Trustworthy and accessible news content is fundamental to democracy and demanded by groups within social spaces of varying structures. News outlets have always, and continue to be in a state of development, adapting to social changes and accommodating the advances new technologies afford the structure of the industry of news.The aim of this thesis is to research the news consumption habits of Spanish undergraduate students at a time when the print newspaper industry, for many years the key disseminator of news relied upon by the general public, is in a state of financial crisis and its future, in its current form, is in jeopardy.Using a quantitative survey of 144 students and supported by a linked theoretical framework of News Consumption, Social Space and Uses & Gratifications, the study illustrates a generation of news consumers with a healthy appetite for news, whose cultural, economic and social capital are manifested via the diverse portfolio of news media they elect to consume from. Adopting a gratifications approach reveals that the efficiency and comfort mobile devices provide users for news consumption is one of the determining factors when deciding upon which forms of news disseminators respondents wish to engage with; user agency takes precedence over the notions of trust felt for the integrity of journalistic publications.The study provides a unique insight into the news consumption habits of Spanish undergraduate students enrolled in private university education, which although not representative of the wider population, is a study of an increasingly significant social group in Spain, their news consumption choices and the relation to the social space they inhabit.

Le déclin et la fermeture de nombreuses conserveries qui jusqu’aux années 70 du XXe siècle animaient une partie du territoire au sud-ouest de la ville de Matosinhos au Portugal, a culminé avec l’existence d’un espace occupé en grande partie par des usines à l’abandon et en ruines. Un diagnostic urbain et social réalisé par le pouvoir local a abouti à la proposition d’une réforme urbanistique pour cette zone. Une surface d’action de 101 ha qui serait désormais nommée par le biais de la toponymie Matosinhos Sul [MS] a alors été administrativement circonscrite. Le pouvoir local, les investisseurs, les architectes ou les urbanistes ont discuté de la transformation constructive et fonctionnelle de cette zone dès le début des années 1990. En conséquence, à partir des dernières années de la même décennie, de nouveaux habitants ont commencé à arriver à MS. Ils sont venus occuper un ensemble de nouveaux immeubles d’appartements au prix d’achat élevé. À leur arrivée, ils ont trouvé un espace très souvent comparé aux ‘qualités sociales et urbaines’ des beaux-quartiers de la ville voisine, Porto. Mais ils ont également trouvé des bâtiments abandonnés, de vieux espaces commerciaux ou une occupation de l’espace public pas toujours conforme à leurs attentes.La question posée à propos de ce scénario est simple : comment MS s’est-il formé ? Afin de répondre à cette question, une hypothèse épistémologique différente a été adoptée. MS n’a pas été considérée comme une unité géographique et sociale a priori. Le ‘risque tautologique’ d’analyser cet espace à partir d’une unité géographique préalable ou d’y chercher des groupes sociaux conformes aux divisions scientifiques n’aboutirait qu’à la réunion de cette unité et de ce groupe. Au lieu de cette approche, qui risque de ratifier des catégories pratiques et savantes, nous avons plutôt cherché à savoir comment les acteurs sociaux engagés dans cette réforme urbaine ont défini, selon leurs dispositions sociales, ce qu’est ou devrait être MS. Cette approche se traduit par l’apparition d’un ensemble de représentations sur les diverses dimensions constitutives de la vie sociale de MS qui, autrement, seraient cachées. Dans les méandres de cette pluralité de points de vue - sur lesquels nous cherchons évidemment des régularités - il y a une série de luttes à propos de la direction sociale, symbolique et territoriale de MS. Ainsi, cette thèse propose de collecter et d’analyser un ensemble de catégories et d’actions mises en œuvre par différents acteurs afin de définir MS. Pour finir, à partir de cette étude, nous entendons montrer que les propriétés associées à un espace et aux groupes qui l’occupent sont avant tout des conventions socialement fondées.Cette recherche sera développée à partir d’entretiens semi-directifs, d’observations, de l’étude de statistiques officielles, de la consultation de documents juridiques et de l’analyse de sources journalistiques. Avec cela, nous essayons de restaurer les stratégies d’action qui se trouvent derrière une série d’agents impliqués dans cette opération et (trans) formation sociale et urbaine. Parmi eux, des politiciens du pouvoir local, des architectes, des résidents, des commerçants, mais aussi quelques gardiens des immeubles qui marquent la morphologie de ce ‘nouvel’ espace. / The decline and closure of countless fish canneries, which until the 1970s enlivened part of the territory of southwest of the city of Matosinhos, in Portugal, culminated in an area largely occupied by abandoned factory buildings in ruins. An urbanistic and social diagnosis carried out by local authorities resulted in the proposal of an urbanistic reform for this area. An area of 101 ha was then administratively circumscribed, which would henceforth be designated by the toponymy Matosinhos Sul [MS]. Local authorities, investors, architects or urbanists were discussing the constructive and functional transformation of this area since the early 1990s. As a result, at the end of that same decade, new inhabitants started arriving to MS. They came to occupy a set of apartment buildings of high acquisition value. On their arrival, they found an area not infrequently compared to the ‘social and urbanistic qualities’ of the beaux quartiers from the neighbouring city, Porto. However, they found also abandoned buildings, former retail stores, or the exploitation of public space not always according to their expectations. The issue raised on this picture is a simple one: how was MS formed? To address/answer this question, a different epistemological assumption than usual was adopted. MS was not considered as a geographical and social unit a priori. The ‘tautological risk’ of analysing this area from a prior geographical unit, or of searching for social groups conforming to scientific divisions in it, would merely result in finding that unit and that group. In place of this approach, which risks ratifying practical and theoretical categories, this Thesis sought to understand how the social actors engaged in this urbanistic reform defined, according to their own social dispositions, what is, or should be, MS. This approach results in a set of representations about the various dimensions constituting the social life/environment of MS which, otherwise, would remain hidden. In/Within the intricacies of this multitude of viewpoints – in which, evidently, one can still search for regularities – we find a series of struggles about the social, symbolic, and territorial directions of MS. As such, this Thesis proposes to gather and analyse a set of categories and actions put into practice by different actors to define MS. Finally, from this study one intends to show that the properties associated to an area and to the groups which occupy it are, above all, socially founded conventions. This research is grounded on semi-directive interviews, observations, study of official statistics, consulting of legal documents, and analysis of newspaper sources. With this, it is intended to reconstruct the action strategies behind a series of agents involved in this operation of social and urbanistic (trans) formation. Among these are local politicians, architects, dwellers, business owners, but also few ‘concierges’ from the apartment buildings which shape the morphology of this new ‘area’.

This dissertation suggests that network governance theory may have reached an impasse, and in order to pursue its advance, new methods need to be used. It tests the viability of actor-network theory on providing new insights on network governance, which could contribute to the strengthening of network governance theory. The author suggests that actor-network theory may offer both an epistemology and ontology that intents to not impose current definitions and divisions of traditional social science. By doing so, actor-network theory focuses on the performance of associations rather than on the traditional categories of structures, institutions, individuals or groups -- characteristic of most network governance studies. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015 / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This study examines two Facebook groups with the explicit purpose of creating a resistance against the nationalist and right-wing political party the Sweden Democrats. Through qualitative interviews with administrators of these groups, three main themes have been identified and analyzed: the motivation behind the resistance, the role these groups play for their members and the path to an active political engagement online. The theoretical basis for the analysis consists of Becker’s theory on deviant groups, Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective and Bauman’s description of the age of nostalgia.  The study finds that the members of the groups mainly protest against the outlook on people expressed by the Sweden Democrats through their view on immigrants. While an increasing number of people in Sweden express negative views on immigrants, the members of these groups turn to each other online to find a community where their views are shared. The Facebook groups act as places of support, but also as sources of fact-based information where arguments to use in life offline can be found. Anyone who doesn’t sympathize with the Sweden Democrats, and who agrees to the group terms of preserving a friendly debate climate, is welcome in these groups, creating a relatively heterogenous group composition.  The start of an active engagement in these groups seems to have been triggered by a specific event, but the social process leading there appears to consist of a development of a sense of justice through upbringing and earlier experiences. A current life situation permitting time for engagement as well as a feeling of deviating from the views of others in their social proximity, seem to be other important factors resulting in an active political engagement online.

Virtual worlds and massively-multiplayer online games are rich sources of information about large-scale teams and groups, offering the tantalizing possibility of harvesting data about group formation, social networks, and network evolution. They provide new outlets for human social interaction that differ from both face-to-face interactions and non-physically-embodied social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. We aim to study group dynamics in these virtual worlds by collecting and analyzing public conversational patterns of users grouped in close physical proximity. To do this, we created a set of tools for monitoring, partitioning, and analyzing unstructured conversations between changing groups of participants in Second Life, a massively multi-player online user-constructed environment that allows users to construct and inhabit their own 3D world. Although there are some cues in the dialog, determining social interactions from unstructured chat data alone is a difficult problem, since these environments lack many of the cues that facilitate natural language processing in other conversational settings and different types of social media. Public chat data often features players who speak simultaneously, use jargon and emoticons, and only erratically adhere to conversational norms. Humans are adept social animals capable of identifying friendship groups from a combination of linguistic cues and social network patterns. But what is more important, the content of what people say or their history of social interactions? Moreover, is it possible to identify whether iii people are part of a group with changing membership merely from general network properties, such as measures of centrality and latent communities? These are the questions that we aim to answer in this thesis. The contributions of this thesis include: 1) a link prediction algorithm for identifying friendship relationships from unstructured chat data 2) a method for identifying social groups based on the results of community detection and topic analysis. The output of these two algorithms (links and group membership) are useful for studying a variety of research questions about human behavior in virtual worlds. To demonstrate this we have performed a longitudinal analysis of human groups in different regions of the Second Life virtual world. We believe that studies performed with our tools in virtual worlds will be a useful stepping stone toward creating a rich computational model of human group dynamics.

Group cohesion has been operationalized in the literature by measures which tend to focus only upon limited aspects of the phenomenon, usually interpersonal attraction or attraction to the group. In sport, it is imperative that instruments developed to assess group cohesion reflect factors associated with the goals and objectives the group is striving to achieve as well as factors associated with the development and maintenance of harmonious positive interpersonal relationships. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to develop a valid and reliable group cohesion instrument that measures both task related forces as well as social related forces that exist in sport groups.

The purpose of the study was to determine if the Educational Planning and Resource Management System (EPRMS), implemented by the Orange County Public Schools, increased parent and/or teacher involvement and communication in the school level decision making process. The study surveyed parents, teachers, and principals about their perception of the communication and involvement at their school during 1982-83 and 1983-84 (the year EPRMS was fully implemented). It was assumed that any increase in communication and/or involvement would be due to the Educational Planning and Resource Management System. A questionnaire was developed after an extensive literature review and input by a panel of experts. Separate questionnaires were administered by mail to a random sample of parents, teachers and principals. The data were analyzed with analysis and variance and cross-tabulations. Since three surveys were administered, three separate univariate analysis of variance designs were used. In each case, the analysis of variance was a repeated measures design including a factorial between subjects and a within subjects component. The data analysis revealed that parents, teachers and principals reported an increase in communication and involvement during the 1983-84 school year. These increases, while statistically significant, were relatively small. It also showed that principals and high school respondents gave the highest ratings to communication and involvement while teachers and junior high respondents gave the lowest ratings. The study did, for the most part, support the assumption that there was more perceived communication and involvement at the school level since the implementation of EPRMS. Even though the statistically significant increases for the various groups and levels were small, question 34 provided substantial support to the finding of increases school-level involvement. Almost three-fourths (74.7%) of the respondents reported that more opportunities for involvement existed during the 1983-84 school year than during the 1982-83 school year. Recommendations included additional monitoring of EPRMS with regard to staff and parent involvement and extensive management training in group dynamics and managing group interactions.

by Cheung Wai-ting. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-142). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter Chapter 1 --- The Research Problem --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Literature Review / Chapter 2.1 --- Prohibitionist Approach --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2 --- Medical-Treatment Approach --- p.8 / Chapter 2.3 --- How Should We Understand Post-Treatment Drug Use Behavior ？ --- p.14 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Analytical Framework / Chapter 3.1 --- Social Capital Theory --- p.24 / Chapter 3.2 --- Differential Association Theory and Social Capital --- p.26 / Chapter 3.3 --- Control Theory and Social Capital --- p.31 / Chapter 3.4 --- Labeling Theory --- p.39 / Chapter 3.5 --- Self-Efficacy Theory --- p.44 / Chapter 3.6 --- The Hypotheses --- p.48 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- Methodology / Chapter 4.1 --- Data and Sample --- p.52 / Chapter 4.2 --- General Profile of Respondents --- p.54 / Chapter 4.3 --- Conceptualization and Operationalization of Variables --- p.57 / Chapter 4.4 --- Method of Data Analysis --- p.66 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- Results / Chapter 5.1 --- Quantitative Analysis --- p.68 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Bivariate Analysis / Chapter 5.1.2 --- Path Analysis / Chapter 5.1.3 --- Verification of Hypotheses / Chapter 5.2 --- Qualitative Analysis --- p.86 / Chapter Chapter 6 --- Summary and Discussion / Chapter 6.1 --- The Study --- p.112 / Chapter 6.2 --- Summary of Findings --- p.113 / Chapter 6.3 --- Theoretical Implications --- p.117 / Chapter 6.4 --- Practical Implications --- p.120 / Chapter 6.5 --- Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research --- p.122 / Appendix I Interview Schedule --- p.125 / Appendix II Socio-demographic Profile of the Ten Informants --- p.127 / Bibliography --- p.130

This thesis explores the implications of cultural resources for educational attainment and socioeconomic progression among Caribbeans in Britain - one of Britain's most disadvantaged [social] ethnic groups - since the 1940s. More specifically, it offers, first, a review of Caribbeans’ experiences in education and socioeconomic domains in Britain, as have been researched throughout the decades since the World Wars, and explores, second, how cultural resources through which Caribbeans understand their social world and mediate their experiences therein impact upon their educational attainment and socioeconomic progression. Cultural resources, as implied in studies undertaken by DeGraaf (1986; 1989; 2000) in the Netherlands, are acquired in settings such as the family and schools in which individuals are socialised, i.e., learn their culture and how to live in their social world. These settings are held to be influenced by cultural and societal factors that are interrelated and are, in effect, sociocultural (Wertsch, 1994; 1995). Such settings are posited in this thesis as vital to understanding Caribbeans’ educational and socioeconomic outcomes. This is demonstrated through adopting a sociocultural approach from which analyses was undertaken into the experiences of ten families of three generations and ten individuals - all of Caribbean descent - who participated in a quasi-ethnographic inquiry that formed the empirical part of the study. The participants had a range of educational, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, which characterised a purposive sample that they formed. Their accounts of their experiences, which were the source from which inferences about their educational attainment, socioeconomic progression, and cultural resources are made, were elicited through ethnographic interviews, participant observations, and researcher’s diaries, and are presented in this thesis as family case study analyses and sociocultural settings analyses. The inquiry revealed that the participants across the whole sample were socialised in a key set of sociocultural settings that were identified in their accounts of their experiences as family, community, religion, education, and occupation. In-depth interrogation of patterns in their lived experiences in these settings revealed that their socialisation processes were diverse and, consequently, reflected in diversity in their acquisition and usage of a common set of cultural resources that were discovered and, through analyses, reified as familial influence, community orientation, religiosity, familiarity with formal education processes, and occupational aspiration. Diversity in their acquisition and usage of these resources in the various settings reflected in diverse patterns of educational and socioeconomic outcomes across the three generations. However, two distinct patterns are herein defined and discussed as a ‘trajectory of advancement’ and a ‘trajectory of urgency’. The former characterises the outcomes of participants who had attained educationally and progressed in socioeconomic terms across generations in their family, and the latter characterises the outcomes of participants who had not attained educationally and remained disadvantaged in socioeconomic terms across generations in their family. These findings are tentative, but they suggest, nonetheless, that cultural resources are salient in shaping Caribbeans’ educational and socioeconomic outcomes. Such findings are significant in that they interrupt the ways that Caribbeans’ experiences and outcomes in education and socioeconomic domains have been understood historically and, at the same time, offer the sociocultural approach as another way from which to understand these experiences and outcomes. In addition, the sociocultural approach from which these finding are derived and the concept of cultural resources are introduced, in this thesis, in an understanding of patterns of educational and socioeconomic outcomes that persist across generations. This understanding, it is herein suggested, is crucial to any debate surrounding persistently low achievement in education and socioeconomic domains among social groups - particularly among groups such as Caribbeans that are disadvantaged in education and socioeconomic domains.

Este trabalho orientou-se por uma pergunta: qual era o público literário (leitor e consumidor) de Alexandre Dumas, Manuel Antonio de Almeida, José de Alencar e Fagundes Varella e de suas respectivas produções literárias que foram difundidas no Brasil entre 1850 e 1860? Para responder a esta pergunta, o trabalho buscou identificar e caracterizar como grupo social uma fração do público literário brasileiro destes escritores e de seus folhetins, publicados na forma de romances e crônicas. Eles circularam no Gabinete Português de Leitura do Rio de Janeiro (Dumas) e em dois jornais do Império - Correio Mercantil-RJ (Almeida e Alencar) e Correio Paulistano-SP (Varella). E nestes espaços sua presença foi considerada bastante expressiva a ponto de existir, em um país marcado pela escravidão e analfabetismo, uma fração de público para eles. Essa fração não representava apenas a elite, advinha também de outros estratos sociais, que carecem de investigação sociológica. Diante da variedade do sistema literário brasileiro, extraímos dele somente alguns momentos que, uma vez compreendidos, apresentam elementos constitutivos de uma fração do público literário no Segundo Reinado no Rio de Janeiro e em São Paulo. / The research question guiding this study was: who was the literary public (both reader and consumer) of the works of Alexandre Dumas, Manuel Antonio de Almeida, José de Alencar, and Fagundes Varella that were published in Brazil between the years of 1850 and 1860? To answer this question, this study attempted to identify and characterize as a social group a fraction of the Brazilian literary public who consumed the writings of the aforementioned authors, which circulated as feuilleton (novels and chronicles). Such writings circulated at the Gabinete Português de Leitura in Rio de Janeiro (Dumas) and in two newspapers printed during the Empire - Correio Mercantil from Rio de Janeiro (Almeida and Alencar) and Correio Paulistano from São Paulo (Varella). Their presence was of such importance that a fraction of the literary public existed in a country marked by slavery and illiteracy. This fraction did not represent the elite only, it included other social groups requiring investigation. In relation to the diversity of the Brazilian literary system some elements were extracted in this investigation. Once understood, they present constitutive elements of a fraction of the literary public in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo during the Second Empire of Brazil.