This study applied the impression management theory in the context of social networking to investigate the generalized research question of this dissertation which is "Do active social media presence and various privacy concerns influence online behaviors of students on social media?" The results and conclusions are presented via the conduct of three different studies and the summary provides insights and explain the overall contribution of the research. For each study we developed a research model for which data was collected separately for each of these models. Hypotheses of each model were tested by partial least squares- structural equation modeling techniques using SmartPLS 2.0. Our findings confirm the hypotheses and showed that all the predictors positively influence online social networking behaviors. Active social media presence is operationalized as predictors such as SNS stalking awareness, Selective disclosure, desired differential persona, impression motivation, and information trustworthiness. Privacy concerns have been operationalized as SNS privacy awareness, technology awareness. Online behaviors have been operationalized as responsible image and reckless image.

My research illustrates new school librarians’ information practices by studying their critical examination of information and information seeking and how their workplace conditions impact their work situation in terms of the prerequisites for information and knowledge sharing. Interviews with ten new school librarians were conducted and recorded. The transcriptions were analyzed through qualitative thematic analysis where models of information seeking, organizational culture and information culture were used in order to concretize the social interplay of the information practices. The new school librarians used everyday life information seeking more than traditional search strategies. All of the participants expressed that their school did not prioritize media and literacy (MIL) work or that they did not prioritize it enough. All of the participants cooperated with other librarians both in person and through digital networks, hence the epithet herd animals. They conveyed that they too make source criticism mistakes and that transparency is part of source confidence. Eight participants described information seeking problems, such as pay walls and information overload. The professors’ information packed work is an interaction barrier for the new school librarians. The introductions at the schools pave the ground for information sharing. Schools are naturally hierarchical and market oriented. A relation based information culture benefits the school library’s inclusion. Reading is prioritized over MIL at the schools. This relates to the perception that a librarian only work with books, which can be changed through a well-developed cooperation between professors and librarians, active work from the librarians and the right resources for MIL work. Therefore the participants who worked at smaller schools and/or schools with a clan culture had a better chance to work with MIL. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.

Repeatedly, researchers have reported on the health benefits resulting from social support (Cohen-Mansfield, 2000; Lee, 1985; & Siebert & Mutran, 1999). Despite this testimony, social support eludes a clear definition and has been predicted to decline with debility and aging. Additionally, institutionalization and medicalization may potentiate this decline. The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the characteristics of social support, and the influencing factors of social support in a nursing home environment. The settings for this research were two central Florida nursing homes that differed according to the diversity of their populations. Observations and staff questionnaires were analyzed in order to answer the following research questions: (a) How is social support manifested in elderly nursing home populations? (b) How do staff behaviors influence social support among elderly nursing home residents? (c) How do nursing home policies influence social support among elderly nursing home residents? (d) How do economic differences influence social support among elderly nursing home populations? Collected data from observations, and questionnaires, were sorted and coded according to emerging patterns and themes. The analysis of these data contributed to answers to the research questions. Manifestations of social support within this environ were very limited. Residents exchanged greetings, occasionally looked after their roommates' needs, or assisted them down a hall in a wheelchair. Although infrequently observed, reciprocal resident tasks appeared to have significant resident value. Staff behaviors and facility policies appeared to be determined by governmental mandates and resulted in resident dependency. Economic differences appeared to be essentially aesthetic and had limited impact on residents and social support. The exception was the impact that economics seemed to have on resident demographics and levels of cognition. A greater health care provider understanding of the manifestations of social support and the sociopolitical and economic influences of social support in elderly nursing home populations can positively impact future policy, education, and the lives of elderly individuals.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / Recent advances in social network applications have resulted in millions of users joining such networks in the last few years. User data collected from social networks can be used for various data mining problems such as interest recommendations, friendship recommendations and many more. Social networks, in general, can be seen as a huge directed network graph representing users of the network (together with their information, e.g., user interests) and their interactions (also known as friendship links). Previous work [Hsu et al., 2007] on friendship link prediction has shown that graph features contain important predictive information. Furthermore, it has been shown that user interests can be used to improve link predictions, if they are organized into an explicitly or implicitly ontology [Haridas, 2009; Parimi, 2010]. However, the above mentioned previous studies have been performed using a small set of users in the social network LiveJournal. The goal of this work is to study the performance of the ontology based approach proposed in [Haridas, 2009], when number of users in the dataset is increased. More precisely, we study the performance of the approach in terms of performance for data sets consisting of 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000 users. Our results show that the performance generally increases with the number of users. However, the problem becomes quickly intractable from a computation time point of view. As a part of our study, we also compare our results obtained using the ontology-based approach [Haridas, 2009] with results obtained with the LDA based approach in [Parimi, 2010], when such results are available.

The advert of social media has transformed the way in which tourism businesses operate especially in the marketing of tourism services. One major tourism sector which has been influenced by social media is the accommodation subsector. Hospitality businesses are now compelled to adopt social networks for marketing purposes to keep pace with changes in consumer behaviour. Previous research has indicated that, although social media is a new phenomenon in marketing, hospitality businesses such as accommodation facilities have embraced it for marketing purposes and the usage varies from one country to another. Prior studies have also shown that social networks are now considered a major source of information for tourists and influence their decision making process. Evidence from the literature shows that little work has been done to investigate the effectiveness of social networks in marketing accommodation services in Sub-Saharan Africa. Studies on adoption and usage of social networks in the accommodation sector in South Africa and Zimbabwe are limited. This study was done to address these knowledge gaps identified in literature. The aim of this research was to determine the effectiveness of social networks in the marketing of accommodation services in South Africa and Zimbabwe. To achieve this, two literature chapters provided an in-depth discussion on social media marketing as well as the influence of these networks on tourists‟ decision-making process. For the empirical survey, the study used an electronic questionnaire which was mailed to South African accommodation establishments. The same questionnaire was hand delivered by field workers in Zimbabwe from June 2013 to July 2014. A total of 129 and 134 were completed from South Africa and Zimbabwe respectively. Factor analysis was used to identify the dominant factors influencing usage of social networks and their effectiveness. The dominant factors were further tested using t-test, chi-square test and effect sizes calculation. The results from t-test and effect sizes computation revealed that there was a statistically significant difference in both the usage of social networks and the effectiveness of social networks in the two countries. Chi-square tests results further revealed that accommodation establishments in both countries were not extensively utilising social networks for marketing purposes and social networks were effective marketing tool in the accommodation sector. The major challenges highlighted by most accommodation establishments from both countries were, time constraints, lack knowledge on the use social networks for marketing and lack of commitment to sustain social media marketing efforts. Power cuts were also another challenge for the Zimbabwean accommodation establishments. This study did not only present theoretical contributions to accommodation establishments but practical recommendations were also made. Based on the results, this study made the following invaluable contributions: firstly a social media marketing framework was proposed. This framework contributes to the body of literature that could be used for future references in the field of social media marketing. The framework provides some necessary steps that can be followed when implementing social media marketing not only by accommodation establishments but with other similar businesses. Secondly, the study addresses the gap in literature by providing evidence from a developing country‟s perspective on the usage and effectiveness of social networks an area which has received little attention in hospitality research. Findings of this study can be used as a future reference by other researchers in the field of social media marketing on the African continent. Lastly, the study also shed light on how social networks can be utilised to influence tourists‟ decision-making process. / PhD (Tourism Management), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

The advert of social media has transformed the way in which tourism businesses operate especially in the marketing of tourism services. One major tourism sector which has been influenced by social media is the accommodation subsector. Hospitality businesses are now compelled to adopt social networks for marketing purposes to keep pace with changes in consumer behaviour. Previous research has indicated that, although social media is a new phenomenon in marketing, hospitality businesses such as accommodation facilities have embraced it for marketing purposes and the usage varies from one country to another. Prior studies have also shown that social networks are now considered a major source of information for tourists and influence their decision making process. Evidence from the literature shows that little work has been done to investigate the effectiveness of social networks in marketing accommodation services in Sub-Saharan Africa. Studies on adoption and usage of social networks in the accommodation sector in South Africa and Zimbabwe are limited. This study was done to address these knowledge gaps identified in literature. The aim of this research was to determine the effectiveness of social networks in the marketing of accommodation services in South Africa and Zimbabwe. To achieve this, two literature chapters provided an in-depth discussion on social media marketing as well as the influence of these networks on tourists‟ decision-making process. For the empirical survey, the study used an electronic questionnaire which was mailed to South African accommodation establishments. The same questionnaire was hand delivered by field workers in Zimbabwe from June 2013 to July 2014. A total of 129 and 134 were completed from South Africa and Zimbabwe respectively. Factor analysis was used to identify the dominant factors influencing usage of social networks and their effectiveness. The dominant factors were further tested using t-test, chi-square test and effect sizes calculation. The results from t-test and effect sizes computation revealed that there was a statistically significant difference in both the usage of social networks and the effectiveness of social networks in the two countries. Chi-square tests results further revealed that accommodation establishments in both countries were not extensively utilising social networks for marketing purposes and social networks were effective marketing tool in the accommodation sector. The major challenges highlighted by most accommodation establishments from both countries were, time constraints, lack knowledge on the use social networks for marketing and lack of commitment to sustain social media marketing efforts. Power cuts were also another challenge for the Zimbabwean accommodation establishments. This study did not only present theoretical contributions to accommodation establishments but practical recommendations were also made. Based on the results, this study made the following invaluable contributions: firstly a social media marketing framework was proposed. This framework contributes to the body of literature that could be used for future references in the field of social media marketing. The framework provides some necessary steps that can be followed when implementing social media marketing not only by accommodation establishments but with other similar businesses. Secondly, the study addresses the gap in literature by providing evidence from a developing country‟s perspective on the usage and effectiveness of social networks an area which has received little attention in hospitality research. Findings of this study can be used as a future reference by other researchers in the field of social media marketing on the African continent. Lastly, the study also shed light on how social networks can be utilised to influence tourists‟ decision-making process. / PhD (Tourism Management), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / Gurdip Singh / In the recent years, social networks have become an integral part of our lives. Their outgrowth has resulted in opportunities for interesting data mining problems, such as interest or friendship recommendations. A global ontology over the interests specified by the users of a social network is essential for accurate recommendations. The focus of this work is on engineering such an interest ontology. In particular, given that the resulting ontology is meant to be used for data mining applications to social network problems, we explore only hierarchical ontologies. We propose, evaluate and compare three approaches to engineer an interest hierarchy. The proposed approaches make use of two popular knowledge bases, Wikipedia and Directory Mozilla, to extract interest definitions and/or relationships between interests. More precisely, the first approach uses Wikipedia to find interest definitions, the latent semantic analysis technique to measure the similarity between interests based on their definitions, and an agglomerative clustering algorithm to group similar interests into higher level concepts. The second approach uses the Wikipedia Category Graph to extract relationships between interests. Similarly, the third approach uses Directory Mozilla to extract relationships between interests. Our results indicate that the third approach, although the simplest, is the most effective for building an ontology over user interests. We use the ontology produced by the third approach to construct interest based features. These features are further used to learn classifiers for the friendship prediction task. The results show the usefulness of the ontology with respect to the results obtained in absence of the ontology.

This study investigates the role of social support in women coping with divorce in mid­ life. Five women were interviewed and a qualitative analysis undertaken, in order to explore the subjective experience of social support during the period of separation and divorce, and its effect on post-divorce adjustment. In particular, the usefulness of formal support groups was examined. It was found that most of the women derived perceived social support from friends and female family members, as well as from their church membership and work environment. It appeared that social support facilitated adjustment in several ways, but most notably in providing esteem support and emotional support which enabled personal growth. All of the women felt that they had developed a sense of their own identity through the process of divorce. Support groups were found to be potentially effective in providing assistance in dealing with emotional issues such as anger and forgiveness, as well as practical and informational support. Such groups might also provide a temporary community where divorced women can interact with other people who are experiencing the same things, thereby freeing them to grieve. The study illuminated the subjective, often unique experience of separation and divorce; this emphasises the challenge for support groups to offer support which addresses this uniqueness. / Psychology / M.A. (Psychology)

Through a qualitative investigation, this study explored what motivated Indian faculty to seek academic positions at universities in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. instead of returning to India after completing their doctorates in one of these countries. Twenty-four in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted over a two-year period with STEM Indian faculty who received their undergraduate degrees in India but their doctorates abroad and who were currently teaching at universities in one of the three aforementioned countries. While there have been several studies investigating trends in international student mobility, few studies have investigated mobility trends amongst faculty, especially those faculty who leave developing nations, such as India, for jobs in first world countries. Theories on globalization, internationalization and brain drain/migration studies guided this study and several theoretical lenses, such as Self Determination Theory, Transnationalism and Social Network Theory, were used to analyze the data. While push-pull literature argues that individuals might be pushed from their home countries because of poor salaries, lacking infrastructure, and lack of access to resources, this study revealed that it was poor communication on behalf of the Indian universities, departmental politics and rigid academic systems that demotivated these participants from returning. This study provides a framework for future research on the complicated process involved in faculty decision-making with regards to career trajectory and possibly how to approach future studies on the complicated job process for international faculty seeking employment outside their native countries.

People turn to others for help and advice during hard times. Early psychologists suggested a ‘talking cure’ as a remedy for emotional turmoil (e.g., Freud, 1916–7/1963; Rogers, 1942). Likewise, folk psychology often sees heart-to-heart conversations as a win-win proposition that brings relief to the afflicted person and reinforces social bonds at the time of need. However, talking about problems does not always help (e.g., Rimé, 2009; Rimé, Mesquita, Boca, & Philppot, 1991; Rimé, Philippot, Boca, & Mesquita, 1992; Rose, 2002). In some cases, problem-talk can be a lose-lose proposition that drags both discussants into depression (Rose, 2002; Rose, Carlson, & Waller, 2007). This thesis examines co-rumination (Rose, 2002), a case of emotional sharing that hurts people instead of helping them, on three levels of analysis (individuals, dyads, and groups). At the individual level, I sketch the life course of co-rumination and replicate earlier findings of gender differences. Furthermore, online survey data (N = 464) links co-rumination with agreeableness and neuroticism. I also demonstrate that co-rumination can be assessed with a brief measure that is 66% shorter than the original. At the dyadic level, data from recorded conversations between romantic couples show that face-to-face co-rumination influences people’s real-time emotional trajectories in complex ways. Furthermore, observer-ratings of the conversations suggest that third-parties can detect co-rumination, even from silent videos. Finally, I study how people react to others’ negative mood and co-rumination in a real social context by longitudinally following two cohorts of students and modelling their interactions with social network analysis tools. These models show that co-rumination appears to elicit social rejection from others, implying a possible pathway to depression via loneliness imposed on the co-ruminators.