published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Business / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

A considerable body of research shows that network structure can either assist or hinder one's access to social capital. Though the effects of particular structural arrangements of relationships are well known, there is comparatively little research on how a person might come to have one structural arrangement of ties over another. This study asks: What structures network structure? What cultural templates guide persons in their practice of friendship and in managing, maintaining, and adapting their personal communities over time? What contextual factors influence the duration and intensity of social relationships? Respondents were asked to make a list of "people who are important to you" and to describe the relationships individually while labeling each person on a social map. Interviews were coded using content analysis software in order to assess emergent cultural themes and the settings from which social relationships were drawn. Interview data confirmed respondents' use of cultural templates in the practice of friendship, which may affect one's ability to acquire and/or lose social capital. Interview data demonstrated how material resources may impact the vigor with which persons engage with social settings. Finally, some respondents reported important voluntary relationships that are at once high-commitment and low-contact. Frequently this type of tie arose when a relationship had outlived its original social context. This finding challenges the idea that contact and commitment usually go together in voluntary relationships.

In this thesis I examine the impact of interaction and participation on Facebook between private individuals and certain hierarchical groups in society, particularly with regard to individual privacy; consider the structure of Facebook’s privacy programming; and seek to establish where the balance of power lies between private individuals and commercial, political and media organisations. I make reference to Foucault’s theory of power, Bourdieu’s theories of power in social space and habitus and Althusser’s theory of interpellation as I record my research. This thesis is a qualitative research project, and I employ Critical Discourse Analysis as the principal research methodology. I focus on four cases studies: Facebook both as the internet platform which facilitates such interaction and the company which operates it; the developers of applications, such as online games, which are mounted on the platform; the network’s use by political parties and their leaders during the UK 2010 General Election campaign; and traditional media platforms as represented by two television annual ‘events’. My findings relate the manner in which individual users are constantly prompted to upload content, principally personal information, thoughts, preferences and relationships to the network, and simultaneously are pressurised into granting access to this information as they seek to fully participate on the social platform. This pressure is applied through applications that are mounted on the platform by commercial, media and political organisations, and I find that Facebook’s affordances to applications developers are instrumental in this process. My research associates these processes with the aforementioned theories of Foucault, Althusser and Bourdieu. My conclusion is that while Facebook continually revises its privacy policy to grant private individuals control over the content, that is the personal information, they upload to the social network, access to this information is a prerequisite for their full participation in the network. Facebook’s continuous introduction of new programmes ensures that private individuals have to choose between interaction and participation on the social network, or exclusion as access to many of the activities it offers is conditional on third party access to their personal information. Further pressure to grant access to the required information is applied through the ability of organisations to feature photographs of users’ Friends who are already using the relevant application. The processes indicate that Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg is slowly progressing his aim to place the social network at the centre of a newly structured Web based on private individuals.

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This dissertation examines the phenomenon of consumer debt in the U.S. and probes the issue of credit card debt from a consumer-centric perspective. It examines how credit card usage and credit card debt are embedded in consumers' social relations and life projects, and reveals how debtors cope within their social networks as they use credit cards and manage their credit card debt.Study 1 explores how young adults use credit cards to achieve their life goals as well as to negotiate changes in their relationships with their parents. Credit cards are an important tool for helping young people gain independence and sever their obligation to their parents. This study focuses on the initial stage of credit consumption and examines the rationale young adults use when acquiring credit cards and taking on credit card debt. Through depth interviews with 17 undergraduate students who have credit card debt, I find that the consumption of credit cards corresponds to their strategies to negotiate independence as well as obligations to their parents. The use of credit cards and management of credit card debt among young adults is a significant and symbolic aspect of their transition from childhood to adulthood, and credit cards are a transitional tool for this coming of age.Study 2 focuses on another phase of debt consumption: repayment of credit card debt. Depth interviews were conducted with 22 adult debtors who were enrolled in a debt elimination program at a credit-counseling agency. Two main theoretical themes are found. First, debtors negotiate the meaning of consumer status. The concept of normality with respect to consumer behavior changes from being based on lifestyle and possessions to a focus on maintaining consumer credibility and being a good credit citizen. Second, during the process of falling into debt and struggling to extricate oneself from debt, consumers engage in a stigma management process to deal with people in their social networks. In addition to coping with the financial consequences of debt, debtors also employ strategies to cope with debt's symbolic consequences.

This study aims to find out what relationship high school students have to social networks at the Internet. This has been done by focusing on norms/standards that adolescents can feel under stress to achieve, through stressing themselves by social networks in a way that is consistent with the norms. The empirical data has been gathered by questionnaires which have been answered by adolescents in randomly selected schools and classes in a medium size Swedish town, Karlskrona. The result showed that all of the participating adolescents have user accounts on a social network. Furthermore it also emerged that a lot of the adolescents thought that norms existed that should be followed in a social network about how to stress oneself. The norms were for example to write about things they are proud of, and to write in a way that is consistent to norms in the society. A few of the adolescents in the survey, said they experienced stress by living up to existing norms. However it is notable that a majority of the adolescents surveyed considered that other adolescents experienced stress for this reason. The analysis in this study was made using the dramaturgical perspective of Erving Goffman and his perspective to stigma, and George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionism. Finally a discussion of the findings of the study, the method used in the study and suggestions for further research are included.

Competitive Diffusion is a recently introduced game-theoretic model for the spread of information through social networks. The model is a game on a graph with external players trying to reach the most vertices. In this thesis, we consider the safe game of Competitive Diffusion. This is the game where one player tries to optimize his gain as before, while his opponents' objectives are to minimize the first player's gain. This leads to a safety value for the player, i.e. an optimal minimal expected gain no matter the strategies of the opponents. We discuss safe strategies and present some bounds on the safety value in the two-player version of the game on various graphs. The results are almost entirely on the safe game on trees, including the special cases of paths, spiders and complete trees but also consist of some preliminary studies of the safe game on three other simple graphs. Our main result consists of a Centroidal Safe Strategy (CSS) Algorithm which suggests a safe strategy for a player on any centroidal tree, a tree which has one vertex as centroid, and gives its associated guaranteed gain.

Authors augment their texts using devices such as bold and italic typeface to signal important information to the reader. These typographical text signals are an example of a signal designed to have some affect on others. However, some signals emerge through the unplanned, indirect, and collective efforts of a group of individuals. Paths emerge in parks without having been designed by anyone. Objects accumulate wear patterns that signal how others have interacted with the object. Books open to important, well studied pages because the spine has worn, for example (Hill, Hollan, Wroblewski, & McCandless, 1992). Digital text and the large-scale collaboration made possible through the internet provide an opportunity to examine how unplanned, collaborative text signals could emerge. A software application was designed, called CoREAD, that enables readers to highlight sections of the text they deem important. In addition, CoREAD adds text signals to the text using font colour, based on the group's collective history and an aggregation function based on self-organising systems. The readers are potentially influenced by the text signals presented by CoREAD but also help to modify these same signals. Importantly, readers only interact with each other indirectly through the text. The design of CoREAD was greatly inspired by the previous work on history-enriched digital objects (Hill & Hollan, 1993) and at a more general level it can be viewed as an example of distributed cognition (Hollan, Hutchins, & Kirsh, 2000). / Forty undergraduate students read two texts on topics from psychology using CoREAD. Students were asked to read each text in order to write a summary of it. After each new student read the text, the text signals were changed to reflect the current group of students. As such, each student read the text with different text signals presented. / The data were analysed for each text to determine if the text signals that emerged were stable and valid representations of the semantic content of the text. As well, the students' summaries were analysed to determine if students who read the text after the text signals had stabilised produced better summaries. Three methods demonstrated that CoREAD was capable of generating stable typographical text signals. The high importance text signals also appeared to capture the semantic content of the texts. For both texts, a summary made of the high signals performed as well as a benchmark summary. The results did not suggest that the stable text signals assisted readers to produce better summaries, however. Readers may not respond to these collaborative text signals as they would to authorial text signals, which previous research has shown to be beneficial (Lorch, 1989). The CoREAD project has demonstrated that readers can produce stable and valid text signals through an unplanned, self-organising process.

This thesis explores several issues in the adaptation process of immigrants and their children in Canada. Chapter 2 investigates why second-generation immigrants are better educated than the remaining population. Using a standard human capital framework where individuals choose how much to invest in both their children's and their own human capital, I show that a gap in education can arise in the absence of differences in unobservable characteristics between immigrants and the native born. Rather, it can arise due to institutional factors such as imperfect transferability of foreign human capital and credit constraints. The model's key implication is a negative relationship between parental human capital investments and children's educational attainment, particularly in families with uneducated parents. I find strong empirical evidence of such tradeoffs in human capital investments occurring within immigrant families. Chapter 3 re-assesses the effect of living in an ethnic enclave on labour market outcomes of immigrants. I find evidence of cohort effects in the relationship between mean earnings and the proportion of co-ethnics in the CMA which vary by education level. Next, using information on the proportion of one's friends who share one's ethnicity, I test a common assumption that the enclave effect is a network effect. I find that traditional, geography-based measures of the ethnic enclave effect capture the impact of factor(s) other than social networks. In fact, the two effects generally offset each other to some degree in determining immigrant employment outcomes. Neither measure has a statistically significant effect on average immigrant earnings, at least in cross-sectional data. Chapter 4, co-authored with David Green and Craig Riddell, tests two alternative theories about why immigrants earn less than native-born workers with similar educational attainment and experience - discrimination versus lower skills (measured by literacy test scores). We find that immigrant workers educated abroad have lower cognitive skill levels (assessed in English or French) than similar native-born workers. This skills gap can explain much of the earnings gap. At the same time, foreign-educated immigrants receive no lower returns to skills than the native born. These results offer strong evidence against the discrimination hypothesis.