Following the dramatic takeoff of contemporary China-Africa relationship in the late 1990s, this once neglected international phenomenon has become one of the most topical themes over the past decade. This new popularity is due not only to the growing importance of both China and Africa on the global stage, but also China's rapidly increasing foreign aid on the continent. However, whilst most scholars are focusing on the financial side of the story – the massive concessional loan deals, the generous investments in natural resources and so forth, the primary purpose of this foreign aid – assisting African recipient countries' economic and welfare development – has only generated minimal interest. Little is known regarding how China delivers its foreign aid, and even less about how this foreign aid actually works in the African recipient countries. In light of this situation, this study asks: How has China's foreign aid been assisting Africa's development? On the basis of drawing specific attention to the effectiveness and sustainability of China's foreign aid in Africa, this study also explores the factors that affect these outcomes. Which, as this study finds out in the end, friendship – a factor that is often overlooked by Western scholars and patriotically examined by Chinese scholars. Not only has it continuously played a substantial role in shaping the development of China's foreign aid in Africa, but it is also frequently the most influential underlying consideration that practically undermines China's foreign aid outcomes. All in all, whilst purposed to promote China's foreign aid outcomes, this study improves our understanding of China's foreign aid in Africa. As well it delves into the development of China's foreign aid in Africa, assesses its performance, this study finds the shortcomings of China's foreign aid at present and searches for practical solutions that may contribute to its future development.

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I denna uppsats undersöks vänskapsmotivet i romancegenren, med fokus på kvinnliga vänskaper. Romanerna Beach Read (2019), People We Meet On Vacation (2020) och Book Lovers (2021) av Emily Henry står som representanter för genren. Syftet är att studera hur kvinnlig vänskap porträtteras och huruvida den får ta plats jämte romansen. Mieke Bals Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (2017) används för att göra narratologiska analyser av karaktärerna, med fokus på begreppen ”kvalifikation” och ”kvalifikation genom funktion”. Detta belyser inte bara karaktärernas egenskaper utan också deras roller och funktion i narrativet. Även Elizabeth Abels artikel ”(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women” (1981) tas upp för att kategorisera olika typer av fiktiva väninnerelationer, där komplementaritet eller identifikation mellan kvinnokaraktärerna är faktorn som särskiljer dem. Slutsatsen i uppsatsen är att vänskaperna hamnar i narrativets periferi. Även om relationerna ser väldigt olika ut i verken, och väninnorna i varje verk på detaljnivå har olika roller, så sammanhålls de alla av att väninnan används för att främja romantiken. Genren böckerna arbetar inom påverkar dess möjlighet att skildra något annat än komplementära väninneskildringar. / This study examines the motif of friendship in the romance genre, focusing on female friendships. The novels Beach Read (2019), People We Meet On Vacation (2020) and Book Lovers (2021) by Emily Henry works as representatives for the genre. The purpose of the study is to explore the portrayal of friendship between women and whether it's allowed any space next to the romance. Mieke Bal's Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (2017) is used to analyze the characters, focusing on the concept of "qualification" and "qualification by function”. This illustrates not only the character's individual characteristics, but also their roles and function in the narrative. Elizabeth Abel's article ”(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women” (1981) is also brought up to categorize different types of fictional female friendships, where complementarity or identification between the female characters are the factor that differentiates them. The conclusion of the study is that the friendships do end up in the narrative's periphery. Although the relationships look very different in the respective works, and though the friends on a detailed level have different roles, they are all united in the sense that the female friend is predominantly used to promote the romance. The genre of these novels affects their ability to depict anything other than complementary friendship portrayals.

<p dir="ltr">International friendship (i.e., friendship between host-national and international students) is an important area of study for counseling psychologists. Host-national students’ engagement with international friendship is associated with cross-cultural learning, cognitive benefits, and a more nuanced understanding of race and stereotyping. Even with these benefits, international friendships appear to be infrequent. In this dissertation, I present two distinct chapters to investigate international friendship more deeply. In Chapter 1, I summarized benefits of and barriers to international friendship. Additionally, I described how relevant friendship theories have guided the current international friendship literature. I concluded Chapter 1 by identifying limitations to current research, making recommendations for future research, and offering implications for counseling psychologists. In Chapter 2, I performed a latent profile analysis to identify three profiles of host-national students based on their attitudes, behaviors, and demographic factors. I used these profiles to analyze how international friendship engagement varies by their profile group membership. I then contextualized these profiles in research and theory and identified limitations to the current study.</p>

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / The idea of socializing with other people of different backgrounds and cultures excites the web surfers. Today, there are hundreds of Social Networking sites on the web with millions of users connected with relationships such as "friend", "follow", "fan", forming a huge graph structure. The amount of data associated with the users in these Social Networking sites has resulted in opportunities for interesting data mining problems including friendship link and interest predictions, tag recommendations among others. In this work, we consider the friendship link prediction problem and study a topic modeling approach to this problem. Topic models are among the most effective approaches to latent topic analysis and mining of text data. In particular, Probabilistic Topic models are based upon the idea that documents can be seen as mixtures of topics and topics can be seen as mixtures of words. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is one such probabilistic model which is generative in nature and is used for collections of discrete data such as text corpora. For our link prediction problem, users in the dataset are treated as "documents" and their interests as the document contents. The topic probabilities obtained by modeling users and interests using LDA provide an explicit representation for each user. User pairs are treated as examples and are represented using a feature vector constructed from the topic probabilities obtained with LDA. This vector will only capture information contained in the interests expressed by the users. Another important source of information that is relevant to the link prediction task is given by the graph structure of the social network. Our assumption is that a user "A" might be a friend of user "B" if a) users "A" and "B" have common or similar interests b) users "A" and "B" have some common friends. While capturing similarity between interests is taken care by the topic modeling technique, we use the graph structure to find common friends. In the past, the graph structure underlying the network has proven to be a trustworthy source of information for predicting friendship links. We present a comparison of predictions from feature sets constructed using topic probabilities and the link graph separately, with a feature set constructed using both topic probabilities and link graph.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / William H. Hsu / An ontology can be seen as an explicit description of the concepts and relationships that exist in a domain. In this thesis, we address the problem of building an interests' ontology and using the same to construct features for predicting both potential friendship relations between users in the social network Live Journal, and users' interests. Previous work has shown that the accuracy of predicting friendship links in this network is very low if simply interests common to two users are used as features and no network graph features are considered. Thus, our goal is to organize users' interests into an ontology (specifically, a concept hierarchy) and to use the semantics captured by this ontology to improve the performance of learning algorithms at the task of predicting if two users can be friends. To achieve this goal, we have designed and implemented a hybrid clustering algorithm, which combines hierarchical agglomerative and divisive clustering paradigms, and automatically builds the interests' ontology. We have explored the use of this ontology to construct interest-based features and shown that the resulting features improve the performance of various classifiers for predicting friendships in the Live Journal social network. We have also shown that using the interests' ontology, one can address the problem of predicting the interests of Live Journal users, a task that in absence of the ontology is not feasible otherwise as there is an overwhelming number of interests.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Intimate and satisfying relationships in adolescence are connected to mental health and well-being and have significant implications for adolescent psychosocial development. Despite the benefits of romantic involvement, research into adolescents’ experiences within their romantic relationships is limited. Few studies on adolescent intimacy experiences, especially those leading to conceptualizations of intimacy, have been undertaken. The majority of studies that have been conducted on adolescents’ intimacy experiences have been conducted in White, Euro-American, middle-class samples, using quantitative methodology and researchers’ definitions of the construct. In South Africa adolescent romantic relationships are often studied because of their links with pressing social issues, such as teenage pregnancy, intimate partner violence and risky sexual behaviour and HIV/AIDS, rather than for the value of understanding the relationships themselves. The resultant negative constructions of adolescent romance in research literature serve to continue the narrow scope of inquiry into adolescent intimate relationships and also limit the ability of professionals and care-givers to respond to the relationship challenges of South African youth. The present study was aimed at addressing some of the limitations of previous research on adolescent romantic relationship experiences, with a particular focus on intimacy. Coloured adolescents from a low-income, semi-rural community in the Western Cape were selected as participants for the inquiry due to the overwhelming lack of knowledge about the constructions of intimacy in this group. Social constructionism was used as a theoretical framework to ground and inform the study. The research objective was to develop an understanding of the constructions and experiences of intimacy of middle adolescents within the specific target community. A social constructionist grounded theory method was used. In-depth interviews were conducted with 20 young men and women. The social constructionist grounded theory analysis indicated that participants appeared to strive toward having ideal relationships as portrayed in the Western popular media. Participants’ constructions of intimacy centred on behaviour rather than on abstract, emotional experience, Their relationship experiences and behaviours reflected discourses of gendered romantic relationship interaction, with boys emphasizing commitment and girls focusing on “doing emotion work” as pathways to experiencing and expressing intimacy. The researcher raises the possibility that adolescent boy’s and girl’s striving toward ideal Western relationships, media and peer reinforcement of these ideal relationships and adolescents’ specific developmental cognitive limitations may limit their capacity for knowing themselves and their partners in their romantic relationships and contribute to inauthenticity in romantic relationships. As Western mainstream intimacy discourses stress the importance of self and partner knowledge, as well as authenticity in romantic relationships, these discourses therefore make it difficult to recognize and validate adolescents’ intimacy experiences. In fact these discourses imply that adolescents have a limited ability to experience intimacy. The researcher argues that by situating intimacy in the context of behaviours rather than emotional experience, understandings of intimacy can move beyond the essentialist depictions of what is and is not intimate, thus allowing for a range of behaviours to count as intimate, broadening the possibilities for conceptualizing and acknowledging intimacy. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Intieme en bevredigende verhoudings in adolessensie is verbind aan geestelike gesondheid en welsyn en het beduidende implikasies vir die adolessent se psigososiale ontwikkeling Ten spyte hiervan, is navorsingoor adolessentese ervaringsin hulromantiese verhoudingsbeperk. Minstudies ooradolessenteintimiteit, veral dié wat lei totbegrippevanintimiteit, isonderneem.Diemeerderheid van studiesooradolessente seintimiteitservaringsis uitgevoer inWit,Euro-Amerikaanse, middelklas steekproewe. In Suid-Afrika word adolessente se romantiese verhoudings dikwels bestudeervanweehul assosiasie met dreigende sosiale kwessies soos tienerswangerskappe, intieme maatgeweld, riskante seksuele gedrag en MIV/VIGS, eerder as vir die waarde van die begrip van die verhoudings self. Die gevolglike negatiewe konstruksies van adolessente se romantiese betrokkenheid dra by tot die beperkte fokus en omvang van ondersoekeoor adolessente se romantiese verhoudings, en ook die beperkte vermoë van professionele mense en versorgers om te reageer op die verhoudingsuitdagings van die Suid-Afrikaanse jeug te beperk. Die huidige studie was daarop gemik om van die beperkings van vorige navorsing oor adolessente se romantiese verhoudingservarings, met 'n besondere fokus op intimiteit, aan te spreek. Kleurling adolessente van 'n semi-landelike gemeenskap in die Wes Kaap is gekies as deelnemers as gevolg van die oorweldigende gebrek aan kennis oor die konstruksie van intimiteit in hierdie groep. ‘nSosiaal-konstruktionistiese raamwerk is gebruik om die studie te begrond en te rig. Die navorsingsdoelwit was om 'n begrip van die ervarings van intimiteit van middel-adolessente binne die spesifieke teikengemeenskap te ontwikkel. Hierdie doel is bereik deur gebruik te maak van 'n sosiaal-konstruksionistiese gegrondeteoriemetode.In-diepte onderhoude is gevoer met 20 adolessente mans en vrouens. Die sosiaal konstruktionistiese gegronde teorie analise het aangedui dat deelnemers se konstruksies van intimiteit gedrag eerder as emosionele ervaring in hul intimiteitsvertellings beklemtoon het. Hul verhouding ervarings en gedrag weerspieël diskoerse van geslagtelike romantiese verhoudinginteraksie met seuns wattoewyding en meisies wat die "doen van emosie werk" beklemtoon as roetes na intimiteit. Deelnemers blyk om te streef na ideale verhoudings soos uitgebeeld is in die Wes-populêre media, duer ‘n behoefte om in te pas en aanvaar te word deur hul eweknieë. Hierdie proses kan deelnemers lei om op te tree en hulle gedagtes oor romantiese verhoudings uit te spreek in ooreenstemming met wat algemeen aanvaar word binne hul portuurgroep, eerder as in die maniere wat hulle eie oortuigings, begrip en begeertes weerspieël. Hierdie proses lei tot 'n beperkte kennis en bewustheid van die self as' n romantiese vennoot sowel as 'n neiging tot onoutentieke grdrag in romantiese verhoudings. Hierdie beperkte self-bewustheid en onoutentieke gedrag inhibeer dan adolessente se vermoë om intimiteit te ervaar wanneer dit volgens die hoofstroom konstruksies daarvan beskou is. Die bevindinge dui op die behoefte aan die gebruik van breër definisies van intimiteit in die oorweging van adolessente romantiese verhoudings, die bou van alternatiewe diskoerse van intimiteit en‘n verhoging van leiding deur volwassenes ten opsigte vanadoloesente se romantiese verhoudings Sekere beperkings van die huidige navorsing het ook verwys na 'n behoefte aan meer navorsing oor die invloed van' n wyer kontekstuele faktore in adolessente se konstruksies van intimiteit.

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

published_or_final_version / abstract / Social Work and Social Administration / Master / Master of Philosophy