Communities In Social Networks Research Articles

Parents’ attitudes toward and experiences with seeking informal mentors for their children

Supportive relationships with non-parental adult role models (akainformal mentors) are important contributors to positive development for children. Absent from research on informal mentoring relationships are studies examining parents’ role in the formation and maintenance of these relationships. In this study, we examined parents’ attitudes about and experiences with their children’s involvement in informal mentoring relationships in two phases. Participating in phase 1 were 161 parents of children enrolled in a formal mentoring program in Canada (ages 27–69, M = 40.25 years; 93.2 % female; 6.8 % male). Participating in phase 2 was a convenience sample of 425 parents in a midwestern state in the United States (ages 23–70, M = 44.95 years; 65.9 % female; 34.1 % male). Parents completed a one-time 20-minute online survey. Parents generally held positive attitudes towards informal mentors but also reported limited involvement in − and several barriers to − fostering children’s informal mentoring relationships. Barriers ranged from not wanting to be a burden on others to believing children would rather spend time with friends. Most parents reported their child had had at least one informal mentor at some point. In both phases, frequency of their child having a mentor was related to their parents having positive attitudes toward informal mentoring and to having directly asked a nonparental adult to be an informal mentor. In phase 2, parents who reported a greater sense of community and supportive social network and higher self-efficacy for facilitating mentoring relationships were more likely to have children with informal mentoring relationships. The findings have implications for including parents in efforts to increase children’s access to supportive mentoring relationships.

Twitter, Politics, and the Pandemic

This article examines the intersection of politics, government, and health communication in the Scottish Twittersphere during the Covid-19 outbreak. It captures two phases of the pandemic: the beginning of the health crisis, and the rollout of the vaccination programme, coinciding with the emergence of the Delta variant in Scotland. A combination of thematic, quantitative content and social network analyses is employed to identify key themes emerging from the tweets of selected government and politicians' accounts, and to explore the formation of social networks communities. The thematic analysis reveals that Twitter has primarily been used for disseminating information about the virus, preventative measures, and government interventions, with limited efforts towards public engagement. Twitter communications became increasingly partisan as the pandemic progressed, with users frequently using the crisis as a political proxy. Five major clusters were detected in the Twitter network: two highly partisan and polarised clusters; a group containing numerous news media accounts reporting on the pandemic, and two clusters focusing primarily on the vaccination programme and the provision of health information, where the First Minister and the Scottish Government operate. Implications of these findings for government and political communication in health crises are discussed.

Risk Factors for Elder Mistreatment Among Older Korean Americans.

Using data from a sample of older Korean Americans (n = 2,150), we examined the prevalence and associated factors of physical, emotional, and financial mistreatment. Given the importance of contextual factors, we examined the effect of immigration-related (years in the U.S. and acculturation) and interpersonal/community-related (family solidarity, social network, and ethnic community social cohesion) factors in addition to sociodemographic and health-related characteristics. The rate of experiencing physical, emotional, and financial mistreatment during the past year was 3%, 37.9%, and 16.1%, respectively. Younger age and lower family solidarity were common risk factors for emotional and financial mistreatment. The experience of emotional mistreatment was also more likely among females and those with higher level of acculturation, smaller social networks, and lower ethnic community social cohesion. Chronic disease was an additional risk factor for financial mistreatment. The findings suggest targeted prevention and intervention strategies for elder mistreatment.

Web-based intervention for young adults experiencing anxiety and hazardous alcohol use: Study protocol for an 18-month randomized controlled trial.

Alcohol use and anxiety often co-occur, causing increased severity impairment. This protocol describes a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that aims to test the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of a web-based, self-guided alcohol and anxiety-focused program, compared with a web-based brief alcohol-focused program, for young adults who drink at hazardous levels and experience anxiety. It will also test moderators and mechanisms of change underlying the intervention effects. This RCT will be conducted with a 1:1 parallel group. The study will be a web-based trial in Australia. Individuals aged 17-30 years who drink alcohol at hazardous or greater levels and experience at least mild anxiety (n = 500) will be recruited through social media, media (TV, print) and community networks. Participants will be randomly allocated to receive a web-based, integrated alcohol-anxiety program plus technical and motivational telephone/e-mail support (intervention) or a web-based brief alcohol-feedback program (control). Clinical measures will be assessed at baseline, post-intervention (2months), 6months (primary end-point), 12 months and 18 months. Co-primary outcomes are hazardous alcohol consumption and anxiety symptom severity. Secondary outcomes are binge-drinking frequency; alcohol-related consequences; depression symptoms; clinical diagnoses of alcohol use or anxiety disorder (at 6months post-intervention), health-care service use, educational and employment outcomes; and quality of life. Mediators and moderators will also be assessed. Efficacy will be tested using mixed models for repeated measures within an intention-to-treat framework. The economic evaluation will analyze individual-level health and societal costs and outcomes of participants between each trial arm, while mediation models will test for mechanisms of change. This will be the first trial to test whether a developmentally targeted, web-based, integrated alcohol-anxiety intervention is effective in reducing hazardous alcohol use and anxiety severity among young adults. If successful, the integrated alcohol-anxiety program will provide an accessible intervention that can be widely disseminated to improve wellbeing of young adults, at minimal cost.

Where Do They Come From and Where Do They Go? Socioeconomic Patterns in Dog Acquisition and Rehoming.

This research examines the ways people acquire dogs in the US as well as the ways the dogs leave the household and the way these differ by income level in seven geographically diverse study communities. A web-based panel survey was distributed and received 6318 responses. Individuals were asked a series of demographic and socioeconomic questions as well as how they acquired their current dogs, how previous dogs left their household, and where they left to. The results indicate that the likelihood of acquiring a dog through friends and family decreased monotonically as income increased, while the opposite was observed for adopting and purchasing a dog. The likelihood of giving a dog away to a friend or family member also decreased as income increased, as opposed to shelter surrender-a person earning over USD 100,000 annually was more than four times likelier to surrender to a shelter than a person earning under USD 15,000. The results suggest a stronger reliance on informal social networks in lower-income communities for both obtaining and placing dogs. As these dogs would otherwise end up in the shelter system, animal shelters may support low-income pet owners to help keep their dogs within their community of care.

Content and structure based attention for graph node classification

Graph-structured data is ubiquitous in real-world applications, such as social networks, citation networks, and communication networks. Graph neural network (GNN) is the key to process them. In recent years, graph attention networks (GATs) have been proposed for node classification and achieved encouraging performance. It focuses on the content associated on nodes to evaluate the attention weights, and the rich structure information in the graph is almost ignored. Therefore, we propose a multi-head attention mechanism to fully employ node content and graph structure information. The core idea is to introduce the interactions in the topological structure into the existing GATs. This method can more accurately estimate the attention weights among nodes, thereby improving the convergence of GATs. Second, the mechanism is lightweight and efficient, requires no training to learn, can accurately analyze higher-order structural information, and can be strongly interpreted through heatmaps. We name the proposed model content- and structure-based graph attention network (CSGAT). Furthermore, our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on a number of datasets in node classification. The code and data are available at https://github.com/CroakerShark/CSGAT.

On your own, together: Regional perspectives on community resource-sharing for disaster preparedness in Washington state

ABSTRACT When disasters isolate communities from external support, their members must turn to each other for mutual assistance. This study explores (1) resource management, (2) information sharing, and (3) community leadership and civic participation as dimensions of peer-to-peer sharing for more efficient distribution of local resources under “islanded” conditions. Interviews with members and leaders of three neighborhood-scale communities in Washington state revealed concerns about household preparedness and stockpiling of resources, but also the potential to lever individuals’ community knowledge, social networks, and willingness to participate. Future interventions might include enhancing place-based social infrastructure for resource and information sharing; online local databases and applications that normally maintain privacy but “unlock” important household information for community use in emergencies; and programs that help individuals access and adopt leadership and participation roles. Satisfying these requirements for successful disaster prepared ness also aligns with the goals of everyday community-building and strengthening of collective capacity.

‘Letting it be’: a grounded theory about dementia care in Fiji

Objectives This research study aimed to discover how dementia affecting older people was perceived, experienced, and managed by stakeholders in the Pacific Island country of Fiji. Method A transformational grounded theory approach was used. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders in the major towns of Suva, Lautoka, and Nadi were carried out. Transcripts were analysed in line with transformational grounded theory methods. Results A total of 50 participants (40 service providers, eight family caregivers, one person with dementia, and one village elder) shared their views and experiences about dementia. A grounded theory about dementia care management was constructed. ‘Letting it be’ is the grounding socio-cultural construct that interweaves and binds together the processes of dementia care management. It expresses a compassionate approach to caring for older people with dementia that involves searching for knowledge and support, and application of traditional care practices within the strength of family and community networks. Conclusion In Fiji, support for dementia centres on the integration of community understandings, and promotion of cultural values of wellbeing and care, with service provision. It also focuses on support for families and communities through social welfare, community networks, and education.

A novel three-phase expansion algorithm for uncovering communities in social networks using local influence and similarity in embedding space

Community detection can help uncover and understand complex networks’ underlying patterns and structures. It involves identifying cohesive groups with similar entities while being separated from other groups. Social networks are a prime example of an area where community detection is particularly relevant, as it can provide insight into the behaviors of individuals. Several community detection methods have been proposed, each addressing the problem from different perspectives. However, the rise of vast and intricate networks from diverse domains has necessitated the development of community detection methods that can effectively handle large-scale graphs. This study introduces a novel three-phase expansion algorithm for community discovery based on nodes’ local information and similarity in embedding space. The proposed model consists of three steps. In the first stage, we generate an embedding space in which nodes are represented as vectors, and we extract nodes that greatly influence others and have an extraordinary ability to create communities using degree centrality measures. Then, based on cosine similarity in the embedding space, we group the most similar nodes to the influential ones in the same community and create an initial community structure. In the last phase, we extract the weak communities from the initial community structure generated in the second phase and merge them with the strong ones. We conduct extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic networks to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than other widely used algorithms and is highly reliable and efficient in large-scale graphs.

Impact of Internet on Social life of Students: An Overview

In this paper we discuss about impact of internet on social life of students, an overview as we all know, Internet today is widely recognized not only as a means of communication but also as a powerful tool. Internet usage among students involves not only the use of leisure time, but also their community involvement and social networking. Students are now facing major social issues like isolation, mental depression, lack face to face communication, waste of time, excessive use of social networking sites and depression. Rather it was found that children who spend more time on the internet were more likely to spend more time with other media, more time on some kind of physical activities, and were more socially involved. The study recommends that as the internet is regarded as an in separable part of human life, students should conscious of using the internet. Internet represents the greatest collection of human knowledge and has enabled many communications in the world to manage communication and solve problems. Internet usage will become addicted and more likely to ha-case negative and less support in learning activities. So using the Internet for social media as much as, use for online gaming activity, while utilizing the Internet for watch you tube, rarely use the Internet to learn and seek information.

THE IMPORTANCE OF USER-GENERATED CONTENT IN TOURISM EVENTS FOR CREATING ENGAGEMENT

Objective: The objective of this study is to investigate engagement with the aim of knowing the impact that user-generated content has on it.
 
 Theoretical Framework: Laroche et al. (2012) revealed that social networking communities promote shared awareness, society's obligation, rites and traditions, trust, and customer loyalty. A year later, Brodie et al. (2013) specified the reach of consumers in online participation suggesting that consumers with a good level of engagement present greater loyalty.
 
 Method: The methodology adopted for this research comprises Extensive field work was carried out by administering a questionnaire to tourists who visited the events during the holiday week. Data collection was carried out through questionnaires and social network studies.
 
 Results and Discussion: The results obtained revealed the strong relationship between variables, especially between engagement and user generated contents.
 
 Research Implications: The results may be applied and influence practices in the field of tourism and also in other fields.
 
 Originality/Value: The study makes a specific contribution to literature, because the proposed model is innovative especially with the introduction of engagement as a mediator variable, as well as to use and compare two methodologies, questionnaires and Twitter, for the same tourism event.

Влияние социальных сетей на развитие политических коммуникаций в новой цифровой реальности

The article analyzes the aspects and problems of the influence of social networks on the development of politi-cal communications in the new digital reality. The concept of social networks is introduced, aspects of their im-pact on political communications and processes are characterized. Separately, the possibilities of the positive influence of social networks on the development of political communications in the new digital reality are re-vealed, and new threats and risks are also examined. Considering the factor of Russia’s involvement in a hy-brid, including informational, war with the collective West, a typology of social networks is proposed, including the criteria for blocking and possible reserves of popularity of political communications. The influence of differ-ent types of social networks and the factor of their blocking on the features and risks of political communica-tions is revealed, the specifics of communication activity in social networks with increasing and decreasing popularity are analysed. The mechanisms of political communications in the most preferred social networks for this are shown – VKontakte and Telegram. The necessity of activation of political communications aimed at young audience in TikTok, as well as on the basis of serious longreads on the platform “Zen” is argued. Measures are proposed for organizing political communications in social networks, including taking into ac-count the risk factors of outsourcing.

Examining How Contextual Cues Affect the Interpretation and Dissemination of Metaphors in Social Networks

This paper explores the intricate relationship between contextual cues and the interpretation and dissemination of metaphors in social networks. Utilizing a multi-disciplinary approach that combines insights from linguistics, cognitive psychology, and communication studies, we investigate how various contextual cues, such as visual elements, hashtags, and social signals, shape the way metaphors are understood and spread in digital environments. Through a comprehensive review of literature and analysis of case studies, we highlight the dynamic interplay between metaphor interpretation and dissemination, revealing how the same metaphor can evoke different interpretations and dissemination patterns depending on the surrounding context. Our findings underscore the complexity of metaphorical communication in social networks and its implications for online discourse. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our study, emphasizing the importance of considering contextual cues in the effective use of metaphors in social media communication. Finally, we suggest future research directions to further explore the role of contextual cues in metaphorical communication in social networks.

Social Network Community Detection to Deal with Gray-Sheep and Cold-Start Problems in Music Recommender Systems

Information from social networks is currently being widely used in many application domains, although in the music recommendation area, its use is less common because of the limited availability of social data. However, most streaming platforms allow for establishing relationships between users that can be leveraged to address some drawbacks of recommender systems. In this work, we take advantage of the social network structure to improve recommendations for users with unusual preferences and new users, thus dealing with the gray-sheep and cold-start problems, respectively. Since collaborative filtering methods base the recommendations for a given user on the preferences of his/her most similar users, the scarcity of users with similar tastes to the gray-sheep users and the unawareness of the preferences of the new users usually lead to bad recommendations. These general problems of recommender systems are worsened in the music domain, where the popularity bias drawback is also present. In order to address these problems, we propose a user similarity metric based on the network structure as well as on user ratings. This metric significantly improves the recommendation reliability in those scenarios by capturing both homophily effects in implicit communities of users in the network and user similarity in terms of preferences.

Content of Regional Library Communities on the VKontakte Social Network

Social networks are one of the platforms for posting official content and interacting with users, as well as providing remote access to information resources. The purpose of analyzing the content of communities in the VKontakte social network of the Oryol regional libraries (public, children’s and special) was to identify the structure and typology of communities, their characteristic features, and types of labels. The reason for choosing the accounts of regional libraries as the object of research was the social function they perform: regional libraries are the flagships of the development of the library system of a certain territory. The popularity of publications in communities was measured using the Engagement Rate coefficient. A direct correlation has been revealed between the type of publication and its popularity: the more popular the publication, the more publications of this type are posted in the community. For more effective functioning of library communities, it is necessary to develop a content plan that is based on the theory of management and marketing of social networks.

Earthen stories. Cross-craft strategies in raw material procurement and production at the tell site of Arslantepe (Türkiye) during the 4th millennium BCE

Arslantepe, located in south-eastern Turkey, is a multi-period settlement with a rich history of habitation dating back to at least the late 5th millennium BCE and spanning into the Medieval period. Over millennia, the site underwent drastic cultural, socio-economic and political transformations, resulting in its current form as a 30-m-high artificial mound. This mound predominantly consists of earth, encompassing clay-based construction materials, assorted objects and discarded materials. This paper consolidates research on various earthen objects and fixtures from the site, investigating their material properties through X-ray Diffraction (XRD), X-ray Fluorescence (XRF), sediment micromorphology and ceramic petrography. The focus is on characterising the diverse earthen products as well as assessing differences and similarities in the procurement and manipulation of raw materials during the Late Chalcolithic period. Earth emerged as a pivotal resource for Arslantepe communities, showcasing diverse strategies of collection, manipulation and utilisation-a compelling example of cross-crafting strategies. The findings reveal a multifaceted body of knowledge intertwined with the exploitation of this resource, emphasising distinct technological expertise, environmental considerations, as well as cultural preferences and socio-economic factors. Ultimately, the integrated examination of cross-craft strategies in the 4th millennium BCE Arslantepe settlement provides a unique glimpse into communities of practice and social networks centred around the utilisation of earth, contributing to a deeper understanding of past societies.

Evaluating the satisfaction and utility of social networks in medical practice and continuing medical education

BackgroundDigital health has surged during the Covid health crisis, and the use of social media, already prevalent in medicine, has significantly increased. There are Social Networks groups dedicated to physicians with an educational purpose. These groups also facilitate peer discussions on medical questions and the sharing of training materials.ObjectivesThe aim of our study was to assess the value of these new tools and their contribution to medical education.MethodsAn anonymous questionnaire was conducted among members of a Social Networks community group for physicians. The survey received responses from 1451 participants.ResultsThe majority of participants believed they had enriched their medical knowledge and accessed documents they would not have accessed without the group. Subgroup analysis showed that the contribution of this tool is more pronounced for general practitioners and doctors practicing in limited healthcare access.ConclusionIt is essential to develop digital tools that enhance physician training, and social networks represent a valuable educational tool.

The Role of MSMEs in Community Empowerment: A Study in Malang Regency, East Java, Indonesia

This research aims to analyze and describe the impact and contribution of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in community empowerment. In various developing countries, MSMEs have become the economic backbone of local communities and have a significant influence on improving welfare and strengthening social networks in various communities. This research uses a qualitative descriptive approach, with a study focus on Super Heru MSMEs in Pakis District, Malang Regency, East Java, Indonesia. The research results show that MSMEs have played a crucial role as economic drivers by creating jobs for residents. Its existence can form strong bonds between business actors, consumers, and the community, as well as contribute to local economic growth and increase a sense of community ownership and involvement. MSMEs also play a role in providing access to disadvantaged groups, such as women, youth, and marginalized community groups, by providing business opportunities and skills training. MSMEs have succeeded in empowering many individuals to create their own sources of income, increase economic independence, and reduce social disparities. The conclusion of this research confirms that MSMEs have great potential in strengthening community networks and advancing social welfare. Researchers suggest that with the right support from the government, non-governmental organizations, and society, MSMEs can continue to be agents of positive change in advancing social, economic, and environmental welfare in various communities.

Rural farmers’ perceptions of and adaptations to climate change in Sub-Saharan Africa: Does climate-smart agriculture (CSA) matter in Nigeria and Ethiopia?

AbstractThe available literature has ignored farmers’ perceptions on the benefits and drawbacks of adopting climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in favor of focusing primarily on profitability and economic constraints. We use the Ethiopian Socioeconomic Survey (ESS) and the General Household Survey from 2018 and 2019 to compare Nigeria and Ethiopia, both of which have sizable rural populations to assess farmers’ climate change perception and their adaptation options in promoting CSA. We first hypothesize that farmers with high tolerance for risk and stable financial resources are more likely to adopt CSA techniques, relying on the adopter perception theory of agricultural innovations and technologies. We address potential selection bias using the Heckman selection model, and estimate our data using multinomial logistic estimator, as well as standard logistic regression for robustness checks. We find that in both Ethiopia and Nigeria, household income and plot size influence farmers’ adaptations to climate change mitigation practices. However, farmers with bigger plots who run the risk of massive production loss tend to adopt measures of coping with climate change. We show that in both Ethiopia and Nigeria, rural farmers’ adaptation decisions are heavily influenced by agricultural extension programs and community social networks. Overall, our work highlights the important role of income, farm size, and climate-related information for investing in climate-smart agricultural methods to curb food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Using path coloring of graphs for communication in social networks

An L (p1, p2, p3, … , pm)- labeling of a graph G, has the vertices of G assigned with non-negative integers, such that the vertices at distance j should have at least pj as their label difference. If m = 3 and p1 = 3, p2 = 2, p3 = 1, it is called an L (3, 2, 1)-labeling which is widely studied in the literature. In this paper, we define an L (3, 2, 1)-path coloring of G as a labeling g : V (G) → Z+ such that between every pair of vertices there exists at least one path P where in the labeling restricted to this path is an L (3, 2, 1)-labeling. Among the labels assigned to any vertex of G under g, the maximum label is called the span of g. The L (3, 2, 1)-connection number of a graph G, denoted by k3c (G) is defined as the minimum value of span of g taken over all such labelings g. We call graphs with the special property that k3c (G) = |V (G) | as L (3, 2, 1)-path graceful. In this paper, we obtain k3c (G) of graphs that possess a Hamiltonian path and carry forward the discussion to certain classes of graphs which do not possess a Hamiltonian path, which is novel to this paper. Although different kinds of labeling are studied in the literature with different mathematical constraints imposed, the idea of showing the existence of a graph with a given number as its minimum labeling number has rarely been addressed. We show that given any positive integer, there always exists an L (3, 2, 1)-path graceful graph with the given integer as its k3c (G), thus addressing the inverse question. Finally exploiting the fact that there is no gap on the k3c (G) number line, we give an application of path colorings for secure communication on social networking sites. Efforts to deploy graph coloring in task scheduling, interference-free transmission, etc have been dealt by earlier researchers. In this paper, we deploy the L (3, 2, 1)-path coloring technique defined by us for secure communication in social networks, which has not been dealt with so far.