<p>An extensive body of research documents the strong influence of social relationships, social support, social integration and social networks on well-being. Nonetheless, conceptual clarity remains elusive and these terms are often used interchangeably, precluding confident conclusions and hindering cross-study comparisons. Guided by social network analysis, the social convoy model and the life course framework, I measure social network structure and composition through the use of typologies. I then examine the influences of social network structure and composition on an array of health indicators, including self-rated health, psychological distress and self-esteem. </p><p>This study uses data from the Americans' Changing Lives Survey, a nationally representative longitudinal panel survey of adults aged 25+ interviewed in 1986, 1989, 1994 and 2001/2002. I use hierarchical cluster analysis to create social network typologies from data on respondent reports of close confidants and develop two typologies, one for social network structure and the other for social network composition. In cross-sectional analyses, I use logistic regression and Poisson regression to examine the associations between these two social network typologies and poor/fair self-rated health, high self-esteem, and counts of depressive symptoms. I also perform two sets of longitudinal analyses to determine the predictive utility of network structure and composition for health. First, I use OLS regression to examine whether the social network typologies predict residual change scores for self-rated health, psychological distress, and self-esteem both 3 and 8 years after the baseline survey. Second, I use autoregressive cross-lagged models within a structural equation framework to disentangle the effects of social causation and social selection on the relationship between social network structure and the three indicators of health mentioned above.</p><p>The typologies representing social network structure and composition are strongly related to important social and demographic factors. In addition, there are strong and significant cross-sectional associations between these typologies and indicators of mental health, although their association with self-rated health is weak at best. The typologies are highly predictive of changes in mental health across waves, although again, they are not strongly related to changes in self-rated health. Lastly, this dissertation finds strong support for both social causation and selection processes at work in the relationships between social network structure and self-rated health and psychological distress. Support social selection, but not social causation, was found in regards to self-esteem.</p> / Dissertation

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This thesis explores how women's organizations are using communication technologies and strategies for global social change. In 2002, the combination of current feminist theory that highlights issues of cultural specificity and digital communications technology is enabling new possibilities for women's organizations to engage in global feminist practices. Based on feminist theory, communications theory and feminist media literature, this thesis formulates an evaluative framework for assessing the communicative potential of V-Day, a virtual women's organization. The analysis moves beyond this case study to inform the potential global feminist practices of other women's organizations.

This study investigates individual creative performance in the context of social networks in medium sized work groups (n = 15 - 25) by combining individual, contextual, and social network antecedents. It is an effort to build a balanced model that takes into account the position of the individual within the social system, as well as individual motivation and perceptions of organizational context. The results show that the effects of motivational and contextual factors on creative performance are mediated by creative behavior performed by the individual. The individual's position in the social network and the nature (strong or weak) of the individual's ties with others in the network, in contrast, exercise both direct and indirect effects (via creative behavior) on creative performance. As predicted, intrinsic motivation, empowerment, and organizational support had positive effects on creative performance. Surprisingly, formal structure also exerted a positive influence on creative performance. Another unexpected finding is that both local brokerage and weak ties exerted overall negative effects on creative performance. As hypothesized, centrality exerted a strong positive effect on creative performance. The results, which are in part inconsistent with previous findings, suggest that the direction of the effects of both social network position and tie strength on creative performance may depend on group size, and that ego network characteristics also affect perceptions of the organizational context. The preferred model showed a strong fit to the data, providing support for the inclusion of network variables in any comprehensive theory of creative behavior in organizations.

<p>Following Bryceson&rsquo / s article, &lsquo / De-agrarianisation in Sub-Saharan Africa: Acknowledging the Inevitable&rsquo / , and other related writings in the volume Farewell to Farms, rural development has become a contested academic and policy domain. One side of the debate is characterized by &lsquo / agrarian optimism&rsquo / , mirrored in various state policies and advice from the World Bank / the other side is typified by the de-agrarianisation thesis, which is sceptical regarding the agrarian path to rural development, because it doesn&rsquo / t accord with dominant trends. The main reasons given for the trend of de-agrarianisation are: unfavourable climatic trends, economic adjustments, and population growth. While the de-agrarianisation thesis seems to be a sensible proposition, it has failed to attract many disciples, evidenced by the continuation of current policy directions towards the agrarian optimistic path. The purpose of this study was to assess the applicability of the de-agrarianisation thesis in the Gokwe-Kabiyuni area of Zimbabwe, during a time when the nation went through climatic, economic and political crises. The idea was to assess the influence of such an environment to smallholder farmers in terms of livelihood strategies by observing trends in climate, education, occupation, and crop yields over the period. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to establish whether the de-agrarianisation process can be noted in two villages over the period 1990-2008. A comparative analysis of the experiences of smallholder farmers in these two villages revealed the existence of a cultivation culture and differential agrarian resilience depending on natural resource endowment and levels of infrastructural development, notwithstanding the involvement of the villagers in non-farm activities to diversify their livelihood portfolios.</p>

Web-based social networks have become one of the most popular applications on the Internet in recent years. However, most of the social networks rely on some simplistic trust models to manage trust information of the users, which can cause problems ranging from unsatisfied user experience to exposure to malicious users. This thesis proposes a gravity-based trust model to enhance the aggregation of personal trust information into a subjective reputation system. This new model maps all users on the social network into n-dimensional Euclidean spaces based on their direct trust information, and creates a trust social neighborhood for each user. The reputation of a target user is determined by applying gravity model to the information from both target's and observer's trust social neighborhood. A prototype of this trust model is implemented in order to evaluate the effects of varying different parameters of the gravity-based trust model.

The study introduces an alternative analytic framework for the investigation of online discussion forums. It focuses on the social dynamics occurring in online discussion threads situated within a tertiary e-learning context, and advocated by social learning theories. Online discussion forums are perceived as conducive environments for the evolvement and support of collaborative and socio- constructivist learning. However, the literature reviewed, revealed a growing need for finding empiric frameworks for ascertaining the materialisation of these perceptions. Attempting to address the identified need, the study adopts ethnomethodological notions, complemented by Structural Analysis approach, to produce an alternative analytic frame called the Event Centre (EC) approach for the study of online discussion forums. The theoretical framework chosen in this study enables the investigation of online discussion forums as systems of relations rather than aggregations of individuals. The EC approach enables the visual representation of networks of people interacting with each other and at the same time presenting the content discussed in each interaction. Applying the EC approach to a set of 131online discussion threads, enabled the discovery of social dynamics occurring within the discussion threads. Preliminary investigations of these visually represented dynamics revealed two overarching patterns. One depicting uni directional interactions in which all participants referred to a single message and a second one depicting sequences of interactions organised in chain like patterns. The study suggests that these overarching patterns may imply different perceptions of knowledge as enacted by the participants, and hence possibly reveal different perceptions of teaching and learning through which it may be possible to detect collaborative and social constructivist processes. The study suggests that the visual patterns introduced should be perceived as abstractions of particular events, implying their generalisability and hence possible application to different data sets.

Social support has been identified as an important mediator aiding adaptation during major life transitions such as matriculation in college. In the present study two models were proposed to predict social network development from measures of previous social support and individual characteristics collected prior to students' matriculation. It was hypothesized that initiation skills and previous social relationship patterns would predict the quantitative development of the students' new social support networks while negative affectivity and social relationship patterns would predict satisfaction with the forming network.The models were tested using path analysis techniques. Model I was supported. Initiation skills and relationship patterns both had significant direct effects on network size; while initiation skills also had a meaningful indirect effect on size through its effects on relationship patterns. Model II was not supported by the data. Network satisfaction was not meaningfully influenced by negative affect but was affected by initiation skills and by social relationship patterns. Changes in the characteristics of the network over time were also observed and considered. The results clarify the process through which new social networks develop and have implications for college-based intervention programs. / Department of Psychological Science