Social Friends Research Articles

Brothers and sisters all: Catholic schools for community with Muslims

This article makes the normative argument that Catholic schools can and should reject Islamophobia by welcoming Muslim students through the acceptance of full accommodation. It reviews research that could assist Catholic schools to take up Pope Francis’s ‘Fratelli Tutti’ Encyclical Letter call for ‘fraternity and social friendship’ with near and distant ‘strangers’, by adopting acceptance forms of community with Muslim students, and rejecting Islamophobia. Currently, illiberal securalist societies have rendered Muslim students eminently vulnerable to cultural racism and racialisation. Many of them experience schools as culturally incongruent, are subject to everyday cultural racism, and also lack a faith-based education. It defines Islamophobia as cultural racism, with gendered forms of racialisation, examines histories of secularisation and of school markets as contexts exclusionary of Muslims. It reviews research on: how non-denominational and denominational schools, teachers, and peers have contributed to, or rejected, the Islamophobia experienced by Muslims students; how they have moved, or can move, to school-based policies of accommodation based on positive difference; and how their religious education pedagogies do, or may, foster the opening of hearts and minds to the respect as equal of Muslim brothers and sisters.

Fratelli tutti e Solidariedade Global

The text aims to understand the evolution of the term “solidarity” within Pope Francis’ magisterial theology until the writing of the encyclical letter Fratelli tutti. Enriched with the global adjective, the term solidarity for Francis is translated as a real and profound critique towards global divisions and inequalities, in the pursuit of an inclusive and empathetic love inspired by St. Francis of Assis. Therefore, the idea of solidarity that seeks to become “global” is not reduced to charitable aid only, but must be concretized as co-participation in the pain and common destiny of humanity. The encyclical proposes a “social friendship” that recognizes the dignity of all, seeking to transcend polarizations and ultranationalisms. Francis seeks the promotion of forms of dialog between local and global instances, avoiding abstract universalisms and/or stagnant localisms. His theological vision emphasizes interconnectedness and mutual responsibility in the building of a just and fraternal global community.

Até onde vamos?

This article presents some initial contributions on (re) thinking the major challenges facing Latin American society, reconstructing its historical features and its contemporary challenges. It also presents possible ways of reconstructing the present and the possibility of reconverting to ways of life, cultures and values that have their roots in ancestral peoples. It looks to Good Living, Food Sovereignty and agroecology, the principles of which are in line with the teachings announced by Pope Francis in his encyclicals Fratelli Tutti and Laudatto Si, for hope of a better world. This world will only be possible if it is based on Fraternity and Social Friendship and on deep respect for our Common Home and those who live in it.

Fratelli tutti e a superação do individualismo pela educação

Fratelli Tutti, an encyclical written by Pope Francis, addresses the themes of fraternity and social friendship, emphasizing the need to recognize, to value and to love all people, regardless of the physical proximity or the place where they were born or live. Individualism, however, is approached as one of the main challenges of contemporary neoliberal society. By reflecting on this issue and its implications for the common good, this article seeks to situate education as a form of overcoming selfish indifference. Based on Charlot (2020), Laval and Vergne (2023) and Benincá (2010), the dialogical education is defended as an essential element for promoting a culture of encounter and a sense of brotherhood.

Por uma fenomenologia da amizade social

Based on the phenomenology developed by Edmund Husserl, especially his writing from the 1930s, we intend to establisch a dialogue with the thoughts of Pope Francis expressed in the Encyclical Fratelli Tutti. They are two characters in the story separated by a century, however, both manifests in the face of the irrationality of the world are not only similar, but share the same aspirations. In this way, by showing a phenomenologu of social friendship based on the return to the word of life and the development of intersubjective experience, we arrive at the final proposal of an aspiration to ethical love, to social love.

The Doctrinal Status of Just War in the Contemporary Teaching of the Catholic Magisterium

This article examines the doctrinal status of just war in the contemporary teaching of the Catholic magisterium. Some passages from Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical Fratelli tutti, On Fraternity and Social Friendship appear to exclude the just war idea from the social doctrine of the Catholic Church. To gauge whether this is so, the article establishes a baseline comparison to the seminal teaching of Thomas Aquinas on peace and just war. Both St. Thomas and Pope Francis proceed from the assumption that “war” designates a sinful violation of peace. They appear to differ, however, on the question whether a positive meaning should be ascribed to the Roman term bellum justum. To understand if this divergence is purely verbal or involves a substantive disagreement, I consider why Pope Francis’s predecessors have (since the mid-twentieth century) abstained from employing the expression “just war” in their official documents. Finally, Pope Francis’s emphatic statement that St. Augustine ‘forged a concept of “just war” that we no longer uphold in our own day’ is interpreted in light of the passage from his Epistle 229 to Darius that Francis references in Fratelli tutti.

Smoking Behavior as a Social Influence of Teenagers in Association in Sungai Beliung Urban Village

This research aims to find out how the social influence of teenagers in the social process influences the formation of smoking behavior in minors as a form of social influence in the Sungai Beliung District. Researchers tried to examine the smoking behavior orientation of minors which was determined to be the influence of teenage social interactions. This research is in the form of a case study and uses a qualitative approach with data collection techniques, namely interviews, observation and literature study. The results of the research show that smoking behavior by minors is starting to become more common nowadays. The widening influence of relationships and the environment makes teenagers follow this behavior. Initially, teenagers are influenced by their social friends and the community, especially those around their home environment, most of whom are smokers.

Joint friend and item recommendation based on multidimensional feature reciprocal interaction in social e-commerce

Social e-commerce platforms need to undertake the two core tasks of recommending potential social friends and preferred consumption items for users. However, the use of traditional one-dimensional information is no longer able to accurately make personalized recommendations. Early scholars have confirmed that users’ social and consumption behaviors do not exist independently: users with the same interests are more likely to become friends, and there is a high probability of similar consumption behaviors among friends. In this paper, we propose a joint friend and item recommendation model based on multidimensional feature reciprocal interaction (MFRI). Which is based on the user’s social friends and item preference information, extracts the shallow and deep features of the user’s social and consumption behaviors, and utilizes the reciprocity between unusual behaviors to achieve mutual enhancement. The reciprocity between shallow and deep features in similar behaviors is also explored based on the attention mechanism, and the model is trained by a joint loss function. We conducted experiments on real datasets, and the results confirm the effectiveness and robustness of MFRI for potential friend and preference item recommendations.

Friendship and Socio-Emotional Skills in 3rd / 4th Year Students in Portuguese Basic Education

We carried out quantitative research (descriptive, exploratory, transversal, explanatory) analyzing interpersonal/social friendship relationships (acceptance/refusal) and the mastery of socio-emotional skills in four classes with 3rd and 4th year students of basic education (sample N=91 students), in a School Group in Castelo Branco in Portugal, in the Pre-COVID period (November 2019), not being able to carry out the intervention of an Emotional Intelligence Development Program in these study subjects. We investigated the significant differences between the social friendship relationships (sociometric friendship test) of students in the 3rd/4th year of basic education and the analysis of the results obtained by the Emotional Skills Questionnaire. The study was guided by the following objectives: analyzing the acceptance/rejection of the relationship of 3rd/4th year students from the four basic education classes; verify the significant differences in friendship relationships between 3rd/4th year students by gender; know the differences between 3rd/4th year students by class in emotional skills; Determine the socio-emotional skills by gender of 3rd/4th year students by class. The results obtained confirmed that certain student behaviors in the group/class constitute an indicator of effective and valued social skills in this socialization context.

Robust social recommendation based on contrastive learning and dual-stage graph neural network

GNN-based social recommendation aims to use social network information to improve recommendation performance of traditional user–item interaction network (U–I network). However, in graph neural network information aggregation, both social networks and U–I networks inevitably have noise, which affects accuracy of recommendation results. To reduce the noise impact of network data, we propose Robust Social Recommendation based on Contrastive Learning and Dual-Stage Graph Neural Network (CLDS). First, considering instability of social networks, we propose the social preference network. It is robust and retains only social friend relationships with common preferences. Based on it and U–I network, we construct a social recommendation pre-training model. Next, we propose self-contrastive learning method. The method initializes multiple social network node representations through Gaussian distribution, pre-training and random disturbance, respectively. Then, it uses contrastive learning on the generated multiple node representations to enhance the robustness of node representation. Finally, CLDS avoids directly capturing potentially user–user and item–item information in U–I networks which is incomplete and untrusted. And instead, it only extracts user–item information to reduce the noise generated by GNN-based U–I network information aggregation. We conduct experiments under the open-source real network dataset. The experimental results show that CLDS outperforms state-of-art methods in social recommendation. The code is available at: https://github.com/Andrewsama/CLDS-master.

Who Wants to Shop With You: Joint Product-Participant Recommendation for Group-Buying Service.

Recent years have witnessed the great success of group buying (GB) in social e-commerce, opening up a new way of online shopping. In this business model, a user can launch a GB as an initiator to share her interested product with social friends. The GB is clinched once enough friends join in as participants to copurchase the shared product. As such, a successful GB depends on not only whether the initiator can find her interested product but also whether the friends are willing to join in as participants. Most existing recommenders are incompetent in such complex scenario, as they merely seek to help users find their preferred products and cannot help identify potential participants to join in a GB. To this end, we propose a novel joint product-participant recommendation (J2PRec) framework, which recommends both candidate products and participants for maximizing the success rate of a GB. Specifically, J2PRec first designs a relational graph embedding module, which effectively encodes the various relations in GB for learning enhanced user and product embeddings. It then jointly learns the product and participant recommendation tasks under a probabilistic framework to maximize the GB likelihood, i.e., boost the success rate of a GB. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of J2PRec for GB recommendation.

Exploiting dynamic social feedback for session-based recommendation

Since people with close relationships are easily influenced by each other, social friends usually have more preferences of higher similarities than others. For this reason, social recommendation methods are proposed to adopt social links to improve the degree of preference matching between users and recommended items. Although current social recommendation methods have captured the general preference similarities among social friends, it is still difficult to model the evolution of dynamic social influence among friends, especially in session-based scenarios. In reality, when users’ dynamic preferences are changing, social feedback from their friends is also changing over time. So that the dynamic social feedback is an important social influence, which has not been considered in current studies. To this end, we propose a social feedback-enhanced session-based recommendation (SFRec) method, which not only utilizes the similarity of general preferences among friends but also captures the friends’ influence which reflects people’s dynamic preferences. Specifically, we first coordinate similarity relations via information propagation on social graph, item transition graph and user–item interaction graph. To capture social feedback based on users’ dynamic preferences, we then construct a social feedback generation module that consists of preference extraction, feedback generation and feedback aggregation. Finally, we construct a preference fusion module to obtain the final preference representation and make personalized recommendation. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three datasets. Results demonstrate that SFRec surpasses the state-of-the-art models on recommendation performance.

THE FEMININE CONTRIBUTION TO ‘SOCIAL FRIENDSHIP’ INSIGHTS FROM THE SOCIAL ENCYCLICAL "FRATELLI TUTTI"

The latest social encyclical of Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti (2020), focuses on the theme of fraternity, which is a key concept of Catholic social teaching. The papal document reiterates that true universal fraternity implies the acknowledgement of the worth of each human person as a primary value of reference, always and everywhere. Fraternity, however, rooted in reciprocity and openness to mutual enrichment, needs to be consciously and carefully cultivated. Although men and women are both called to actively participate in building the culture of fraternity and solidarity that allows the pursuit of the common good, women can offer a particular contribution to promoting fraternity and social friendship. The feminine capacity to nurture and bring forth new life can effectively enhance an attitude of care, which integrates and completes the more masculine orientation towards justice, marked by a distinct sensitivity towards those who are more fragile and in need of help. From this perspective, a cultural change is needed, through education and practice, so that the feminine capacity for care can be recognized as a gift and promoted within organizations and all basic structures of common life.

Information Quality, Social Friendship and Social Interaction in Predicting Web Usage and Online News Readers’ Understanding

Information Quality, Social Friendship and Social Interaction in Predicting Web Usage and Online News Readers’ Understanding

Caring for the Common Home and Calling for a Diverse Future: Pope Francis and Byung-Chul Han in Dialogue

The first few decades of the twenty-first century have posed various challenges to humankind such as the worldwide impact of the changing patterns of globalization processes, economic crises, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the specter of deglobalization illustrate. The unknown and unpredictable future is a reason for utmost concern for the contemporary society that Byung-Chul Han characterizes as an “achievement society”—one that is dominated by “excessive positivity” and that has evolved into a “doping society”. This “palliative society” is such because it is unable to cope with pain, and it is marked by a kind of permanent analgesia that prevents urgent reforms from taking place. In this essay, I examine how Pope Francis’s encyclical letters Laudato Si’ (2015) and Fratelli Tutti (2020)—by calling for an integral ecology (which connects environmental, economic, political, social, cultural, and ethical issues), social friendship, solidarity, and the common good—instill hope in the burnout society that Han reflects upon, urge action toward, and encourage changes to overcome in the current environmental and human crisis, as well as to building a diverse future that is not palliative.

POPULISME AGAMA DITINJAU DARI PERSPEKTIF TEOLOGI KATOLIK

This study is intended to critically elaborate Catholic Theology on Religious Populism, primarilly as articulated in the Encyclical Fratelli Tutti (On fraternity and social friendship), and its relevance to critically investigate politics of Religious Poapulism in Indonesia. Since the politics of Populism is corraleted with the politic of religious identity, this research then addresses the correlation of those two political phenomena. We utilize literer study as a method in exploring this study. After doing a biblical critical analysis, which in the Christian Theology considered as the biblical theology; we then investigate the Encyclical Fratelli Tutti, which gives an extentive account on Populism. Catholic theology, we are convinced, gives important contributions to the project of religious moderation and offers critical thoughts on religious populism: Religious Populism could endanger the democratic foundations, such as the recognizion of plurality, neglecting the richts of the marginalized and minority, and induces the crisis of humanity itself.

Psychomotory Formation of Children Through Islamic Religious Education in the Family

Education cannot be separated from family life. One of the successes of education is the role of the family in educating children. Education in the family is a form of conscious effort carried out by parents. The psychomotor aspect is a very important aspect for educators to know. These psychomotor abilities can be grouped into five, namely imitation, manipulation, movement accuracy, articulation and naturalization or autonomy. This research aims to determine the formation of children's psychometrics through Islamic religious education in the family. This research uses qualitative methods (field research). Meanwhile, the data collection method uses interviews, observation and documentation. Data analysis in this research uses data reduction which consists of checking data and organizing data, presenting or displaying data, and verification. The results of this research show that in forming children's psychomotor skills through Islamic religious education, families usually use methods, advice, example, habituation, rewards and punishments, training children for practices, stories, and so on, while supporting factors in the formation of psychomotor skills in the family are the existence of prayer room close to home, parents' preferences, family and school environment, surrounding environment and social friends, while the inhibiting factors are excessive use of gadgets, and busy parents who work outside the home.

Christianity and Fraternal Globalisation

This paper discusses the importance of fraternity in building more fair and humane societies. The globalised world poses new challenges to the understanding of fraternity, especially when it is seen as an attack on the dignity of each person. Religions are considered to have an important role to play in responding to the dehumanisation that a certain type of globalisation can promote. To this end, we reflect on the threats and opportunities that the globalised world offers and how religious thought can make a positive contribution. Based on Pope Francis’ challenges, we will respond to what the “something greater” is that fraternity has to offer the world. The answer is developed using sources from the sacred scripture and the patristics to understand Christianity, where it is concluded that the model of relationships between people, in the thought of the magisterium in the light of sacred scripture, aims to awaken the awareness of a social friendship, which will grow to the extent that one offers what is best for the other, simply by loving them and being who they are.

Personalized Point-of-Interest Recommendation Using Improved Graph Convolutional Network in Location-Based Social Network

Data sparsity limits the performance of point-of-interest (POI) recommendation models, and the existing works ignore the higher-order collaborative influence of users and POIs and lack in-depth mining of user social influence, resulting in unsatisfactory recommendation results. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a personalized POI recommendation using an improved graph convolutional network (PPR_IGCN) model, which integrates collaborative influence and social influence into POI recommendations. On the one hand, a user-POI interaction graph, a POI-POI graph, and a user–user graph are constructed based on check-in data and social data in a location-based social network (LBSN). The improved graph convolutional network (GCN) is used to mine the higher-order collaborative influence of users and POIs in the three types of relationship graphs and to deeply extract the potential features of users and POIs. On the other hand, the social influence of the user’s higher-order social friends and community neighbors on the user is obtained according to the user’s higher-order social embedding vector learned in the user–user graph. Finally, the captured user and POI’s higher-order collaborative influence and social influence are used to predict user preferences. The experimental results on Foursquare and Yelp datasets indicate that the proposed model PPR_IGCN outperforms other models in terms of precision, recall, and normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG), which proves the effectiveness of the model.

Smoking Behavioral Intentions of Nursing Students in Kendari

This study aims to analyze the smoking behavioral intentions of nursing students in Kendari. The type of research used is qualitative with a case study design. The analysis takes the form of domain analysis using Focus Group Discussion data collection techniques for eight nursing students in Kendari. The research results show that smoking behavior is not based on intention. They start smoking by trial and error and are influenced by social friends. The need for an interpersonal communication approach is supported by policies to implement strict and sanctioned no-smoking areas, both on campus and in nursing students' workplaces, to minimize their chances of having the intention to smoke.