Thesis (Ph.D.)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2007. / Adviser: Rance P.L. Lee. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-62). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2003. / Zhi dao jiao shou: Li Peiliang jiao shou (Prof. Rance Pui-leung Lee) 880-03 Includes bibliographical references.

Social networking sites are a recent phenomenon and have experienced tremendous growth in popularity especially among young people. Social networking sites are changing the way individuals communicate with each other and the world. Social networking sites (SNS) provide users with a unique computer-mediated environment where individuals are able to disclose their thoughts, feelings, and experiences within their own social network. The present study aims to explore the experiences of young adults regarding Facebook. A transcendental phenomenological approach was used to elicit the essence of the experiences of the participants. Theoretical sampling ensured relevant participants were selected through haphazard sampling procedures. Data was collected through the use of biographical questionnaires and individual, semi-structured interviews. The data was processed according to the four phenomenological principles epoche, phenomenological reduction, imaginative variation and synthesis using Tesch’s eight steps. Lincoln and Guba’s model was used to assess the trustworthiness of the data obtained. The participants described their experiences of Facebook by highlighting how they use Facebook as a communication tool which assists them in their relationship maintenance with others. Participants use self-presentation on Facebook to manage how they are perceived. The participants experience Facebook as having many privacy risks. They indicated that Facebook has addictive qualities and facilitates cyber stalking behaviour.

No description available.

Divorce in the United States is so widespread that it touches the lives of every citizen in some way. Divorcing adults face a multiplicity of problems including emotional, physical, and economic factors. The literature overwhelmingly suggests evidence of stress associated with this transition process. This study surveyed the feelings and opinions of 84 recently separated or divorced adults, 23 men and 61 women, in Pima County, Arizona, through a questionnaire designed to identify current life stressors, sources of support, and the quality of that support. The two stressors that were identified most often for both men and women were loneliness and anger. The source of support listed most often for both sexes was friends. There was strong evidence to support the hypothesis that it is a universal response for people faced with stress and trauma to turn to others for help and nurturance. It would appear that support networks do help to ameliorate some of the stress and pain, and that individuals have a multisource network.

No description available.

As people go about their lives, they form a variety of social relationships, such as family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, and these relationships differ in their strength, indicating the level of trust among these people. The trend in these relationships is for people to trust those who they have met in real life more than unfamiliar people whom they have only met online. In online social network sites the objective is to make it possible for users to post information and share albums, diaries, videos, and experiences with a list of contacts who are real-world friends and/or like-minded online friends. However, with the growth of online social services, the need for identifying trustworthy people has become a primary focus in order to protect users’ vast amounts of information from being misused by unreliable users. In this thesis, we introduce the Capacity- first algorithm for identifying a local group of trusted people within a network. In order to achieve the outlined goals, the algorithm adapts the Advogato trust metric by incorporating weighted social relationships. The Capacity-first algorithm determines all possible reliable users within the network of a targeted user and prevents malicious users from accessing their personal network. In order to evaluate our algorithm, we conduct experiments to measure its performance against other well-known baseline algorithms. The experimental results show that our algorithm’s performance is better than existing alternatives in finding all possible trustworthy users and blocking unreliable ones from violating users’ privacy.

This research describes the relationship between several social network characteristics and knowledge creation outputs in the form of patented intellectual property of researchers by investigating the case of the University of Waterloo. Based on a literature review in the domains of social networks and knowledge creation, this research focuses on the position of knowledge creation between social closure theory and structural hole theory. These are the two seminal theories of the creation of social capital through social networks. From this body of literature, this thesis develops the research question involving five hypotheses. These hypotheses test whether network density, strength of relationships, diversity of relationships, and amount of research funding have a positive correlation with the number of patents held by the researcher, and whether network size has a negative correlation with number of patents held by a researcher. The data for this research comes from a variety of secondary sources including the University's Office of Research, UWDIR online directory, NSERC research awards search engine, and CIPO patent database. Using a combination of social network analysis and statistical regression analysis, this research shows that network density, diversity of relationships, and amount of research funding have a positive correlation with knowledge creation outputs, while network size has a negative relationship with knowledge creation outputs. Understanding the relationship that these social network factors have with the knowledge creation outputs can help the University develop strategies to help improve their knowledge creation processes, thereby putting the University in a stronger position to facilitate the development of patentable ideas and innovations by encouraging the development of research centres and institutes that intersect disciplinary boundaries.

Märta Helena Reenstierna was a Swedish noblewoman who lived at a countryside estate called Årsta, just outside the city borders of Stockholm in the late 18th and early 19th century, a time when the nobility lost much of its privileges and the uprising bourgeois class gained new influence. Märta Helena is famous for the diary she kept almost every day from 1793 until 1839, two years before her death and its wide array of topics. One of the most important of them is the extensive social network she her entire life had around her and her comments and statements about her family, friends, visitors and servants are full-bodied records of the time she lived in. The purpose with this thesis is therefore to investigate how this social network changed over time as Märta Helena became older and tragically lost both her husband and the only son that survived to adulthood. It will also discuss the characteristics of the relationships she had with some of the individuals in her network, outside her nuclear family and some of the ways that she showed her noble status in public. All with the help from excerpts of this diary. The conclusion will show that the largest parts of her social network consisted of bourgeois men who were her friends and her troublesome servants and that her own aging process is a more substantial factor in the change processes in her network than the large-scale transformations in society that took place during her life time.