Svarbu nustatyti, ar ugdymas, edukacinės erdvės gali būti kuriamos socialinių tinklų pagalba ir kaip toks metodas yra vertintinas. Darbe siekiama pabrėžti, kad socialinių tinklų analizė – XX-ojo ir XXI-ojo amžių sandūroje plačiai taikoma teorinė paradigma. Būtent „socialinio tinklo“ sąvoka tapo viena pagrindinių sąvokų tiriant socialinius santykius sociologijoje, antropologijoje, medicinoje, vadyboje, komunikacijos ir kituose socialiniuose moksluose. Taigi ir ugdymo aspektu, išgryninant jauno žmogaus edukacinę erdvę, atlikus socialinį empirinį tyrimą, socialinių tinklų analizė – ne tik galimas, bet ir reikalingas darbas. Darbo tikslas – nustatyti socialinių tinklų vaidmenį jaunimo socializacijos kontekste. Darbo uždaviniai: 1. Pristatyti socializacijos sampratos ypatumus; 2. Aptarti socialinio tinklo teorinius aspektus; 3. Atskleisti veiksnius, skatinančius ir trukdančius akademinio jaunimo dalyvavimui socialiniuose tinkluose. Šiame magistro darbe tyrimo objektas – socialiniai tinklai jaunimo socializacijos kontekste. Hipotezės: 1. Interneto socialiniai tinklai šiandienos jaunimo tarpe – vienas iš svarbesnių socializacijos būdų; 2. Per didelis užimtumas, laisvalaikio trūkumas sąlygoja ir nepakankamus socialinius tinklus jaunų žmonių tarpe. Tyrimo metodologija: Darbo autorės nuomone galimos ir reikiamos kelios skirtingos socialinių tinklų analizės metodologinės kryptys, tačiau tikslingiausia daugiausia dėmesio skirti naujausioms tendencijoms, nagrinėjančioms socialinius... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / It is important to determine whether education, educational spaces can be created on the social networking support and how the method is assessed. The paper aims to emphasize that the social network analysis - the twentieth century and the twenty-first century, the turn of widely used theoretical paradigm. It was the “social network” concept has become one of the key concepts in researching social relations sociology , anthropology , medicine , management, communication and other social sciences. Thus, the educational aspect of the purification of the young person's educational area, the following empirical social research, social network analysis - not only possible but necessary work. The aim - to identify the role of social networks in the context of the socialization of young people. Tasks: First introduce the concept of socialization medium; Second Discuss social network theoretical aspects ; 3rd Uncover the factors that promote and hinder the academic youth participation in social networks. In this thesis the subject matter - the social networks of young people in the context of socialization. Hypotheses: First Internet social networks among young people today - one of the most important ways of socialization; 2nd Over- employment, lack of leisure time is determined by the lack of social networks among young people. Research methodology: Labour possible opinion of the author , and the required number of different social networks analysis methodological orientations... [to full text]

People often make social-related trips to perform activities with their friends. An individual's group of friends can be characterized by his or her social network. While traditional social network data collection is time-consuming and dependent on memory recollection, new online social networking sites may address these shortcomings. This research focuses on the use of tie-strength, the strength of an individual's relationships in his or her social network, to characterize friendships and how this influences an individual's air travel behavior. Four candidate weighting schemes were developed using data collected from a web-based survey which included demographic information, an air travel diary, and friendship information retrieved from Facebook.com. The candidate weight matrices were then tested in a spatial Durbin count model (social model). The results of this study are threefold. First, candidate weighting schemes which consider mutual friendship (i.e. the number of mutual friends two people have in common) exclusively produced higher log-likelihoods than weighting schemes which also consider whether individuals are direct friends (i.e. whether the two individuals are friends themselves). Second, the results of the social model were compared with those of a non-social model. These results suggest that there exist major flaws in using a non-social model to represent variables which may be socially dependent and correlated. Finally, results suggest that individuals tend to have friends who, on average, make more trips than they do. With a growing number of people using online social networks, exploring and understanding friendship influences on travel behavior will help the transportation industry better recognize future travel needs.

This study examined the relationship between social support and self-care agency in post myocardial infarction (MI) patients. Hypothesis I stated that total social support and it's three subscales are positively related to total self-care agency and it's six subscales. Hypothesis II stated that the three subscales of social support will predict total selfcare agency in post MI patients. A convenience sample of 28 post myocardial infarction patients from a large midwestern metropolitan hospital participated in the study. The Norbeck Social Support Questionnaire (NSSQ) was used to measure the social support variable. The Denyes Self-Care Agency Instrument (DSCAI) was utilized to measure the self-care agency variable. The study supported a positive and significant relationship between social support and self-care agency. The study further supported significant relationships between the subscales of social support and four of the subscales of self-care agency. Affect (a subscale of social support), contributed to 27% of the variance in selfcare agency. The results demonstrated congruent findings with previous studies, reflecting a positive and significant relationship between social support and self-care agency. The study findings have implications for improving nursing practice for myocardial infarction patients and for further nursing research among this population. / School of Nursing

The present study considered the relationships between internal working models of adult attachment, satisfaction with social supports, and career decision self efficacy. Theoretical support was found within the context of Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986) and Attachment Theory (Bowiby, 1 973 ; Hazen & Shaver, 1994). A conceptual model was proposed and tested using structural equation modeling to answer the research questions: is there a relationship between secure internal working models of attachment and career decision self efficacy, and if so, is the relationship between secure internal working models of attachment and career decision self efficacy partially mediated by satisfaction with social supports? A third research question was considered: are men and women similar in how they experience internal working models of attachment, satisfaction with social supports, and career decision self efficacy? Participants included 663 college-aged students (457 women; 206 men) from two Midwestern universities, with most being in their first or second year of college (72% freshmen/sophomores; 28% juniors or above). Alternate models for men and women were proposed and a multi-group analysis was conducted to determine if groups were similar. Results indicated that the groups were similar. Models were then combined for a comprehensive model representing both men and women. Findings indicated that there was a direct relationship between secure internal working models of attachment and career decision self efficacy and an indirect relationship that was partially mediated by satisfaction with social supports. Theoretical, research, and practice implications are discussed, as well as methodological limitations to the study. Future directions are offered. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

Network data (also referred to as relational data, social network data, real graph data) has become ubiquitous, and understanding patterns in this data has become an important research problem. We investigate how interactions in social networks are formed and how these interactions facilitate diffusion, model these behaviors, and apply these findings to real-world problems. We examined graphs of size up to 16 million nodes, across many domains from academic citation networks, to campaign contributions and actor-movie networks. We also performed several case studies in online social networks such as blogs and message board communities. Our major contributions are the following: (a) We discover several surprising patterns in network topology and interactions, such as Popularity Decay power law (in-links to a blog post decay with a power law with -1:5 exponent) and the oscillating size of connected components; (b) We propose generators such as the Butterfly generator that reproduce both established and new properties found in real networks; (c) several case studies, including a proposed method of detecting misstatements in accounting data, where using network effects gave a significant boost in detection accuracy.

The use of social networks, as a business tool is becoming more and more frequent in this day and age. Companies are exploring various ways in which to optimise social media in gaining a competitive advantage. Social platforms give organisations the ability to communicate better with their staff, to market their products more effectively to potential customers and also to drive behaviour within the workplace. Employee engagement, sense of belonging and organisational commitment can be considered as components of employee well-being. Companies are investing large amounts of resources to lower employee turnover by creating an environment that is favourable for the employee. Within the call centre environment a well established technological infrastructure exists. This creates a setting that is very prone to launch a social media platform. The average age of employees is also quite young, which in most cases means that they understand and interact on social networks with ease. The applications for social media also seems to become second nature for younger generations and this also speaks volumes as to implement social network strategies within working environments. The experimental research design included a pre- and post assessment with samples of 74 employees for the pre-test and 36 employees for the post test. A qualitative and quantitative approach was utilised in order to gain better insight of what employees define as social networks and what effect it has on employees. To measure the various constructs, the following instruments were utilised: Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES), a self-constructed Sense of Belonging Questionnaire and the Affective Organisational Commitment Questionnaire (AOC). The results indicated that the exposure to a social network resulted in lower levels of employee engagement and lower levels of sense of belonging. The exposure to a social network however increased the levels of participants? affective organisational commitment. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

The use of social networks, as a business tool is becoming more and more frequent in this day and age. Companies are exploring various ways in which to optimise social media in gaining a competitive advantage. Social platforms give organisations the ability to communicate better with their staff, to market their products more effectively to potential customers and also to drive behaviour within the workplace. Employee engagement, sense of belonging and organisational commitment can be considered as components of employee well-being. Companies are investing large amounts of resources to lower employee turnover by creating an environment that is favourable for the employee. Within the call centre environment a well established technological infrastructure exists. This creates a setting that is very prone to launch a social media platform. The average age of employees is also quite young, which in most cases means that they understand and interact on social networks with ease. The applications for social media also seems to become second nature for younger generations and this also speaks volumes as to implement social network strategies within working environments. The experimental research design included a pre- and post assessment with samples of 74 employees for the pre-test and 36 employees for the post test. A qualitative and quantitative approach was utilised in order to gain better insight of what employees define as social networks and what effect it has on employees. To measure the various constructs, the following instruments were utilised: Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES), a self-constructed Sense of Belonging Questionnaire and the Affective Organisational Commitment Questionnaire (AOC). The results indicated that the exposure to a social network resulted in lower levels of employee engagement and lower levels of sense of belonging. The exposure to a social network however increased the levels of participants? affective organisational commitment. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

The first-order properties like degree distribution of nodes and the clustering co-efficient have been the prime focus of research in the study of structural properties of networks. The presence of a power law in the degree distribution of nodes has been considered as an important structural characteristic of social and information networks. Higher-order structural properties such as edge embeddedness may also play a more important role in many on-line social networks but have not been studied before. In this research, we study the distribution of higher-order structural properties of a network, such as edge embeddedness, in complex network models and on-line social networks. We empirically study the embeddedness distribution of a variety of network models and theoretically prove that a recently-proposed network model, the random $k$-tree, has a power-law embedded distribution. We conduct extensive experiments on the embeddedness distribution in real-world networks and provide evidence on the correlation between embeddedeness and communication patterns among the members in an on-line social network. / Graduate

This research aims to test the hypothesis that portable art objects and ornaments were used to create and maintain social networks between groups of hunter-gatherers coping with climatic insecurity. This is tested through the materials used to produce such objects. The results of tests indicate that the movement of objects of portable art and ornaments did not correlate with climatic values such as precise temperature and variance of temperature, which goes against the assumptions of the main hypothesis mentioned above. However, the variation in the production of these objects correlates well with broad climatic changes and with demographic events. This suggests that portable art objects and ornaments might have been used to a certain extent to help facilitate the population movements that were themselves affected by climate change. / Graduate

Trust relationships between users in various online communities are notoriously hard to model for computer scientists. It can be easily verified that trying to infer trust based on the social network alone is often inefficient. Therefore, the avenue we explore is applying Data Mining algorithms to unearth latent relationships and patterns from background data. In this paper, we focus on a case where the background data is user ratings for online product reviews. We consider as a testing ground a large dataset provided by Epinions.com that contains a trust network as well as user ratings for reviews on products from a wide range of categories. In order to predict trust we define and compute a critical set of features, which we show to be highly effective in providing the basis for trust predictions. Then, we show that state-of-the-art classifiers can do an impressive job in predicting trust based on our extracted features. For this, we employ a variety of measures to evaluate the classification based on these features. We demonstrate that by carefully collecting and synthesizing readily available background information, such as ratings for online reviews, one can accurately predict trust-based social links. / Graduate