No abstract available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1981.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2002.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1978.

Attachment theories emphasize the importance of a secure attachment at all stages in life. In secure attachment relationships, individuals are confident that during times of real or perceived distress they can rely on the attachment figure to provide desired security. Conversely, individuals with insecure attachments feel they cannot rely on their attachment figures and thus will not be comforted in times of need. Lack of secure attachments can lead to psychological and behavioral difficulties. In the present study, maternal and peer attachments were investigated and related to levels of self-reported delinquency among 84 First Nations adolescent students, ages 11 to 17 from a reserve in a remote geographic location. The results from the present study appear to be congruent with the literature which reports that insecure attachments in youths lead to higher rates of delinquent behaviors. High levels of secure attachments in the participants resulted in low levels of reported delinquency, however the relationship between attachment and delinquency in adolescent participants was found to be dependent on the grade in school and gender interaction.

This thesis contributes to knowledge in the field of medical anthropology, particularly in Egypt and the Middle East, in two specific ways. First, the thesis demonstrates how a limited focus on kinship and micro social relations precludes a full understanding of the life experiences of people, especially at times of illness. The thesis shows that these conceptual limitations stem from a romanticized view of Egyptian culture---a view that poorly corresponds to the contemporary Egyptian situation. The thesis proposes that social networks And the ground between micro and macro social associations need to be incorporated into future studies of medical anthropology in general, and in Egypt and the Middle East in particular. Second, the thesis demonstrates how cultural values linked to the diversity of social classes and unequal access to social and financial capital shape illness experience. It is argued that access to biomedical services is a social manifestation of culturally constructed subcultures where kinship, social networks, and social hierarchy produce the current inequalities in well-being among inhabitants of modern Egypt. A cultural and social analysis grounded in the history of Egyptian modernity is pursued here to better understand current inequality in social and physical well-being. Space, aesthetics, religion, network affiliation, and other factors constitute essential elements of this analysis. The thesis proposes integrating a study of the cultural manifestations of the production of social inequality into all future studies of illness in Egypt and the Middle East. It is concluded that a culture of social distinctions and discrimination prevails, and that such a culture shapes social relations and illness experience. Unless this culture is understood and addressed, there is little hope for an equal distribution of resources for well-being among Egyptians.

<p>An abstract of a dissertation that examines the motivational foundations of social networks. Five studies using diverse methods examine goal pursuit as an antecedent to social network structure, finding that self-oriented and affiliation-oriented goal pursuit evoke unique patterns of interpersonal perception and motivation which lead to the development of sparser and denser social networks, respectively. Study 1 serves as an empirical summary of our theorizing: individuals primed with dense networks feel more efficacious pursuing affiliation-oriented goals versus self-oriented goals, and individuals primed with sparse networks feel more efficacious pursuing self-oriented goals than individuals primed with dense networks. Study 2finds a correlation between personal goals and network structure. Studies 3 and 4 experimentally demonstrate that reminders of self versus affiliation-oriented goals lead to different cognitively-activated network structures. Study 5 finds that individuals entering a new social network with strong career goals (self-oriented goals) develop significantly sparser local networks and attain more central network positions; the opposite pattern emerges for individuals pursuing strong social goals (affiliation-oriented goals). Individuals strongly motivated to pursue both goals lose the network structure benefits of having a strong career goal. Findings support the hypothesis linking personal goal pursuit to network structure, a novel approach to integrating psychology and networks research.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Although many organizations aspire to be diverse, both in their internal composition and external collaborations, diversity's consequences for organizational outcomes remain unclear. This project uses three separate studies to examine how diversity within and across organizations influences organizational outcomes. The first study uses original data from a national study of organizations to analyze how an organization's internal social composition is associated with its performance. It advances diversity-performance research by demonstrating how the mechanisms of social bridging and social bonding can work together within a diverse organization to improve its performance. The findings suggests that an organization can improve its performance by having socially diverse members who interact often and in ways that engage their social differences. The second study integrates social capital theory and network analysis to explore the relationship between interorganizational networks and organizational action. It uses cross-sectional and panel data from a national study of congregations to analyze the collaborative partnerships congregations form to provide social services. This study demonstrates that a congregation's network ties, net of the effects of its internal characteristics, are significantly associated with the number and types of social service programs it offers. The third study illustrates how an organization's external ties can shape its action by examining black churches and their responses to people living with HIV/AIDS. It uses data from a nationally representative sample of black congregations and draws on institutional theory to analyze congregations as open systems that can be influenced by their surrounding environment. This study indicates that black churches that are engaging their external environment are significantly more likely to have an HIV/AIDS program. Overall, by analyzing how individuals interact within organizations and how organizations interact with one another, these three studies demonstrate how diverse networks influence organizational outcomes.</p> / Dissertation

Motivated by increasing public awareness of possible abuse of confidential information, which is considered as a significant hindrance to the development of e-society, medical and financial markets, a privacy preserving data mining framework is presented so that data owners can carefully process data in order to preserve confidential information and guarantee information functionality within an acceptable boundary. First, among many privacy-preserving methodologies, as a group of popular techniques for achieving a balance between data utility and information privacy, a class of data perturbation methods add a noise signal, following a statistical distribution, to an original numerical matrix. With the help of analysis in eigenspace of perturbed data, the potential privacy vulnerability of a popular data perturbation is analyzed in the presence of very little information leakage in privacy-preserving databases. The vulnerability to very little data leakage is theoretically proved and experimentally illustrated. Second, in addition to numerical matrices, social networks have played a critical role in modern e-society. Security and privacy in social networks receive a lot of attention because of recent security scandals among some popular social network service providers. So, the need to protect confidential information from being disclosed motivates us to develop multiple privacy-preserving techniques for social networks. Affinities (or weights) attached to edges are private and can lead to personal security leakage. To protect privacy of social networks, several algorithms are proposed, including Gaussian perturbation, greedy algorithm, and probability random walking algorithm. They can quickly modify original data in a large-scale situation, to satisfy different privacy requirements. Third, the era of big data is approaching on the horizon in the industrial arena and academia, as the quantity of collected data is increasing in an exponential fashion. Three issues are studied in the age of big data with privacy preservation, obtaining a high confidence about accuracy of any specific differentially private queries, speedily and accurately updating a private summary of a binary stream with I/O-awareness, and launching a mutual private information retrieval for big data. All three issues are handled by two core backbones, differential privacy and the Chernoff Bound.

Abstract Beliefs about which behaviors and responsibilities should typical be assumed by women and men are central in shaping gender relations and gender equality in society. The belief that women should be responsible for domestic work, while men should provide economically for the family gives rise to an uneven opportunity structure, situating women in a disadvantaged position compared to men. In order to achieve gender equality traditional gender role attitudes need to liberalize. This thesis examines who supports non-traditional gender roles in Sweden. Data representative of the Swedish population between the ages of 18-79 were used to explore the relationship between social context and individual self-interest and gender role attitudes. The results showed that women are more likely to be positive towards non-traditional gender roles if they are situated in highly educated social contexts. Conversely, men were found to be more likely to be positive if situated in gender equal contexts. This indicates that men’s beliefs regarding what is appropriate for women might be countered by women in gender equal contexts, while women may find confirmation regarding their non-traditional gender role attitude in other equally liberal women.

Ces dernières années, le contenu disponible sur le Web a augmenté de manière considérable dans ce qu’on appelle communément le Web social. Pour l’utilisateur moyen, il devient de plus en plus difficile de recevoir du contenu de qualité sans se voir rapidement submergé par le flot incessant de publications. Pour les fournisseurs de service, le passage à l’échelle reste problématique. L’objectif de cette thèse est d’aboutir à une meilleure expérience utilisateur à travers la mise en place de systèmes de filtrage et de recommandation. Le filtrage consiste à offrir la possibilité à un utilisateur de ne recevoir qu’un sous ensemble des publications des comptes auxquels il est abonné. Tandis que la recommandation permet la découverte d’information à travers la suggestion de comptes à suivre sur des sujets donnés. Nous avons élaboré MicroFilter un système de filtrage passant à l’échelle capable de gérer des flux issus du Web ainsi que RecLand, un système de recommandation qui tire parti de la topologie du réseau ainsi que du contenu afin de générer des recommandations pertinentes. / In the last years, the amount of available data on the social Web has exploded. For the average user, it became hard to find quality content without being overwhelmed with publications. For service providers, the scalability of such services became a challenging task. The aim of this thesis is to achieve a better user experience by offering the filtering and recommendation features. Filtering consists to provide for a given user, the ability of receiving only a subset of the publications from the direct network. Where recommendation allows content discovery by suggesting relevant content producers on given topics. We developed MicroFilter, a scalable filtering system able to handle Web-like data flows and RecLand, a recommender system that takes advantage of the network topology as well as the content in order to provide relevant recommendations.