Social networks are a phenomenon of our age; their popularity rises every day, same as the amount of time that people spend on the social networks. Social networks are also very popular in the Czech Republic and also their importance in the communication mix of Czech companies arises. This final thesis aims to analyze the ways, how can companies benefit from social networks and use this analysis to propose the suitable strategy for Accenture, the global Consulting, Technology and Outsourcing Company, how to use social media effectively to raise company's awareness, inform about its products and also about the career options that this company offers to university graduates.

Through a second look at the now twenty-five-year-old literature on guanxi, a form of reciprocal relationship making and using in China, I examine how the kinds of opportunities and challenges possible for young people intersect with who they know and how this has changed (with its own set of reflections on and consequences for a still-rapidly changing China) since China’s rural to urban transition. My dissertation project examines how young people in contemporary urban China form and produce guanxi ties (resource-full relationships) through the theoretical lens of practice and possibility, inspired by de Certeau’s conceptualization of practice, productive consumption, and strategies versus tactics (1984). Drawing on qualitative data gathered through participant observation and unstructured interviews, I sought to both describe and analyze when, where, and how social networks became consequential. Central to my methodology is an emphasis on people and their practices rather than the common sense categories used to describe them. The people in my field research were predominantly aged 18-30 and came from a range of ethnic, professional, and education backgrounds. In so doing, I was able to examine the moments and contexts within which some people have opportunities and others do not, as well as when some are vulnerable while others are less so. I found that social networks can be formed in a variety of spaces, and sometimes most saliently in moments of serendipity. Chance encounters in spaces of play, without the artifice of traditional and structured gift-giving practices of building guanxi, provided people with opportunities and potential alternatives outside of more stringent work hierarchies. Ultimately, who people knew – their social networks – shaped the ways in which they experienced circumstances of precarity, instability, and possibility.

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While bringing tremendous benefits to individuals worldwide, the proliferation of online social networks has also given rise to undesirable online harassment behavior. Although users can respond in various ways, little attention has been paid so far to the use of online coping strategies on social media, more specifically, how individuals respond to online harassment by using the available features on social media. This thesis sought to understand individuals' use of online coping strategies. This thesis aims to tackle these challenges to advance the understanding of whether, how, and why individuals use online coping strategies in response to online harassment. Essay 1 develops a typology of online coping strategies based on users' focus of response (i.e., self or initiator) and mode of response (i.e., avoidance or approach). This essay serves as a conceptual background for the two subsequent empirical studies (Essay 2 and Essay 3) that focus on two critical roles involved in online harassment (e.g., victims and bystanders). These two studies are conducted in the social media context. Essay 2 investigates whether and how individuals use online coping strategies in response to online harassment on social media. Results from a scenario-based experiment showed that victims would be more likely to adopt self-focused and approach strategies (e.g., seclusion, mediation, and reporting) when they perceived a high threat of the incident. Confidence in executing the platform functions would increase victims' use of the initiators-focused strategies in both modes (e.g., blocking and reporting) but reduce their use of self-focused avoidance strategy (e.g., seclusion). Trust in social media would lead victims to the self-focused approach strategy (e.g., mediation). Victims with the intensified fear of the incident would be more likely to use the self-focused and avoidance strategies (e.g., seclusion, mediation, and blocking). While Essay 2 focuses on the role of victims, Essay 3 concentrates on the role of bystanders and reporting strategy, which is one of the online coping strategies on social media that support bystanders' interventions. Essay 3 explains why individuals report witnessing online harassment. The results found that four contextualized factors (perceived emergency of the online harassment incident, perceived responsibility to report, perceived self-efficacy in using built-in reporting functions, and perceived outcome effectiveness of built-in reporting functions for tackling online harassment) are important factors for shaping bystander reporting interventions, while the presence of others as an inhibitor that discourages bystanders' willingness to help. This essay also found that socio- environmental and technological factors exert a significant effect on bystanders' willingness to intervene. In sum, this thesis contributes to the area of online harassment by breaking new ground for the study of users' prosocial responses to online harassment on social media. It not only furthers our understanding of online coping strategies but also provides valuable insights for practitioners to design effective coping features to combat online harassment.

Community detection is one of the most fundamental problems in network study. The stochastic block model (SBM) is arguably the most studied model for network data with different estimation methods developed with their community detection consistency results unveiled. Due to its stringent assumptions, SBM may not be suitable for many real-world problems. In this thesis, we present two approaches that incorporate extra information compared with vanilla SBM to help improve community detection performance and be suitable for applications. One approach is to stack multilayer networks that are composed of multiple single-layer networks with common community structure. Numerous methods have been proposed based on spectral clustering, but most rely on optimizing an objective function while the associated theoretical properties remain to be largely unexplored. We focus on the `early fusion' method, of which the target is to minimize the spectral clustering error of the weighted adjacency matrix (WAM). We derive the optimal weights by studying the asymptotic behavior of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the WAM. We show that the eigenvector of WAM converges to a normal distribution, and the clustering error is monotonically decreasing with the eigenvalue gap. This fact reveals the intrinsic link between eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and thus the algorithm will minimize the clustering error by maximizing the eigenvalue gap. The numerical study shows that our algorithm outperforms other state-of-art methods significantly, especially when signal-to-noise ratios of layers vary widely. Our algorithm also yields higher accuracy result for S&P 1500 stocks dataset than competing models. The other approach we propose is to consider heterogeneous connection probabilities to remove the strong assumption that all nodes in the same community are stochastically equivalent, which may not be suitable for practical applications. We introduce a pairwise covariates-adjusted stochastic block model (PCABM), a generalization of SBM that incorporates pairwise covariates information. We study the maximum likelihood estimates of the coefficients for the covariates as well as the community assignments. It is shown that both the coefficient estimates of the covariates and the community assignments are consistent under suitable sparsity conditions. Spectral clustering with adjustment (SCWA) is introduced to fit PCABM efficiently. Under certain conditions, we derive the error bound of community estimation under SCWA and show that it is community detection consistent. PCABM compares favorably with the SBM or degree-corrected stochastic block model under a wide range of simulated and real networks when covariate information is accessible.

Social media platforms are interconnected environments that influence each other. Information from one social media platform spreads to another. This thesis proposes a platform-independent framework to analyze information transfer across social media platforms. This thesis uses Symbolic Transfer Entropy and Statistical Significance Test to measure influence and optimize the time window of influence between different platforms. To validate the framework, the thesis analyses the temporal activity dynamics and the information transfer across three different platforms, Reddit, Twitter and GitHub. Two data driven studies are described in this thesis. The first study finds the optimum time windows of influence between the three platforms during two different cyber attack events on cryptocurrency exchanges. It finds that specific types of activities are more influential than others, and optimum time interval changes with pre, during, and post event days. The second study applies information revealed in the first study and specifically the optimal time window to link cross-platform information cascades from Twitter and Reddit. The case-study is a heuristic that, we show, can reduce the search space for connecting information cascades across different platforms.

Includes bibliographical references / This thesis focuses on the use of maternal health services and child health in Tanzania. The main focus is on how these issues relate to social networks and bargaining power within couples. These issues are interrelated and are discussed in three essays. The first essay investigates the impact of information externalities in social networks on the use of antenatal services. Particular emphasis is placed on the extent to which the probability of early antenatal check-up and antenatal completion are affected by social networks. Adopting an econometric technique that minimises the problem of omitted variable bias, the analysis suggests that these network effects increase the probability of antenatal care completion by an additional 6 to 35 percent, and may be as high as 59 percent. The study further finds that without adequate control of omitted variables, the network impact would be understated. It is also evident that failure to control for individual and household observable characteristics overstates the impact of networks. Results from the two approaches used in this study confirm that irrespective of the definition of social network, having a high quality contacts increase the probability of utilising maternal health services. The second essay examines the effect of bargaining power within couples on the probability of delivering in a health facility (public and private), as opposed to a home birth. It further investigates the effect of bargaining on the probability of health care provider choice at childbirth using a multinomial nested logit. Evidence suggests that cooperation within couples in decision-making, female discretion over household resources, and freedom from domestic violence increases the probability of childbirth in a facility, as opposed to home. The study finds that a woman's influence on service use varies if she is better educated than her partner. In addition, while cooperation in household decision and the incidence of domestic violence significantly affect private facility use, female discretion over household resources has a strong effect on public facility choice. Finally, antenatal completion, health knowledge, and maternal specific factors increase the probability of delivering in a public and private facility. ii The third essay empirically explores the contribution of intra-household bargaining, to the rural-urban gap in child nutrition. The study analyses the effect of parental bargaining indicators (cooperation in household decisions, the incidence domestic violence and discretion over household resources) on the probability of child stunting in both rural and urban areas. The essay contributes to the literature by demonstrating empirically that differences in intra-household bargaining increase the rural-urban gap in child health. It further contributes to the literature by correcting for possible sample selection bias. The results suggest that the significant effects of household bargaining indicators on child stunting in Tanzania are mainly from the rural and not the urban population. It provides evidence that weak bargaining power within couples in rural areas account for 5 percent of the rural-urban gap in child nutrition. The contribution reduces to 4 percent after correcting for sample selection bias. The results also suggest that failure to adequately correct for selection bias leads to a substantial underestimation of the overall rural-urban gap in child nutrition by 11 percent.

The present study was designed to explore the mind-body connection within a psychosocial-cultural context. More specifically, the current investigator hoped to examine how various dimensions of the mind and body interact with psychosocial-environmental factors, which are significantly influenced by cultural processes and reference group membership A cross-sectional study was designed to examine the relationship between health beliefs and health behaviors in sample of 419 adults with Type II diabetes with a focus on the moderating effects of social support, emotional reactions, and experiences of unfair treatment. A self-report questionnaire comprised of 90-items obtained from previously established measures of health beliefs, psychosocial-cultural factors, and health behaviors was administered online via Qualtrics.com. Results of testing a series of measurement and structural models using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed poor fit across all models specified. While these results indicated that the expanded Health Belief Model (eHBM) specified for this study did not adequately describe the diabetes-related thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors for the current sample of participants, findings may have provided preliminary evidence of a three-factor structure reflecting participants’ worries and concerns about their health & perceptions involving challenges or obstacles to successful behavior change, which could interfere with daily life. Although it is unclear whether these results were related to limitations in the measurement instruments and study design, or to differences in the nature of the constructs and the ways in which participants interpreted and responded to the scales, the overall findings of this study suggest a need for research that examines the equivalence of health belief and health behavior measures and greater empirical evidence to ensure that the theories and models used in health research are generalizable across groups of people with varying world-views, identities and lived experiences. Implications for the Health Belief Model (HBM) and ideas for future research are discussed.

Podemos observar que, en la actualidad, la decoración y ambientación de hogares, oficinas y negocios en general se viene desarrollando cada vez más. Esto con el propósito de diferenciación o exclusividad, buscando en cada caso reflejar estilos, asociaciones con actividades, productos, marcas, estilos de vida o simplemente una proyección de personalidad en cuanto a gustos y preferencias. Los hechos descritos abren la posibilidad de incursionar en el negocio de la decoración dada su proyección y demanda creciente tanto por decoradores de Interior, publicistas e incluso las propias personas que toman esta actividad como una forma de distracción y relax. El presente proyecto plantea realizar la propuesta de viabilidad para el desarrollo de un negocio en diseño y confección de artículos decorativos usando como material principal el vinilo y comercializando los productos a través de Instagram y otras redes sociales. De esta forma se busca facilitar la tarea decorativa ofertando al mercado diseños exclusivos y creativos pudiendo atender incluso una demanda personalizada en función de los gustos, preferencias y requerimientos de los clientes. Se ha previsto desarrollar muestras y modelos con el propósito de promocionar la línea de productos en la plataforma de Instagram buscando una rápida difusión mediante personas con influencia en la red a las cuales se podrá llegar vía canje o convenios promocionales. Mediante el análisis financiero, se ha validado la rentabilidad del proyecto con un VAN positivo, una TIR económico de 77.30% un periodo de recuperación de la inversión aceptable, así como indicadores que muestran NORMAL como un negocio real y sostenible. Finalmente, se presentan las conclusiones finales obtenidas a partir de los resultados obtenidos en la investigación. / This project proposes to make the feasibility proposal for the development of a business in design and preparation of decorative items using vinyl as the main material and marketing the products through Instagram and other social networks. In this way, it is sought to facilitate the decorative task by offering the market exclusive and creative designs, being able to meet even a personalized demand based on the tastes, preferences and requirements of the clients. It is planned to develop samples and models with the purpose of promoting the product line on the Instagram platform looking for a rapid dissemination through people with influence in the network which can be reached via exchange or promotional agreements. Through the financial analysis, the profitability of the project has been validated with a positive NPV, an economic IRR of 77.30%, a period of recovery of the acceptable investment as well as indicators that show NORMAL as a real and sustainable business. Finally, the final conclusions obtained from the results obtained in the investigation are presented. / Trabajo de investigación

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / This paper presents the results of an interview of first-year university students at a private face-to-face university in Lima city on how they use digital technologies in their social and academic lives. This study was positioned in the interpretive paradigm with qualitative research design. Semi-structured interview with 13 open-ended questions was selected as the means of data. Atlas.ti. were used to analysed and coded all the interviews. To provide a well-structured approach to handling a large data set, thematic analysis was employed to analyse the verbatim transcription as outlined by Braun and Clarke. Contrary to the assumption that young learners are seen as highly adept technology users, the findings show that social networks (Facebook and Instagram) and WhatsApp are the most important applications for the participants.