from various aspects.

In recent years, more and more mass mediums mentioned blog, the new individual public mediums in network, and more and more blogger began blogging. They documented their life, expressed deeply felt emotions and provide commentary and opinions in blog. Blog is stage that blogger present self for audience, blogger can transmit image to their audience. But these bloggers express what self-presentation in blog? This research use the concept of self-presentation and analysis of social network, and study the social network is formed with online dairies blog and the self image. we discovered that connection relations centralize in the popular blogs, and the more popular blogs have more indegree. The support of audience is motivation of continue writing for blog. In the dimension of self-presentation, the most self in blog is decorated from real life of blogger. But even blogger can choice to present which image, they still reproduced structure and characteristic of real world in blogoshpere. The research also discovered blogger wish to segregate audience, presented different self before different reader.

Information privacy is a paradoxical issue. Especially after Facebook, information privacy has become more important than before. College student Facebook users share a great deal of information on Facebook, and Facebook collects users’personal information. Users’ personal information on Facebook is linked to their identity; therefore negative consequences (privacy problems) have become possible on Facebook. This study focused on college students’ privacy concerns and awareness of privacy issues and settings. Moreover, heavy and light users’ privacy concerns were compared in this study. According to the survey results, privacy is still important to Facebook users and different privacy concerns exist among heavy and light users. Results also show that privacy on Facebook is not a simple thing. It is related to identity construction, users’ experience, and awareness of privacy implications. / text

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of West Florida, 2008. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 71 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

AbstractThis paper investigates the impact of social network on the labor market outcomes. This is a case study of highly-educated Iranian immigrant women who have been living in Malmö for more than five years. It is assumed that the high level of education, language skill and work experience are the major characteristics of human capital that affect their social integration. The role of social network in social and economic life of Iranian immigrant women is discussed. The data is comprised of six semi-structured interviews with highly educated Iranian immigrant women in Malmö. The results of the study indicate that Iranian immigrant women are highly motivated to participate in the social and economic sectors of Sweden. Regarding the social network, having weak ties is associated with better labor market achievement for Iranian immigrant women and the power of social network is immense in the process of social integration. The level of education has both positive and negative effects on the degree of social integration. The results of the study demonstrate that re-education is a strategy and investment for a better employment opportunity in future.

In recent decades, political parties espousing extreme nationalist, xenophobic, and even outright racist platforms have enjoyed variable success in national elections across Europe. While a vibrant research literature has sought to better understand the sources of support for such parties, remarkably little attention has been paid to the interplay between parties and the broader social networks of extremism in which they are embedded. To remedy this deficiency, the present study examines the relations between far-right parliamentary parties and their extra-parliamentary networks. One level of analysis tests whether there is a relationship between a party’s position within a network and its sustainability. Social network analysis is employed to assess the nature and structure of ties between Belgian organizations online. In addition, systematic textual analysis of website content is used to determine how a party’s ideological position within the network impacts its sustainability. The second level of analysis is a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with members of Flemish nationalist organization in order to better understand how actors experience social networks. Evidence suggests that the most sustainable parties are those that have dense connections with other nationalist organizations. Mapping relations between far-right parties that compete openly within the rules of institutionalized democracy and their wider social networks can provide important policy-relevant insight into contemporary challenges posed by illiberal forces.

The use of social network sites (SNSs), such as Facebook and LinkedIn, by both organizations and the Swedish population is increasing. Previous publications in this research field lack empirical reinforcement and the empirical research that has been published often suggest a connection between recruitment via SNSs and employer branding. However, this connection has not yet been elaborated on or explained by previous research. Furthermore, both these research fields lack the insight of empirical studies conducted from a managerial point of view. The objective of this study is to contribute to these research fields by providing a holistic understanding about employer branding and SNSs role in recruitment processes from a managerial perspective. The recruitment process includes all activities from the origin of a vacant position to employing an applicant. To gain insight into this perspective, a qualitative study was conducted with the methodological stances constructionism and interpretivism. HR-managers at eight organizations with 200 employees or more located in the northern part of Sweden were interviewed. A thematic analysis, in line with the research approach with inductive characteristics, was used to analyze the qualitative data collected from conducting semi- structured interviews. The themes are based on regularly discussed aspects found in the empirical data. These themes are: “Employer Branding”, “Benefits“, “Barriers”, “Communication Channels” and “Implementation”. The fundamental aspect of succeeding with implementing SNSs as a recruitment tool was found to be a supportive management. This resulted in a framework being developed that describes necessary actions to take into consideration by the management to successfully implement SNSs as a recruitment tool. It was found that employer branding is closely interlinked with the attraction stage of a SNS recruitment process. Therefore, the framework also incorporates the findings regarding the benefits that a strong employer brand will have on the SNS recruitment process. This study provides theoretical insight of how SNSs are used to strengthen the employer brand in recruitment processes. The study also concluded that the interviewed organizations are in the early stages of implementing employer branding and SNSs in organizational contexts. The managerial perspective also provides an important theoretical contribution. Practical contributions include inspiration for how to design strategies to implement SNSs as a recruitment tool and an insight as to why it is important to adopt such strategies.

With the growing popularity of social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter, newspapers have started to use these sites as alternative platforms for news delivery. Analyzing the use of Facebook and Twitter by the top 74 U.S. newspapers, this study examines the effectiveness of social network sites as news platforms. The results showed that most of the major newspapers have adopted social network sites but reached a very limited number of subscribers. After controlling for print circulation, there is no significant correlation between the number of social network subscribers and the number of website visitors. Overall, the effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter as news platforms remained questionable. / text