A certain community within the southern region of Texas has consistently been linked to escalating poverty, high crime rates, low educational achievement, and poor physical and mental health. For the purpose of this research, this community will be referred to as Community X. Although some researchers have found that sense of community and supportive social networks are associated with healthy mental and physical functioning, others have suggested that in a debilitated community social networks can facilitate psychological distress and a strong sense of community is difficult to develop. Guided by Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, the purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine the combination of 3 Social Network Index (SNI) scores and 4 Sense of Community Index 2 (SCI-2) scores that affect Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10) scores. For the 106 Community X resident participants, as the SNI number of embedded networks increased, K10 scores tended to increase, indicating higher levels of psychological distress (consistent with the negative effect research). In a cluster analysis, two clusters emerged in which one cluster (n = 67) had positive z-score means on all SNI indices and all SCI-2 subscales, while the other cluster (n = 39) had all negative z-score means. The cluster with all positive scores had lower K10 psychological distress scores (consistent with the positive effect research), but the difference was not statistically significant. The mixed results indicated that comparative research is needed to control for communities of varying ecological distress to better relate psychological distress to sense of community and the valence of social networks to facilitate positive social change health policies and interventions that are ecological-distress sensitive.

Terrorism threatens both international peace and security and is a national concern. It is believed that terrorist organizations rely heavily on a few key leaders and that destroying such an organization's leadership is essential to reducing its influence. Martonosi et al. (2011) argues that increasing the amount of communication through a key leader increases the likelihood of detection. If we model a covert organization as a social network where edges represent communication between members, we want to determine the subset of members to remove that maximizes the amount of communication through the key leader. A mixed-integer linear program representing this problem is presented as well as a decomposition for this optimization problem. As these approaches prove impractical for larger graphs, often running out of memory, the last section focuses on structural characteristics of vertices and subsets that increase communication. Future work should develop these structural properties as well as heuristics for solving this problem.

In this work I investigate how executive social connections and executive gender diversity dually affect firm Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), a set of firm policies implemented to benefit the social, economic, and environmental welfare of all stakeholders, and how the changes in CSR driven by executive social connections and executive gender diversity in turn affect a range of corporate policies. This research adds to the social networks, gender, and CSR literature within finance in multiple ways. First, while much past work examines the impact on corporate policy of executive gender or executive social connections in isolation, no major work to date examines the impact of gender dependent executive social connections on corporate policy. Second, this work definitively ties the dual effects of executive gender diversity and social connections to firm CSR. The dual impact of social connections and gender diversity on CSR is shown to affect major corporate policies. In all, this work provides evidence that CSR helps drive important firm polices, including M&A and executive compensation policy, and that CSR is impacted by both a firm’s executive gender diversity and social network connections. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The aim of this research has been to explore and further describe the use of Instagram for destination marketing. The purpose of this study was to better understand how marketing objectives can be achieved using Instagram. Based on the research question a literature review was formed. Methodologically a quantitative approach was used. The data was collected from the Instagram account of Swedish Lapland. The finding indicates that Instagram is a place where people find new travel destinations, the app is one of the primary sources of this information and some people buy trips with the information they find on the app.

<p>Following the trend of online data sharing and publishing, researchers raise their concerns about the privacy problem. Online Social Networks (OSNs), for example, often contain sensitive information about individuals. Therefore, anonymizing network data before releasing it becomes an important issue. This dissertation studies the privacy preservation problem from the perspectives of both attackers and defenders. </p> <p><br></p> <p>To defenders, preserving the private information while keeping the utility of the published OSN is essential in data anonymization. At one extreme, the final data equals the original one, which contains all the useful information but has no privacy protection. At the other extreme, the final data is random, which has the best privacy protection but is useless to the third parties. Hence, the defenders aim to explore multiple potential methods to strike a desirable tradeoff between privacy and utility in the published data. This dissertation draws on the very fundamental problem, the definition of utility and privacy. It draws on the design of the privacy criterion, the graph abstraction model, the utility method, and the anonymization method to further address the balance between utility and privacy. </p> <p><br></p> <p>To attackers, extracting meaningful information from the collected data is essential in data de-anonymization. De-anonymization mechanisms utilize the similarities between attackers’ prior knowledge and published data to catch the targets. This dissertation focuses on the problems that the published data is periodic, anonymized, and does not cover the target persons. There are two thrusts in studying the de-anonymization attacks: the design of seed mapping method and the innovation of generating-based attack method. To conclude, this dissertation studies the online data privacy problem from both defenders’ and attackers’ point of view and introduces privacy and utility enhancement mechanisms in different novel angles.</p>

Friendships are a mental health resource for adolescents. Their availability and strength have been shown to predict lower levels of depression, higher self-esteem, and higher life satisfaction. They can also alleviate the stress that often leads to negative mental health outcomes. However, studies examining the stress process rarely consider the fact that social networks like friendship groups are not a static resource that effects all people the same way. Rather, demographic characteristics of both the individual and their friends could change the role of friendship networks within the stress process. In this thesis, I investigate the importance of one such demographic characteristic: race. Racial and ethnic diversity continues to grow in the United States, contributing to an increase interracial and interethnic friendships. It is important to understand what impact racial difference might have on the stress process. In addition to using Leonard Peralin's stress process model to understand these potential effects, I draw upon Gordon Allport’s Contact theory to inform my analysis. Contact Theory attempts to explain why and how intergroup contact leads to changes in racial attitudes. Increases in positive racial attitudes may lower unique stressors often experienced my racial minorities such as racial prejudice and acculturation. This research project provides a starting point for deeper analyses examining how contact theory and the stress process function together. I ask if racially diverse friendship networks affect adolescent mental well being (as measured by mental health and self-esteem) and if the race of the respondent moderate the effects of racial diversity in friendship networks on mental well-being. To answer these questions, I perform secondary data analysis of survey responses from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. I use public-use, cross-sectional data of adolescents from Wave 1 ('94-'95). Linear regression models predicting adolescent mental health found that racial difference in friendship networks is negatively associated with mental health for white adolescents. For Asian respondents, linear regression models found that racial difference in friendship networks was positively associated with both mental health and self-esteem. Results on Hispanic, Black, and "Other" race adolescents were non-significant. These results suggest that racial difference in friendship networks have varying associations on mental well-being that depend on the race of the adolescent. White adolescents with more diverse friend groups may experience increased stress resulting from an increased awareness of the racial prejudice that affects their friend's lives. Asian adolescents may benefit from more diverse friend groups because it allows them to find a "sense of belonging" in environments where there is less opportunity to have same-race friendship networks. They also might face less discrimination from different-race peers, allowing the social support benefits of a racially different friendship networks to outweigh any increases in perceived discrimination from peers. The results indicate that future studies should continue studying how demographic characteristics influence the stress process, including the role of social networks. Policies should aim to provide educational resources teaching adolescents how to handle experiences of prejudice and to create positive points of contact for different race peers. Future studies should assess the validity of these results by performing longitudinal analyses that can provide information on how racially different friendship networks buffer specific stressors and discover if the relationships found in this analysis change over time.

Malaria is the main cause of mortality for children under the age of 5 in Burundi. The access to malaria diagnostics and treatment is hampered not only because of logistical issues, but also due to the lack of qualified human resources and their inequitable distribution across the country. To mitigate the lack of human resources for health, the government of Burundi, along with its partners, shifted some tasks to community health workers (CHWs) to cover unmet healthcare needs for selected diseases such as malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the social support provided to CHWs had an impact on morbidity due to malaria for children under the age of 5. The social networks and social support theoretical framework was used to explore the type of social support received by CHWs and its impact on the number of children treated. The 88 CHWs who participated in this cross sectional survey, were randomly selected from a pool of 719 CHWs who were part of a pilot project that was implemented in the districts of Gahombo, Gashoho, and Mabayi, from 2011 to 2014. The study findings showed mixed results with a positive correlation between the instrumental support received and the number of children under the age of 5 treated. However, a statistically significant correlation was not established between the emotional, informational, and appraisal support received and the number of children under the age of 5 treated. The positive social change implications of the study include providing evidence to build and enhance human resource capacity for improving the health of children living in Burundi, an under-resourced country, through the development of a support package that can be offered to CHWs to help them perform their duties in a more effective way.

Researchers have revealed that rural African American communities, which have been adversely impacted by disasters, could minimize personal injuries and property damage by being prepared before a disaster strikes. Data from past studies have shown that social networks, such as faith-based organizations (FBOs), have been instrumental in assisting rural African American communities recover from disasters such as floods and fires. This exploratory qualitative case study addressed the research question: How a rural, FBO organized resources to build a community based, all-volunteer fire department. The conceptual framework for this study incorporated concepts from social network theory and social capital theory. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit 11 participants. Data were collected through interviews, newspapers articles, and church documents. Data were analyzed using inductive analysis and Colaizzi's method for determining emergent themes. Results revealed that community members lacked the knowledge and resources needed to build the fire department. Findings further revealed that the FBO was the hub of activities where social networks organized the social capital needed to engage, recruit, and unite members in building the fire station. The themes of determination, dedication, resilience, and persistence further revealed that community members used social networks and social capital to overcome obstacles to building the fire station. Findings from this study contributes to positive social change by providing information to human services professionals, government agencies, policy makers, and community members on how FBOs can be utilized as social networks that can leverage the social capital needed to prepare isolated, rural communities for disasters.

Orientador: Marcia Reami Pechula / Resumo: O Discurso Sobre o Emagrecimento (DSE) circula no Facebook e Instagram, produzindo sentidos que afetam sujeitos que acompanham diariamente perfis de leigos e profissionais de saúde nessas redes sociais. Os dizeres do senso comum e os que são apropriados do meio científico são repetidos infinitamente, até que seus sentidos se tornem naturais por efeito da ideologia. Emagrecer nunca pareceu tão simples, e seguir as “dicas” disponíveis na internet faz com que se reforcem discursos que não são benéficos à população, causando risco de adoecê-la ainda mais, já que a obesidade é considerada uma pandemia na atualidade. Duas posições sujeito (leigos e profissionais de saúde) foram acompanhadas, e seus discursos compuseram o corpus, que foi se revelando aos poucos e mostrando como no DSE o sujeito se movimenta a todo instante, identificando-se e desidentificando-se com sentidos de uma formação discursiva bastante heterogênea. O verbal e o não verbal foram considerados em suas materialidades distintas, significando em conjunto, e, mesmo quando houve a necessidade de verbalização, as imagens e seu modo de significar singulares foram destacados. Por haver uma aproximação dos discursos das duas posições sujeito em um espaço onde as linhas que separam o científico do não científico estão cada vez mais finas e esburacadas, elegemos o discurso da dona de casa Eloísa Helena para mostrar os movimentos do DSE, seus sentidos mais recorrentes e como a ideologia trabalha em uma era de pós-verdade, ... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Discourse on Slimming (DSE) circulates on Facebook and Instagram, producing meanings that affect subjects that daily accompanies profiles of laypeople and health professionals in these social networks. The sayings of common sense and those appropriated of the scientific community are repeated infinitely until their meanings become natural by the effect of ideology. Slimming never seemed so simple, and following the "tips" available on the internet, reinforces discourses that are not beneficial to the population, causing the risk of getting it sick even more, since obesity is considered a pandemic nowadays. Two subject positions (laypeople and health professionals) were followed, and their discourses composed the corpus, which gradually revealed itself and showed how in the DSE the subject moves at all times, identifying and disidentificating himself with meanings of a very heterogeneous discursive formation. Verbal and nonverbal were considered in their distinct materialities, meaning together, and even when there was a need for verbalization, the images and their singular way of meaning were highlighted. Because there is an approximation in the discourses of the two subject positions in a space where the lines that separate the scientific from the non-scientific are increasingly thin and bumpy, we choose the discourse of the housewife Eloisa Helena to show the movements of the DSE, their recurrent meanings and how ideology works in an era of post-truth, in which the meanings... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Doutor

Real graph datasets are important for many science domains, from understanding epidemics to modeling traffic congestion. To facilitate access to realistic graph datasets, researchers proposed various graph generators typically aimed at representing particular graph properties. While many such graph generators exist, there are few techniques for generating graphs where the nodes have binary attributes. Moreover, generating such graphs in which the distribution of the node attributes preserves real-world characteristics is still an open challenge. This thesis introduces Borromean, a graph generating algorithm that creates synthetic graphs with binary node attributes in which the attributes obey an attribute-specific joint degree distribution. We show experimentally the accuracy of the generated graphs in terms of graph size, distribution of attributes, and distance from the original joint degree distribution. We also designed a parallel version of Borromean in order to generate larger graphs and show its performance. Our experiments show that Borromean can generate graphs of hundreds of thousands of nodes in under 30 minutes, and these graphs preserve the distribution of binary node attributes within 40% on average.