Conversion Network Research Articles

Facebook Communication Habits and Social Capital

Facebook is the most popular social network today allowing its users to build a virtual network of friendships, acquaintances and contacts, which enables them to connect the virtual and real world. Th e establishment and reinforcement of these connections leads to the development of social capital, which is a cohesive element for any kind of community. This paper focuses on the relationship among various factors that operate on this social network. It aims at disclosing the mutual connection of communicational habits and users’ habits of the informants who participated in the research (N=161), as well as the roles of these habits in the construction of social capital. The initial hypothesis of the research is that the frequency of Facebook use and the length of owning a Facebook account have a positive correlation with communicational habits and provide a positive experience of Facebook users. The research was done via a questionnaire administered in the winter of 2012. Th e questionnaire was uploaded to a commercial site SurveyMonkey . Answers were coded and statistically processed in SPSS 13.0. The results indicate that older users have fewer Facebook accounts and that those who have owned a Facebook account for a longer time tend to check their Facebook page more often. Besides that, the frequency of Facebook use has a positive and statistically significant correlation with the sense of belonging to a community. This is confirmed by other statistically significant results: the users’ opinion that Facebook allows them to meet interesting people is correlated with the sense of belonging to a community and the attitude that Facebook allows them to communicate with others. Opportunities to communicate with others on Facebook positively correlate with maintaining contact with people who live far away, which in turn correlates with maintaining contact with people from the users’ vicinity. This leads to the conclusion that investing both time and effort in communication and maintaining contact on Facebook induces an increased sense of belonging and connection. However, social capital develops and thrives mostly when online connections are just an extension of offline contacts. This is confirmed by the fact that connections with people who live far away are weak and insufficient for the growth of social capital.

#Funeral and Instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular

This paper presents findings from a study of Instagram use and funerary practices that analysed photographs shared on public profiles tagged with ‘#funeral’. We found that the majority of images uploaded with the hashtag #funeral often communicated a person's emotional circumstances and affective context, and allowed them to reposition their funeral experience amongst wider networks of acquaintances, friends, and family. We argue that photo-sharing through Instagram echoes broader shifts in commemorative and memorialization practices, moving away from formal and institutionalized rituals to informal and personalized, vernacular practices. Finally, we consider how Instagram's ‘platform vernacular’ unfolds in relation to traditions and contexts of death, mourning, and memorialization. This research contributes to a broader understanding of how platform vernaculars are shaped through the logics of architecture and use. This research also directly contributes to the understanding of death and digital media by examining how social media is being mobilized in relation to death, the differences that different media platforms make, and the ways social media are increasingly entwined with the places, events, and rituals of mourning.

Feasibility testing of ecomapping in neuro-oncology caregivers to identify social support networks.

66 Background: The role of family caregivers (FCGs) is expanding in the U.S. health care system, but caregiver burden may adversely affect health. A functional social network of friends, family, and other acquaintances may alleviate FCG burden and improve FCG health by providing support resources. Ecomaps are visualizations that are created to organize and depict information on the size, quality and function of a person’s social network; and, thus, may be a useful tool for highlighting existing support and identifying where additional support is needed. Our objective was to test the feasibility of ecomapping to identify support networks within a sample of neuro-oncology caregivers. Methods: Participants included 4 spouse caregivers of neuro-oncology patients undergoing treatment at a national cancer hospital. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in person (n=3) and by phone (n=1). Participants either completed or were sent example ecomaps and, using the “think-aloud” approach, were asked to describe their social network. Participants were also asked about the process and usefulness of the ecomap. Interviews were recorded and transcribed and then content analyzed by two members of the research team. Results: All participants were female, mean age 35.5 (SD=5.5) years, caring for husbands whose mean age was 38.2 (SD=7.4) years. The mean length of relationship was 13 years (SD=2.2). All participants found ecomapping to be feasible, acceptable, and useful for identifying sources and types of social support. Network structure and sources of support varied by participant but consistently included religious networks and family. Quality and types of support also varied; each participant identified strengths and weaknesses within their networks. Participants were in favor of using ecomaps to explore their support networks with providers in a clinical setting and desired clinical guidance on developing and interpreting their ecomap. Conclusions: Despite a small sample, this pilot shows evidence for the feasibility and utility of ecomapping. This cost-effective tool could be more widely implemented to identify and harness existing social support and improve neuro-oncology caregiver quality of life.

Intersectionality, Rural Criminology, and Re-imaging the Boundaries of Critical Criminology

One of the significant shortcomings of the criminological canon, including its critical strands—feminist, cultural and green—has been its urbancentric bias. In this theoretical model, rural communities are idealised as conforming to the typical small-scale traditional societies based on cohesive organic forms of solidarity and close density acquaintance networks. This article challenges the myth that rural communities are relatively crime free places of ‘moral virtue’ with no need for a closer scrutiny of rural context, rural places, and rural peoples about crime and other social problems. This challenge is likewise woven into the conceptual and empirical narratives of the other articles in this Special Edition, which we argue constitute an important body of innovative work, not just for reinvigorating debates in rural criminology, but also critical criminology. For without a critical perspective of place, the realities of context are too easily overlooked. A new criminology of crime and place will help keep both critical criminology and rural criminology firmly anchored in both the sociological and the criminological imagination. We argue that intersectionality, a framework that resists privileging any particular social structural category of analysis, but is cognisant of the power effects of colonialism, class, race and gender, can provide the theoretical scaffolding to further develop such a project.

Remaking Working-Class Community: Sociability, Belonging and ‘Affluence’ in a Small Town, 1930–80

Historians' interest in the ways locality shapes and constrains working-class culture has until recently tended to end with the post-war demise of the ‘traditional working-class communities’ thought to have coalesced in British industrial localities from the 1880s to the 1950s. Such communities, it is assumed, were torn apart in the post-war decades by affluence and urban restructuring, paving the way for the privatisation of working-class life. This article reports a historical case study of the small town of Beverley, East Yorkshire, a type of context often overlooked in such narratives. Evidence gathered from extensive oral history research in the town suggests that the three post-war decades were not so much a period of declining community as one in which full employment and a thriving traditional industrial sector brought considerable social stability. Many Beverley residents reported that they been embedded in extensive local networks of family, friends, acquaintances and workmates which underpinned attachment to place. The article argues that instead of accepting contemporary sociological portrayals of this period as one in which working-class community dissolved into individualism, historians need to engage empirically with patterns of local social life in the mid- and later twentieth century and to explore a greater range of urban settings.

Modeling acquaintance networks based on balance theory

Abstract An acquaintance network is a social structure made up of a set of actors and the ties between them. These ties change dynamically as a consequence of incessant interactions between the actors. In this paper we introduce a social network model called the Interaction-Based (IB) model that involves well-known sociological principles. The connections between the actors and the strength of the connections are influenced by the continuous positive and negative interactions between the actors and, vice versa, the future interactions are more likely to happen between the actors that are connected with stronger ties. The model is also inspired by the social behavior of animal species, particularly that of ants in their colony. A model evaluation showed that the IB model turned out to be sparse. The model has a small diameter and an average path length that grows in proportion to the logarithm of the number of vertices. The clustering coefficient is relatively high, and its value stabilizes in larger networks. The degree distributions are slightly right-skewed. In the mature phase of the IB model, i.e., when the number of edges does not change significantly, most of the network properties do not change significantly either. The IB model was found to be the best of all the compared models in simulating the e-mail URV (University Rovira i Virgili of Tarragona) network because the properties of the IB model more closely matched those of the e-mail URV network than the other models

A Network Evolution Model for Chinese Traditional Acquaintance Networks

The evolution model of Chinese traditional acquaintance relationship networks described in this article emphasizes individual heterogeneity and social culture. The model incorporates three distinct mechanisms that affect acquaintance network evolution and formation: heredity linking, variation linking, and similarity-based disconnection. The authors found that the degree distribution of Chinese traditional acquaintance networks is manifested in a piecewise approximation that combines a power-law form with an exponential cutoff and exponential distribution. Numerical results indicate that individuals maintaining a medium amount of connections far outweigh others, reflecting the characteristics of Guanxi-centered society. The formation of acquaintance relationship networks is greatly affected by the special Chinese kinship culture. The authors' findings are supported by sociological statistical conclusions and offer a rational explanation for the nature of Chinese kinship networks. Their work provides an adequate framework for further research on dynamic human complex behaviors such as epidemic spreading and rumor propagation.

Homophily, Preferential Attachment or Triadic Closure? How the Topology of Acquaintance Networks is Determined by Processes of Link Creation

The proposed model integrates several approaches to explain the evolution of social networks. These approaches -- preferential attachment, homophily, spatial constraints and triadic closure -- are found independently to reproduce network characteristics which can be found in empirical social networks. ERGMs and SAOMs in turn comprehensively fit all these effects to empirical network structures to precisely estimate the strength of all these processes during network evolution. Nonetheless, the latter models have problems reproducing global network topologies as found in empirical data. Here, a model is described which focalizes global network topologies to estimate the role of different network evolution processes. While being far from such precision as ERGMs and SAOMs, we came to some important conclusions: (1) While the skewness of degree distributions can be reproduced without preferential attachment, its inclusion always leads to bad fits. (2) Triadic closure alone is not capable of reproducing high clustering coefficients. (3) The main effects appear to be homophily and spatial constraints while the dimensions of these effects need to be limited. These results should be taken into account to improve overall fits of SAOMs and ERGMs.

The Importance of Community

Complex networks, comprising tens to thousands of nodes are ubiquitous in society, ranging from acquaintance networks—which are of interest in sociology— to networks of interactions between companies and financial institutions—which are of interest in economics. A large number of such systems exhibit structural patterns that appear to be universal. One such organizational feature seen in many networks is modularity, where the network is divided into several connected clusters (‘communities’) with the connection density in each cluster being significantly higher than that for the entire network. Modularity can often be also hierarchical, appearing at several different scales. Recent advances in reconstructing networks from empirical data have shown that modularity is ubiquitous. In this article we explore the role of modularity in organizing the collective dynamics of social networks. The lessons of this analysis may have important implications for understanding the process of consensus formation through individuals affecting the opinions of their neighbours via interactions through the links of the social network.

Low reciprocity rates in acquaintance networks of young adults: fact or artifact?

Empirical studies often report low rates of reciprocity in acquaintance networks. These results, however, are not supported by theoretical assumptions according to which full reciprocity should be assured. To investigate this contradiction, we carried out a full network survey in two longitudinal datasets (N = 213 and N = 197) and identified possible predictors for reciprocity and their development over time. Therefore, we introduce a distinction between active and passive reciprocity. We evaluate indicators for both perceptional errors and factual directedness of links as possible causes for low rates of reciprocity. Results include the following: reciprocity does not increase with the strength of the relation; mutual links are much more stable over time; and personality traits show influences on active and passive reciprocity. Implications of our findings are discussed. There is evidence that crucial differences exist between mutual and non-reciprocated links and that the network integration of an actor is represented rather by the mutual links than by all of the ties.

Low Reciprocity Rates in Acquaintance Networks of Young Adults -- Fact or Artifact?

Empirical studies often report low rates of reciprocity in acquaintance networks. These results, however, are not supported by theoretical assumptions according to which full reciprocity should be assured. To investigate this contradiction, we carried out a full network survey in two longitudinal datasets (N=213 and N=197) and identified possible predictors for reciprocity and their development over time. Therefore, we introduce a distinction between active and passive reciprocity. We evaluate indicators for both, perceptional errors and factual directedness of links as possible causes for low rates of reciprocity. Results include the following: Reciprocity does not increase with the strength of the relation. Mutual links are much more stable over time. Personality traits show to influences on active and passive reciprocity. Implications of our findings are discussed. There is evidence that crucial differences exist between mutual and non-reciprocated links and that the network integration of an actor is represented rather by the mutual links than by all of the ties.

Science Networks in Cutting-edge Research Institutions: Gender Homophily and Embeddedness in Formal and Informal Networks

Female researchers are underrepresented in leading academic positions. Literature has referred to networks as a central factor for sex differences in scientific careers. The present study analyses the interrelations between formal and informal science networks and focuses on gender homophily as a driver for structural embeddedness. Applying QAP network correlation analysis on the principal investigators of two institutions from the German Excellence Initiative, gender homophily minorly influences the involvement in research cooperation, research support and social acquaintance networks. Other similarity variables seem to be more strongly related to integration in science networks, namely, research area, geographic dispersal and academic status.

Production Teams and Producing Racial Diversity in Workplace Relationships

Production teams have become a dominant form of work organization as labor markets have become increasingly diverse. This transition likely affects coworker networks—possibly undermining entrenched patterns of workplace segregation. Contact theory suggests that teams can foster network diversity when workers cooperate and share values emphasizing mutual respect. Yet variants of conflict theory, including the critical teams literature, contend that the benefits of teamwork may be eroded by associated factors, including peer discipline, work intensification, and job insecurity. This study uses 2006 General Social Survey data to assess whether and how teamwork affects the racial diversity of worker acquaintance networks, contrasting worker‐ and manager‐directed teams. We find a positive relationship between teams and diversity, but only when teams are worker directed. Despite countervailing tendencies highlighted in the literature, teams foster greater cooperation between workers, which in turn promotes cross‐racial friendships. African Americans tend to receive the greatest diversity payoffs from teams. These findings suggest that teamwork can undermine segregation, though only with certain implementations and with variation across groups.

Location, Location? A Critical Examination of Patterns and Determinants of Internal Mobility Among Post‐accession Polish Migrants in the UK

ABSTRACTThis article adds to literatures bridging the divide between internal and international migrations by investigating patterns of internal mobility following the international move of post‐accession Polish migrants to the UK. Our analysis is based on a large‐scale qualitative study carried out among 83 Polish migrants living in urban and rural locations in England and Scotland. We analyse the reasons behind their initial choice of location in the destination country and the propensity for subsequent internal mobility after arriving in the UK. We consider the role of family characteristics, migration channels, and time in the spatial moves the migrants undertake. In our analysis, we differentiate between residential mobility (which was generally very high among our study participants) and internal mobility (undertaken by one‐third of our sample). Our research findings indicate that migrants who arrive through recruitment agencies and do not have children (with them in Britain) are the most internally mobile, whereas those who arrive through personal networks (of family, friends, or acquaintances) and with (especially school‐age) children are the least likely to relocate after arriving in the UK. Moreover, it appears that migrants with families are more willing to make urban to rural moves, whereas young and childless migrants favour rural to urban relocations. Notably, the internal migration of some of our (childless) study participants was sometimes interspersed with short‐term return migration. Finally, the general propensity to move internally seems to decrease with time: once the migrants secure permanent employment and stable accommodation, they are less willing to uproot again. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Nordic Keyboard Festival

In September last year, two professional musicians met at the International Clavichord Symposium in Magnano, Italy: Michael Tsalka, who is currently based in Sweden, and Anna Maria McElwain, from Finland. Together they came up with the idea of the Nordic Historical Keyboard Festival in Kuopio, Finland. Both perform on historical keyboards as well as the modern piano. While McElwain considers the clavichord to be her primary instrument, Tsalka enjoys performing on both historical keyboards and the modern piano, often in the same concert. Surprisingly, these two artistic directors were able to organize a substantial festival in less than a year: the Nordic Historical Keyboard Festival, held in Kuopio, Finland on 15−24 August. Tsalka has a network of professional acquaintances from around the world, willing to travel to Kuopio to teach and perform, while McElwain, who is from Kuopio, had the local knowledge necessary to organize the challenging practicalities of this large-scale event. The students, who received lessons in harpsichord, clavichord, fortepiano and modern piano, comprised an international group hailing from Finland, Sweden, China, Mexico and the USA.

Coteries, Social Circles and Hamlets. Close Communities: A Study of Acquaintance Networks

In the analysis of social networks many relatively loose and heuristic definitions of ‘community’ abound. In this paper the concept of closely knit communities is studied as defined by the property that every pair of its members are neighbors or has at least one common neighbor, where the neighboring relationship is based on some more or less durable and stable acquaintance or contact relation. In this paper these are studied in the form of graphs or networks of diameter two (2-clubs). Their structure can be characterized by investigating shortest spanning trees and girth leading to a typology containing just three or, in combination, six types of close communities.

P1-25 Potential bias in HIV estimates using RDS sampling

IntroductionRespondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a process used to collect data from hard-to-reach populations, such as men who have sex with men (MSM). This is a process of accessing a hidden...

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts (review)

Reviewed by: The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts Christine Froula The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Maggie Humm, ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 500. $225.00 (cloth). On the Half-Way Landing of London's National Gallery, a visitor may find herself standing on a Clio fashioned in Woolf's unmistakable image (detail, plate 8), who, with Thalia chortling on her right, holds a quill pen toward a Clive Bell-like Bacchus while beyond him a diagonally counterpoised Melpomene/Greta Garbo gazes into the distance with her back turned, as if, even in this extraordinary company, she'd rather be alone. Boris Anrep's marble mosaic The Awakening of the Muses (1933) melds cultural capital with kitsch and overlays classical myth with glamour girls of modern print culture and the silver screen as it enshrines semibohemian Bloomsbury permanently, if ambivalently, underfoot. Woolf, who liked both fame and anonymity, had meant "to be Clio: not V.W." in Anrep's mosaic (157). In any case, throughout her life she was in direct and indirect colloquy with muses classical and modern. Centered in the metropolis of an empire on which the sun was just beginning to set; enmeshed from birth in a vast, intricate, vibrantly communicative network of writers, artists, intellectuals, politicians, editors, family, friends, acquaintances, servants, children, associates, and everyday urban and village social life; writing in many genres from public novel, essay, and biography to private diary, letter, memoir, and playscript while co-owning and -operating the Hogarth Press, Woolf left one of the richest, most extensive and resonant archives in English literary history. These twenty-five essays by various hands trawl the deep waters of "Woolf and the arts" with a broad net that catches galleries and exhibitions, domestic arts and architecture, bookmaking, publishing and broadcast technology, cinema, photography, music, theatre, dance, popular culture, gardens, entertaining, journalism, and more. They illuminate their findings with thirty-nine black-and-white figures and sixteen color plates. As befits its companionable purpose, much of this hefty book retreads familiar ground and some essays reprise established scholarship. But Maggie Humm has done welcome work in [End Page 480] gathering into one kaleidoscopic compendium these myriad sightings of Woolf at galleries and museums, in concert and music halls, hearing Parsifal at Bayreuth, comparing the Ballets Russes with Henry Tate or Shaw with Chekhov, participating in early Bloomsbury's Play Reading Society, reading Pound's memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska over tea in an A. B. C., coming home wet and tired to listen to a Mozart or Beethoven quartet on the miraculous new gramophone, writing about Vanessa Bell's or Walter Sickert's paintings, commissioning Hogarth book jackets from Vanessa or a French couture ensemble with the help of Vogue's Madge Garland, compiling homemade scrapbooks of snapshots and documents, choosing pictures of Orlando. Turn a kaleidoscope, and the same elements compose different designs; so many of these essays offer fresh discoveries, hypotheses, perspectives, and insights along with some wonderful images. Jane Goldman unearths a 1914 photograph of Millais's portrait of Carlyle in the Museum of London, its glass shattered by a suffragist (42, figure 2.1). Linden Peach proposes that Rudolf Besier's play The Barretts of Wimpole Street (which Woolf thought "rather feeble") inspired Flush. Diane F. Gillespie reproduces in black and white a remarkable 1920 painting by Vanessa Bell now titled Mrs Dalloway's Party (130, figure 7.2). Elizabeth Hirsh looks at actual and virtual portraits in Woolf's writings as an index of historical changes in representation. Ben Harvey finds that Woolf heard a lecture on the Grafton Gallery's 1905 exhibition of impressionist paintings, which she therefore must have seen (153); he probes Clio's proximity to Thalia/Lesley Jowitt on the National Gallery floor and notes Woolf's demurral from Churchill's praise of Sargent's Gassed (plate 7) as a work of "brilliant genius and painful significance" (148). Laura Marcus discusses hand printing and Russian translations at the Hogarth Press, and Tony Bradshaw explores book design from Virginia's bookbinding accomplishments to the Woolfs' library at Washington State University and, of course, the Press. Illustrating both essays...

Proximity, knowledge integration and innovation: an agenda for agent-based studies

In this paper, we develop a theoretical model able to capture some of the main features that govern knowledge sharing and innovation. We pursue our target developing an agent-based model in which the social network of interactions is specified as a knowledge resource, and knowledge integration is seen as the process by which the resource can be applied to innovation. The results of the simulation exercises show that the initial architecture of acquaintance networks is a crucial factor for innovation. Innovating has proven to be more than simply equating endowments of initial skills with firm performance. In fact, the performance of the system showed high sensitivity to the arrangement of the firm’s initial location in the social network. Moreover, the way in which acquaintance networks were mobilized emerged as a key determinant of innovation patterns. The model presented here is a relatively theoretical, stylized model and we employ it to draw some general, albeit preliminary conclusions, while illustrating some of the theory relevant to the issues discussed. It is argued that the model might serve the purpose of setting an agenda for further research along this line of investigation—that is, knowledge integration patterns and firms partnerships formation.

Effects of friend-making resources/costs and remembering on acquaintance networks

We consider two overlooked yet important factors that affect acquaintance network evolution and formation— friend-making resources and remembering—and propose a bottom-up, network-oriented simulation model based on three rules representing human social interactions. Our proposed model reproduces many topological features of real-world acquaintance networks, including a small-world phenomenon and a sharply peaked connectivity distribution feature that mixes power-law and exponential distribution types. We believe that this is an improvement over fieldwork sampling methods that fail to capture acquaintance network node connectivity distributions. Our model may produce valuable results for sociologists working with social opinion formation and epidemiologists studying epidemic dynamics.