Background: Relatives to people with schizophrenia often experience a great burden and inmany cases takes a lot of responsibility for the person suffering from schizophrenia. Nationalguidelines emphasize the importance for relatives to be involved in mental health care, butunfortunately that is not always the case. Objective: The aim of this study is to investigateand describe how relatives to people with schizophrenia have experienced collaboration andsupport from mental health services, and what requests they might have for the futureregarding the design of collaboration and support. Method: Qualitative approach. Interviewbased study with qualitative content analysis as a method. Results: Two different themes andeleven categories describing the relatives experiences and preferences regarding collaborationand support from mental health services. These two themes are; To be taken for granted butstill left out and Lack of support leading to feelings of loneliness and insecurity. The firsttheme symbolizes collaboration and includes five categories. The second theme symbolizessupport and includes six categories. Conclusion: Relatives to people with schizophrenia havepredominantly negative experiences of collaboration with staff in psychiatric care. Governingdocuments states that relatives should be involved in patient care and treatment. To developand implement successful practices around this, it is important that the staff will discussissues such as confidentiality, attitude, responsibility, inclusion and accessibility. Therelatives have both positive and negative experiences of support from mental health services.If regards should be taken to the relative’s requests about how the support should be designed,their insecurities and feelings of loneliness would decrease. Relationships, knowledge, reliefand personalized support are crucial areas that should be discussed by the staff in psychiatriccare. Quality improvement and development in this area would make it easier for relatives,staff and patients. / Bakgrund: Närstående till personer med schizofreni upplever ofta en stor börda och tar imånga fall ett stort ansvar för den sjuke personen. Nationella riktlinjer betonar vikten av attnärstående ska involveras i den psykiatriska vården, det har dock i många fall visat sig att såinte är fallet. Syfte: Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur närstående till personer medschizofreni har upplevt samverkan med och stöder från den psykiatriska vården, samt vilkaönskemål de har för utformandet av samverkan och stöd i framtiden. Metod: Kvalitativansats. Intervjustudie med kvalitativ innehållsanalys som metod. Resultat: Två teman ochelva kategorier beskriver de närståendes upplevelser och önskemål angående samverkan medoch stöd från den psykiatriska vården. Dessa två teman är Att bli tagen för given men ändålämnas utanför och Brist på stöd leder till känsla av ensamhet och otrygghet. Det första tematsymboliserar samverkan, under detta tema finns fem kategorier. Det andra temat symboliserarstöd och under detta tema finns sex kategorier. Slutsats: Närstående till personer medschizofreni har övervägande negativa upplevelser av samverkan med personal inom denpsykiatriska vården. Styrande dokument beskriver att närstående ska involveras i patientensvård och behandling. För att utveckla och implementera fungerande rutiner kring detta är detviktigt att personalen diskuterar frågor som sekretess, bemötande, ansvar, delaktighet ochtillgänglighet. De närstående har både positiva och negativa upplevelser av stöd från denpsykiatriska vården, om de närståendes önskemål om hur stödet ska utformas tas tillvara iutvecklingsarbetet med dessa frågor kan deras otrygghet och känsla av ensamhet minska.Relationer, kunskap, avlastning och individanpassat stöd är viktiga områden som personalinom den psykiatriska vården bör diskutera. Kvalitetshöjande utvecklingsarbete inom dettaområde skulle underlätta för närstående, personal och patienter.

One important research topic in team research concerns how team composition (i.e., the configuration of team member attributes such as personality factors) affects team effectiveness. To date, researchers have almost exclusively focused on the role of team members' attributes (e.g., extraversion) without considering team members' status in the team. Yet, according to social network theory, a team member who occupies a central position in a team network (e.g., has numerous social ties to others) will have a greater impact on the team than other members who occupy peripheral positions. As a result, the effects of team composition on team effectiveness are not influenced exclusively by an attribute, but also determined by who possesses the attribute. To remedy this limitation and account for member "centrality" effects on personality in teams, I conceptualize team composition in the form of personality from a social network perspective. Using 584 team members of 84 teams in China, I test the effects of various operationalizations of team personality traits on team processes and performance. Specifically, the results indicate that team overall personality traits fail to display superior predictive validity over team mean personality traits in predicting team processes. However, I report that the most central member's conscientiousness and agreeableness have meaningful impacts on team processes. Finally, team maximum extraversion and openness interact with team member centrality in predicting team processes such that the personality traits have stronger effects on team processes when the traits are possessed by central members. In doing so, I help to clarify the construct of team composition and gain a better understanding of how team composition affects team outcomes.

Political resistance is manifested in a variety of ways, including violent and nonviolent methods. Though violence and nonviolence are often treated as analytically distinct phenomena, this dissertation argues that there is value in understanding how the methods are related, and how underlying factors lead to the use of one over the other. There are many resistance groups which use a combination of both violent and nonviolent tactics, and only by examining these methods in conjunction with one another can we more fully understand their use. To understand the efficacy of jointly examining violent and nonviolent tactics, this dissertation addresses the topic from three primary perspectives. The introductory chapter offers the primary questions and puzzles this dissertation will explore. Following that, chapter two, is the first primary perspective to be addressed: the individual level. The arguments in chapter two revolve around personal networks, and the characteristics of those networks that impact views on the use of nonviolence by violent groups. Chapter three takes a state and environmental perspective, and identifies factors unique to the state and their impact on the likelihood of violence and nonviolence. Chapter four examines organizations as the unit of analysis, and inter-organizational characteristics are assessed for their impact on the use of nonviolence by violent groups. The concluding chapter brings together the insights gained from the empirical chapters, and offers suggestions for future efforts. Overall, I find that violent and nonviolent tactics share underlying correlates that impact their use, and that their joint examination offers insights on group behavior otherwise unavailable. A unified approach to the range of conflict methods offers new insight and understanding to conflict and conflict processes.

abstract: Online social networks, including Twitter, have expanded in both scale and diversity of content, which has created significant challenges to the average user. These challenges include finding relevant information on a topic and building social ties with like-minded individuals. The fundamental question addressed by this thesis is if an individual can leverage social network to search for information that is relevant to him or her. We propose to answer this question by developing computational algorithms that analyze a user's social network. The features of the social network we analyze include the network topology and member communications of a specific user's social network. Determining the "social value" of one's contacts is a valuable outcome of this research. The algorithms we developed were tested on Twitter, which is an extremely popular social network. Twitter was chosen due to its popularity and a majority of the communications artifacts on Twitter is publically available. In this work, the social network of a user refers to the "following relationship" social network. Our algorithm is not specific to Twitter, and is applicable to other social networks, where the network topology and communications are accessible. My approaches are as follows. For a user interested in using the system, I first determine the immediate social network of the user as well as the social contacts for each person in this network. Afterwards, I establish and extend the social network for each user. For each member of the social network, their tweet data are analyzed and represented by using a word distribution. To accomplish this, I use WordNet, a popular lexical database, to determine semantic similarity between two words. My mechanism of search combines both communication distance between two users and social relationships to determine the search results. Additionally, I developed a search interface, where a user can interactively query the system. I conducted preliminary user study to evaluate the quality and utility of my method and system against several baseline methods, including the default Twitter search. The experimental results from the user study indicate that my method is able to find relevant people and identify valuable contacts in one's social circle based on the query. The proposed system outperforms baseline methods in terms of standard information retrieval metrics. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2010

abstract: Although the social network site (SNS) Facebook achieved great success around the world, in China, it was over taken by the local website Kaixin001. Using comparative analysis and interviews, this thesis compared the architecture of the two websites and Chinese users' attitude towards them. From one side, the result indicates that they are almost the same, but not quite. Kaixin001 is a copycat which adapts to local cultures and political regulations. From the other side, the research also highlights that people associate Kaixin001 with a game platform rather than a social tool. It suggests that there are two layers of digital divide: access and utilization. Chinese users can not get equal access because of the Great Firewall. At the same time, unlike western users, they are fond of playing games, listening music and other functions, rather than creating original content or building social capital. Therefore, the SNS utilization is not equal. Because of regulations and self-surveillance, their SNS use is enjoying the apolitical does not challenge the Chinese state. At the end of the thesis, the author points out the limitations of this research. As Internet-mediated qualitative research, this study lacks extended time and samples to explore the SNSs in global context. Further research is needed to collect extended samples. Moreover, the users' dependence on social network websites may be addressed to seek more comprehensive and deeper understanding of SNS. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Communication Studies 2011

Amicus briefs provide information to Supreme Court justices from an outside party and can be influential for this reason. A state, or states, with an interest in a case may file an amicus brief for one party or another appearing in front of the Court. Research has shown that the more states who join on a brief, the more impact it may have with the Justices. If one or a few states has an interest in a case and wants their brief to be considered how do they get other states to join on a brief? If a state has no interest in a case, why would or wouldn't it join with a state who did have an interest? In this paper, I look at amicus briefs filed in the United States Supreme Court by states either when a state is a party or when they took interest in the case by filing a brief. When considering these cases (131 of them) the question I seek to answer is does partisanship determine who joins on an amicus brief? In order to answer this question, I focus on social network analysis of the cases and states who file for each case. This method allows connections to be made between states as well as identifying the central or influential actors within the network. I find that states who file the most briefs are not necessarily the most influential and if partisanship plays a role, it does so at the individual level and not at the whole network level.

We present platooning as a special case of crowd-sensing framework. After offering a policy that governs platooning, we review common scenarios and components surrounding platooning. We present a prototype that illustrates efficiency of road usage and vehicle travel time derived from platooning. We have argued that beyond the commonly reported benefits of platooning, there are substantial savings in acquisition and processing of sensory data sharing the road. Our results show that data transmission can be reduced to low of 3% compared to normal data transmission using a platoon formation with sensor sharing.

The privacy issues in online social networks (OSNs) have been increasingly arousing the public awareness since it is possible for attackers to launch several kinds of attacks to obtain users' sensitive and private information by exploiting the massive data obtained from the networks. Even if users conceal their sensitive information, attackers can infer their secrets by studying the correlations between private and public information with background knowledge. To address these issues, the thesis focuses on the inference attack and its countermeasures. First, we study how to launch the inference attack to profile OSN users via relationships and network characteristics. Due to both user privacy concerns and unformatted textual information, it is quite difficult to build a completely labeled social network directly. However, both social relations and network characteristics can help attribute inference to profile OSN users. We propose several attribute inference models based on these two factors and implement them with Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, and Logistic Regression. Also, to study network characteristics and evaluate the performance of our proposed models, we use a well-labeled Google employee social network extracted from Google+ for inferring the social roles of Google employees. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed models are effective in social role inference with Dyadic Label Model performing the best. Second, we model the general inference attack and formulate the privacy-preserving data sharing problem to defend against the attack. The optimization problem is to maximize the users' self-disclosure utility while preserving their privacy. We propose two privacy-preserving social network data sharing methods to counter the inference attack. One is the efficient privacy-preserving disclosure algorithm (EPPD) targeting the high utility, and the other is to convert the original problem into a multi-dimensional knapsack problem (d-KP) which can be solved with a low computational complexity. We use real-world social network datasets to evaluate the performance. From the results, the proposed methods achieve a better performance when compared with the existing ones. Finally, we design a privacy protection authorization framework based on the OAuth 2.0 protocol. Many third-party services and applications have integrated the login services of popular social networking sites, such as Facebook and Google+, and acquired user information to enrich their services by requesting user's permission. However, due to the inference attack, it is still possible to infer users' secrets. Therefore, we embed our privacy-preserving data sharing algorithms in the implementation of OAuth 2.0 framework and propose RANPriv-OAuth2 to protect users' privacy from the inference attack. / Graduate

Social support is best understood from a gendered perspective. Women place more emphasis on their social relationships than men, relying on them to cope with stressful situations. Women’s social relationships become crucial during experiences of homelessness as they rely on their relationships to address basic needs. This paper explored how social support and social networks are experienced within homelessness and housing vulnerability. Two studies examined social support and social networks in homeless and vulnerably-housed women. Study One used a quantitative approach to examine group differences on social support and social network characteristics. Forty-nine homeless and forty-three vulnerably-housed women completed three measures to assess their social networks, social support networks, and global social support. Results showed similar social networks and global social support scores between groups. However, vulnerably-housed women reported fewer social support network members than homeless women, suggesting they have fewer supportive individuals in their lives. Study two used a qualitative approach to understand how homeless and vulnerably-housed women experience social support. Ten homeless and ten vulnerably-housed women discussed their social networks and social support through semi-structured interviews. Responses were used to develop a model of social support interactions and highlighted new aspects of the experience. Participants described how they used strategies to offer and elicit support with their networks, as well as how their contexts shaped their interactions. The positive and negative outcomes from these interactions also became part of the contexts that influenced future interactions. These findings offer new considerations for social support theory and suggestions for service provision.

The 'Cosmopolitan Play' is used as a metaphor to reflect the multiple contexts and ways that people act and play with the 'other' in the contemporary global era. The study expands the cosmopolitan perspective by questioning a widely held assumption in much of the existing literature that cosmopolitanism and a 'cosmopolitan stance' (Hannerz 1990) - an openness and willingness to engage with the 'other' - is associated with mobile people. This assumption has led to three dimensions being mainly ignored in the literature, these are: 1) a 'middle group' of movers that are neither mobile elites nor displaced people, 2) the significance of non-movers, and 3) temporality. Rather than defining the cosmopolitan stance as an elite identity, in this study it is seen as the reflexive contestation of essentialised identities formed around social boundaries such as those based on nationality, social class, ethnicity, religion and so forth (Jones 2007). Hence, the overarching research question posed is how may someone evolve a cosmopolitan stance? To answer this, a biographical network approach was developed to analyse in tandem the life stories and ego-networks of 28 non-elite young (aged 23-35) British and Spanish movers and non-movers living in Madrid and Manchester in terms of their cosmopolitan conviviality - the extent and quality of personal relationships initiated and maintained through face-to-face social interaction with others that are objectively different. The approach follows three axes of investigation: convivial horizons (x), people's social interactions across national boundaries; convivial depths (y), people's social interactions across social class, ethnic, religious and other social boundaries, within and across national boundaries; and convivial paths (z), the wider biographical contexts of people's interactions. The study's findings lend support to the critique of equating mobility with cosmopolitanism (Glick Schiller et al. 2011), yet they show that mobility inside and outside national boundaries together with subsequent settlement is influential for whether people not only transcend social boundaries, but also contest them. Additionally, while nationality, class, gender and so forth shape the parameters of people's cosmopolitan conviviality and the articulation thereof, they were not seen as decisive in the openness and willingness of people to engage with the 'other'. Instead, a life path that demanded the negotiation of uncertainty and unfamiliarity from an early age due to either familial problems or difficulties of fitting in at school or the wider 'home' environment was influential in the evolution of a more cosmopolitan convivial stance. The intersection of each axis culminates in a three dimensional view which shows how someone evolves one of four broad but distinctive convivial spheres and stances: national, metropolitan, trans-national and cosmopolitan. The theoretical underpinnings of the biographical network approach enable more complexity and detail of the cosmopolitan play to be captured, which in turn enhances the cosmopolitan perspective. The study illustrates how methods can be mixed in a qualitatively driven way (Mason 2006), and demonstrates the added value of combining qualitative and quantitative methods in network analysis (Crossley 2010, Edwards 2010, Hollstein 2011).