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Background: Project ECHO® networks at Children's Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service (CHQHHS) are communities of practice designed to mitigate services and systems fragmentation by building collaborative partnerships addressing priority child and youth health needs. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experience the negative impacts of fragmentation in addition to historical challenges of absent or culturally inappropriate health services. Access to culturally safe and responsive services can be improved by engaging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Workers and similar roles in an online community of practice, supporting the integration of cultural and clinical knowledge and self-determination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander consumers in decisions affecting their health. Analysing professional support networks and knowledge sharing patterns helps identify enablers and barriers to partnerships. Using social network research, the multilevel network inclusive of ECHO network members and their colleagues was studied to identify interdisciplinary and cross-sector advice exchange patterns, explore the position of cultural brokers and identify common relational tendencies. Methods: Social network theories and methods informed the collection of network data and analysis of advice-seeking relationships among ECHO network members and their nominees. Registered members from two ECHO networks were invited to complete the Qualtrics survey. Networks analysed comprised 398 professionals from mainstream health, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Controlled Health Organisation, education, disability and child safety service settings. Results: Brokers were well represented, both those who hold knowledge brokerage positions as well as cultural brokers who incorporate clinical and cultural knowledge enabling holistic care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients (38 individuals, 17% of network). Professionals who occupy brokerage positions outside the ECHO network tend to be more connected with co-members within the network. Conclusions: This study is the first application of contemporary social network theories and methods to investigate an ECHO network. The findings highlight the connectivity afforded by brokers, enabling the coordination and collaboration necessary for effective care integration. Inclusion of cultural brokers in an ECHO network provides sustained peer group support while also cultivating relationships that facilitate the integration of cultural and clinical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hong Kong is a storied city of dynamic ethnonational identities, with attention growing around a Hongkonger identity purportedly distinct from a Chinese one. Using mixed methods, this article critically appraises the social construction of the Hongkonger identity by adopting a relational approach to ethnonational identification. Multivariate regressions on identity indices in a 2019 citywide survey and qualitative interviews with youth on ethnonational identification cast light on novel interpretive associations drawn between (1) a Hongkonger civic identity and (2) a pan-Chinese racial identity. Rather than being cast into a binary, these two identifications are interlocked in this article in what I will call ethnonational hinges: symbolic hinges through which individuals switch between the two identities to appease dislocated segments of their social networks (nonfamilial and familial ties) with competing worldviews, abetted by a moral cognitive impulse for conformity inculcated in Chinese networking culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employees not being able to express their thoughts and opinions about work has been argued to result in detrimental organizational outcomes. Employee silence has recently become a prevalent organizational issue but studies that have explored proximal and distal outcomes of silence are scarce. Therefore, the study explored anxiety and happiness as mediating mechanisms for the relationship between silence and psychological withdrawal and the moderating effect of social network services usage for the relationship between silence and the mediators. The study conducted a two-wave self-reported questionnaire and sampled 257 full-time employees. Anxiety and happiness were found to mediate the relationship and social network services moderated the relationships between silence with the mediators. Moreover, supplementary analysis found mediated moderation for the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite widespread awareness of risks, significant investments in cybersecurity protection, and substantial economic incentives to avoid security breaches, organizations remain vulnerable to phishing attacks. Phishing research has informed effective practical interventions to address phishing susceptibility that emphasize the importance of broadly applicable IT security knowledge. Yet employees still frequently fall victim to phishing attempts. To help understand why, we conceptualize phishing susceptibility as the failure to differentiate between deceptive and legitimate information processing requests that occur within the context of an employee's typical job responsibilities. We apply this contextual lens to identify characteristics of knowledge workers' organizational task and social context that may enhance or diminish performance in detecting deception in phishing email attempts. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a study in which employees of the finance division of a large university encountered simulated email-based phishing attempts as part of their normal work routine. We found evidence supporting our hypotheses that an individual's susceptibility to phishing attacks is influenced by their position in the knowledge flows of the organization and by the impact of workgroup responsibilities on their cognitive processing. We contend that phishing susceptibility is not merely a matter of IT security knowledge but is also influenced by contextualized, multilevel influences on information processing. As phishing attacks are increasingly targeted to specific organizational settings, it is even more important to incorporate this contextualized information processing view of phishing susceptibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Residential mobility in a Sub-Saharan African (SSA) context is substantially different from in the Global North. This paper provides three position statements to substantiate this claim. The first relates to residential mobility dynamics and posits that in SSA they are characterized by a much more transient and mobile population who frequently move to, from, between and within urban areas. Secondly, formal mechanisms that enable access to decent living conditions in the city are largely absent as compared to most of the Global North context and, as a consequence, poor households have to resort to other options to find a place in the city. Thirdly, real estate markets in SSA are less transparent as social networks interplay with market mechanisms and markets often function on the edge of or outside formal regulatory frameworks. The second part of the paper reflects on the implications of these differences for the African city. It argues that (1) translocal living reduces place attachment to the city, (2) processes of residential sorting and ethnic exclusion aggravate spatial inequality, and (3) limited spatial governance leads to developments that go beyond the capacity to sustain the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep neural networks have achieved excellent performance in various research and applications, but they have proven to be susceptible to adversarial examples. Generating adversarial examples can help identify the vulnerability of the deep neural networks and further enhance the robustness and reliability of these models. However, the existing adversarial attacks can hardly achieve the balance between robustness and imperceptibility, which is not trustworthy in social networks. To solve these problems, we propose adaptive adversarial perturbation (AAP) to improve the universal robustness of the adversarial examples while ensuring imperceptibility. To optimize the imperceptibility of the perturbation, we design a noise visibility function (NVF) to reflect the features of the original images based on the human visual system (HVS). By further calculating a coefficient matrix based on the NVF, the perturbation intensity of different pixels can be adjusted dynamically to improve the robustness. The experimental results prove that the proposed method alleviates the trade-off between robustness and imperceptibility, and outperforms existing attack methods in both one-step and iterative ways. Our method makes the adversarial attack more reliable and applicable in social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing interest in social network-based programmes to improve health, but rigorous methods using Social Network research to evaluate the process of these interventions is less well developed. Using data from the "STis And Sexual Health" (STASH) feasibility trial of a school-based, peer-led intervention on sexual health prevention, we illustrate how network data analysis results can address key components of process evaluations for complex interventions—implementation, mechanisms of impacts, and context. STASH trained students as Peer Supporters (PS) to diffuse sexual health messages though face-to-face interactions and online Facebook (FB) groups. We applied a Multilevel Exponential Random Graph modelling approach to analyse the interdependence between offline friendship relationships and online FB ties and how these different relationships align. Our results suggest that the creation of online FB communities mirrored offline adolescent groups, demonstrating fidelity of intervention delivery. Data on informal friendship networks related to student's individual characteristics (i.e., demographics, sexual health knowledge and adherence to norms, which were included for STASH), contributed to an understanding of the social relational 'building' mechanisms that sustain tie-formation. This knowledge could assist the selection of opinion leaders, improving identification of influential peers situated in optimal network positions. This work provides a novel contribution to understanding how to integrate network research with the process evaluation of a network intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The study aimed to identify HIV prevention, testing, and care services prioritizing young Latino men who have sex with men (MSM) in an HIV service delivery network in Miami-Dade County, Florida, by visually describing structural features and processes of collaboration within and between health and social venues. Methods: The study used cross-sectional data from 40 social and healthcare venues providing goods and services to young Latino MSM. Each venue provided information surrounding HIV-related services provided and collaborations with other venues. Network visualization analyses were performed using UCINET6 and NetDraw2.160. Results: The most commonly used services offered by health and social venues were free condoms and HIV education materials. Collaborations both within and between health and social venues components of the network existed. Not all health and social venues provided services to young Latino MSM. Conclusion: Health venues can reach and incorporate hard to reach populations, such as non-English speaking and undocumented young Latino MSM, to provide HIV-related services using service delivery venue social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network-based arrangements are increasingly used for policy implementation. Arguments are made for the potential benefits of this approach, but evidence of their efficiency is inconclusive. Recent methodological innovations, incorporating social network analysis, are building the evidence base. This article contributes to a growing area of study by exploring the relationship between the efficient implementation of European Union cohesion policy projects, and the characteristics of the networks involved in the implementation process. The research combined quantitative analysis of implementation of projects in Scotland in 2007–2013 and semi-structured interviews. The research finds that the involvement of many partners can have a negative impact on implementation. Rather, the strategic position of key actors in the network is important for efficient implementation. The results stress the importance of network governance and the role of key agents as nodes that bridge structural gaps and facilitate exchange of knowledge and resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has consistently revealed that team cohesion is positively related to team performance under certain conditions. In response to the need for understanding this relationship more fully, and because of the promising new insights that can be garnered with the use of social network analysis (SNA), this study employs SNA as a tool to explore a case study of the structural cohesiveness of two women's collegiate basketball teams. Members of the two teams completed online roster-based surveys related to different types of structural cohesion levels at four points during the season. This case study revealed that the higher performing team showed improved structural cohesion in the efficacy network over the four phases, and highlighted the movement of key players in the different networks (friendship, trust, advice, and efficacy) over time. These patterns demonstrate the potential for SNA to function as a diagnostic tool for organizations and researchers to generate testable hypotheses even in instances where statistical inference may be precluded by sampling constraints. In short, SNA was found to be a valuable new tool for exploring, depicting, and informing explanations about the individual relationships that impact team dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an emerging research approach, social network theory and analysis has been embraced and effectively applied in disciplines that have overlapping interests with sport management researchers including such fields as organizational behavior and sport sociology. Although a number of sport management scholars have investigated network-related concepts, to date no sport management studies have fully utilized the analytical tools that social network theory and analysis have to offer. In conjunction with a discussion about the ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspectives associated with network analysis, this article uses several examples from the sport management and organizational behavior bodies of literature to illustrate a number of the advantageous techniques and insights social network theory and analysis can offer. These examples are meant to provide a general understanding of the utility and applicability of the social network theory and analysis and potentially inspire sport management researchers to adopt a social network lens in their future research endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the relationship between sport volunteerism and social capital, defined here as a resource that stems from participation in certain social networks. A position generator and a resources generator were used to measure the social capital of respondents. Results from this pilot study survey, exploring several aspects of volunteerism in sport in two Canadian communities (one in Québec, the other in Ontario), show a strong relationship between volunteerism in sport and social capital but do not allow a precise measure of the direction of this relationship. Results also show stronger relationships between sport volunteerism and social capital when we control for gender, language, and age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results of a comprehensive literature review of empirical studies investigating travel for work and how it relates to individual lives. The paper presents information on how work travel has been operationalized in the literature. The paper describes findings concerning how feelings about travel, individual well-being, the work/family interface, family relationships and social connections have been found to be affected by work travel. The empirical articles on workers who travel have been conducted in multiple countries and via diverse methodologies, which provides richness to the findings. The lack of uniformity in how work travel has been operationalized presents challenges for drawing conclusions about the effects of work travel. Recommendations concerning how to move the field forward are presented, including uniting the employment-related literature with the family literature to provide more holistic and useful implications for the study of work travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The advent of mass incarceration has reinvigorated calls for a deeper understanding of how the "quality of relationships" is shaped by imprisonment (Travis J, Western B, Redburn S (eds), The growth of incarceration in the United States: exploring causes and consequences, National Academies Press, Washington DC, 2014). We address this issue by describing how imprisonment relates to four dimensions of tie strength in a sample of South Bronx residents. Methods: We draw on a series of survey-based multilevel models to examine how tie strength relates to characteristics of respondents and their self-reported contacts (N1 = 585 ties, N2 = 97 egos) regarding (a) frequency, (b) duration, (c) multiplexity, and (d) reciprocity. Results: Ties of formerly-incarcerated persons are of shorter duration and exhibit less overlap relative to other respondents. However, markers of general association across the sample to currently/formerly incarcerated persons correlate with alter-ego ties that are more frequent, long-lasting, and multi-dimensional. Conclusions: There is some support for the notion that direct exposure to incarceration is linked to a weakening of ties akin to a "knifing-off" process (Maruna and Roy, J Contemp Crim Justice 23(1):104–124, 2007). Indirect exposure to incarceration may follow an inverse pattern, strengthening the ties among those "left behind". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social network approaches have much to offer for the study of African politics. This research note explores the tensions and benefits of using social networks as metaphor or as method, and highlights the types of questions network research can address. We discuss sources of network data, key features of the graphical perspective and basic vocabulary, and the difference between analyzing individual networks and full systems. Three social network analysis (SNA) concepts—centrality, brokerage, and multilevel networks—indicate theoretic spaces for qualitative and quantitative synergies. The note also raises practical considerations and ethical challenges for conducting network research in fieldwork settings, drawing on a collaborative project in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. In conclusion, we encourage layering disciplines and mixing methods to more fully understand how networks shape social life in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the importance of innovation demonstrations with regards to fine-tuning innovations outside the laboratory. It states that through demonstrations, scientists change the focus from research and innovation quality and novelty towards issues of usability, acceptability, and value-addition for various social groups.

Academic performance (i.e., grade point average) determines career entry factors as well as career success and is thus crucial for students' future careers. Besides individual factors such as personality traits, individuals' social embeddedness has been shown to enhance performance. Regarding academic performance, relationships to fellow students (peers), which bundle into one's developmental network, are a valuable source of psychosocial and career support because occupying central positions within a social network provides the benefit of being able to access career-enhancing resources. Integrating individual and social-contextual factors for the purpose of examining academic performance is therefore plausible. Research results indicate that personality, especially extraversion, might predict performance through network centrality. In this study, we examined this assumption by focusing on extraversion and centrality in the peer developmental network of recently acquainted German psychology bachelor students (N = 47, 15% male). In a longitudinal design, we analyzed the impact of extraversion and centrality on students' academic performance at the end of their studies. Results revealed that centrality (i.e., popularity) mediates the relationship of extraversion with academic performance, indicating that extraverted students (regardless of their agreeableness) are more popular among their peers, which, in turn, enhances their academic performance. That is, the likelihood of getting superior final grades depends on whether students manage to attract peers at the very beginning of their university life, which is easier for extraverts. These findings emphasize the importance of the social embeddedness of people, highlight its long-term effects on performance, and yield several implications for research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To investigate tweets about marijuana edibles for surveillance into the content of edibles-related tweets among individuals socially networking about this topic on Twitter.Design: Cross-sectional analysis of tweets containing edible marijuana-related key words during 1 month.Setting: Twitter.Participants: Tweets sent during January 1 to 31, 2015.Methods: A random sample of 5000 tweets containing edibles-related key words was coded for sentiment (positive, negative, and neutral) by crowdsourced workers. Tweets normalizing or promoting edibles use were further analyzed, and demographic characteristics of the Twitter handles sending these tweets were inferred.Results: Of the 5000 tweets, 4166 (83%) were about marijuana edibles, and of those 75% (3134 of 4166) normalized or encouraged edibles use. Nearly half (48%, 1509 of 3134) of the tweets normalizing edibles mentioned wanting or planning to consume, currently consuming, or recently consuming edibles, and 12% (378 of 3134) described the intense or long-lasting effects following use. Individuals whose tweets promoted/encouraged edibles use were more likely to be young (between 17 and 24 years old) and of a racial/ethnic minority (52% black; 12% Hispanic) when compared to the Twitter average.Conclusion: Tweets that normalize edibles use have the potential to increase their popularity. The prevalence of tweets about edibles' intense high could have implications for tailoring prevention messages that could be important for youth and young adult minorities who were inferred to be disproportionately socially networking about edibles on Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is often criticised for being too quantitative in focus and network scientists have commented on a lack of engagement from qualitative researchers. This article will contribute to these debates by critically reflecting on a qualitative study of gambling where social network research methods were adapted and applied to narrative interviews. Egocentric sociograms (maps of participant social networks, using a name generation question and concentric circles) were created for 23 participants. These sociograms were used as an interactive tool, with the addition of coloured dots, to stimulate discussion and so generate rich narrative and visual data on the impacts of gambling behaviour on participants’ wider social networks. This approach represents an extension to existing SNA methods that has not previously been utilised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an empirical analysis of the online public sphere in the three dimensions introduced by Dahlgren (2005): structural, representational and interactional. The main subject of analysis is the largest social networking site – Facebook – and Polish users’ activity on the Facebook Pages of political parties and politicians. The researchers analysed data about all users active on those Pages during two 4-month periods in 2013 and 2015. The results of the study show that only a small fraction of Facebook users are active in public political discussions that take place on political Facebook Pages (structural dimension). However, the level of engagement depends on the current political events taking place within the public sphere offline, and users are more active during electoral campaigns. Moreover, Facebook does not provide an alternative public sphere for political actors that are less present in mainstream media. Parties and politicians that are visible in traditional media are also attracting active fans in social media (representational dimension). Nonetheless, non-parliamentary groups have more active fans than would result only from their popularity in mainstream media. Finally, the online public on Facebook is fragmented and clustered into homogenous political groups (interactional dimension), thus supporting the hypothesis on ‘echo chambers’ presented by Sunstein (2001). The divisions are smaller when there are significantly more users involved. However, most of these cross-cutting links are the result of the electoral campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to find out the use of social networking sites (SNSs) for educational purposes among the postgraduate students at the University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. The study selects descriptive survey method and questionnaire tools for gathering the data. Findings of the study shows that students have a positive attitude towards the role of social networking sites for their academic purposes. Notably, the respondents mostly prefer Facebook which is the most preferable SNS among the others. Finding also demonstrates that majority of the respondents strongly agreed that SNSs help their educational field and it builds up a good relationship between their friends, family, educators, etc. This study reveals that respondents are strongly agreed that they get up-to-date information through SNSs and share their thoughts, information to the others. It is interesting to note that almost 90 per cent respondents strongly agreed that SNSs is an effective media which helps to make a platform where they can study collaboratively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Balancing risks and benefits is a necessary ethical task for social science researchers. Community psychologists must often consider risks and benefits not just for individual participants, but also for the group, system, or society that those individuals inhabit. Little ethical guidance currently exists for how to navigate this ethical challenge across these multiple levels. In this article, we use a case example of social network research incorporating multiple levels of analysis to identify common risks and benefits and understand their relationship to each other. We conclude by discussing distinctive ethical considerations revealed by this case example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communities in social networks are groups of individuals who are connected with specific goals. Discovering information on the structure, members and types of changes of communities have always been of great interest. Despite the extensive global researches conducted on these, discovery has not been confirmed yet and researchers try to find methods and improve estimated techniques by using Data Mining tools, Graph Mining tools and artificial intelligence techniques. This paper proposes a novel two-phase approach based on global and local information to detect communities in social network. It explores the global information in the first phase and then exploits the local information in the second phase to discover communities more accurately. It also proposes a novel algorithm which exploits the local information and mines deeply for the second phase. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance and achieves more accurate results compared with the previous ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of the Internet, the computational analysis of social networks has grown to be a salient issue. Various research analyses social network topics, and a considerable amount of attention has been devoted to the issue of link prediction. Link prediction aims to predict the interactions that might occur between two entities in the network. To this aim, this study proposed a novel path and node combined approach and constructed a methodology for measuring node similarities. The method was illustrated with five real datasets obtained from different types of social networks. An extensive comparison of the proposed method against existing link prediction algorithms was performed to demonstrate that the path and node combined approach achieved much higher mean average precision (MAP) and area under the curve (AUC) values than those that only consider common nodes (e.g. Common Neighbours and Adamic/Adar) or paths (e.g. Random Walk with Restart and FriendLink). The results imply that two nodes are more likely to establish a link if they have more common neighbours of lower degrees. The weight of the path connecting two nodes is inversely proportional to the product of degrees of nodes on the pathway. The combination of node and topological features can substantially improve the performance of similarity-based link prediction, compared with node-dependent and path-dependent approaches. The experiments also demonstrate that the path-dependent approaches outperform the node-dependent appraoches. This indicates that topological features of networks may contribute more to improving performance than node features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social recommender systems aim to support user preferences and help users make better decisions in social media. The social network and the social context are two vital elements in social recommender systems. In this contribution, we propose a new framework for a social recommender system based on both network structure analysis and social context mining. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) are able to capture and simulate the complex structure of a micro-blog network. We derive the prediction formula from ERGMs for recommending micro-blog users. Then, a primary recommendation list is created by analysing the micro-blog network structure. In the next step, we calculate the sentiment similarities of micro-blog users based on a sentiment feature set which is extracted from users’ tweets. Sentiment similarities are used to filter the primary recommendation list and find users who have similar attitudes on the same topic. The goal of those two steps is to make the social recommender system much more precise and to satisfy users’ psychological preferences. At the end, we use this new framework deal with big real-world data. The recommendation results of diabetes accounts of Weibo show that our method outperforms other social recommender systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the network theory of brokerage and closure, this study takes a structural approach to examine network structure and its influence on reception of different types of social support. The study extracted ego networks of 227 active users from a large online health social network and tracked their received supportive comments on personal profiles for 3 months. A total of 3,270 comments were analyzed. The results showed that network brokerage (operationalized as effective size) predicted the amount of informational and network support, whereas network closure (operationalized as local clustering coefficient) predicted the amount of emotional and esteem support received on one's profile. Moreover, brokerage was found to predict received emotional support. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of online social networking platforms established a new way of identifying ourselves as being related to other individuals. Previous research has looked at the impact these 'networking' applications have on individuals' everyday lives. Nonetheless, obtaining convincing data on how individuals assess the quality of digitally mediated social relationships has often been perceived challenging. Drawing on a methodological framework rooted in a social network analysis approach, this paper traces the suitability of hand-drawn network maps for eliciting data on how individuals give meaning to digitally mediated social relationships by comparing it to traditional tools used in social network analysis. The results show that using hand-drawn network maps in this particular context provides respondents with a more tangible resource to recall data on digitally mediated social relationships. In particular, this methodological approach elicits substantial data on abstract thematic areas that are typically difficult to recall using standardised techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. To examine the leadership attributes and collaborative connections of local actors from the health sector and those outside the health sector in a major place-based health initiative. Methods. We used survey data from 340 individuals in 4 Healthy Places North Carolina counties from 2014 to assess the leadership attributes (awareness, attitudes, and capacity) and network connections of local actors by their organizational sector. Results. Respondents' leadership attributes--scored on 5-point Likert scales--were similar across Healthy Places North Carolina counties. Although local actors reported high levels of awareness and collaboration around community health improvement, we found lower levels of capacity for connecting diversity, identifying barriers, and using resources in new ways to improve community health. Actors outside the health sector had generally lower levels of capacity than actors in the health sector. Those in the health sector exhibited the majority of network ties in their community; however, they were also the most segregated from actors in other sectors. Conclusions. More capacity building around strategic action--particularly in non-health sectors--is needed to support efforts in making widespread changes to community health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies indicate the importance of experience for the performance of teams. Theory suggests that working together allows individuals to (a) improve their knowledge about who knows (and can do) what and (b) facilitates learning to combine individual resources efficiently. Yet it remains elusive how experience translates into interaction patterns in teams. Drawing on unique data of career histories of 800 players and 283,259 passes between these players in 760 English Premier League soccer matches, I propose a new measure for network experience and demonstrate how it relates to network intensity and decentralization in teams. Soccer teams exhibit a higher passing rate when players know each other from before. At the same time, network experience has no effect on the decentralization of team play. Further dyadic analyses confirm these findings. Controlling for selection effects, two players are more likely to pass the ball between each other when they know each other more. Network experience affects the way team members interact and ultimately leads to performance outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long noted how migration streams, once initiated, obtain a self-feeding character. Studies have connected this phenomenon, called the cumulative causation of migration, to expanding social networks that link migrants in destination to individuals in origin. While extant research has established a positive association between individuals’ ties to prior migrants and their migration propensities, seldom have researchers interrogated how multiple social mechanisms—as well as exposure to common environmental factors—might account for these interdependencies. This article uses a mixed-methods strategy to identify the social mechanisms underlying the network effects in Mexico–U.S. migration. Three types of social mechanisms are identified, which all lead to network effects: (a) social facilitation, which is at work when network peers such as family or community members provide useful information or help that reduces the costs or increases the benefits of migration; (b) normative influence, which operates when network peers offer social rewards or impose sanctions to encourage or discourage migration; and (c) network externalities, which are at work when prior migrants generate a pool of common resources that increase the value or reduce the costs of migration for potential migrants. The authors first use large-sample survey data from the Mexican Migration Project to establish the presence of network effects and then rely on 138 in-depth interviews with migrants and their family members in Mexico to identify the social mechanisms underlying these network effects. The authors thus provide a deeper understanding of migration as a social process, which they argue is crucial for anticipating and responding to future flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Network Ranker (SoNeR) is software that retrieves, from the Semantic Web, documents describing people (users) and ranks them based on their popularity. It provides supportive tools for obtaining the related FOAF/RDF documents, parsing them, detecting identity synonyms and ranking people. The software is developed and implemented in the Java environment; and consists of the following modules: (1) semantic web crawler (collects FOAF/RDF documents), (2) document parser (extracts relevant information from FOAF/RDF documents), (3) synonym identity tagger (used to manually tag synonym pairs), (4) identity synonym merge and detection (5) ranking algorithms. While all these modules can be used separately, they are also unified in one Desktop GUI application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying free-standing conversational groups (FCGs) in unstructured social settings (e.g., cocktail party ) is gratifying due to the wealth of information available at the group (mining social networks) and individual (recognizing native behavioral and personality traits) levels. However, analyzing social scenes involving FCGs is also highly challenging due to the difficulty in extracting behavioral cues such as target locations, their speaking activity and head/body pose due to crowdedness and presence of extreme occlusions. To this end, we propose SALSA, a novel dataset facilitating multimodal and Synergetic sociAL Scene Analysis, and make two main contributions to research on automated social interaction analysis: (1) SALSA records social interactions among 18 participants in a natural, indoor environment for over 60 minutes, under the poster presentation and cocktail party contexts presenting difficulties in the form of low-resolution images, lighting variations, numerous occlusions, reverberations and interfering sound sources; (2) To alleviate these problems we facilitate multimodal analysis by recording the social interplay using four static surveillance cameras and sociometric badges worn by each participant, comprising the microphone, accelerometer, bluetooth and infrared sensors. In addition to raw data, we also provide annotations concerning individuals’ personality as well as their position, head, body orientation and F-formation information over the entire event duration. Through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art approaches, we show (a) the limitations of current methods and (b) how the recorded multiple cues synergetically aid automatic analysis of social interactions. SALSA is available at http://tev.fbk.eu/salsa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bureaucratic and patrimonial theories of organized crime tend to miss the history and mobility of crime groups integrating into and organizing with legitimate society. The network property of multiplexity—when more than one type of relationship exists between a pair of actors—offers a theoretical and empirical inroad to analyzing overlapping relationships of seemingly disparate social spheres. Using the historical case of organized crime in Chicago and a unique relational database coded from more than 5,000 pages of archival documents, we map the web of multiplex relationships among bootleggers, politicians, union members, businessmen, families, and friends. We analyze the overlap of criminal, personal, and legitimate networks containing 1,030 individuals and 3,726 mutual dyads between them. Multiplexity is rare in these data: only 10 percent of the mutual dyads contain multiplex ties. However, results from bivariate exponential random graph models demonstrate that multiplexity is a relevant structural property binding the three networks together. Even among our sample of criminals, we find dependencies between the criminal and personal networks and the criminal and legitimate networks. Although not pervasive, multiplexity glued these worlds of organized crime together above and beyond the personalities of famous gangsters, ethnic homophily, and other endogenous network processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sample of 488 male and female young adults completed an online survey in effort to explore whether social networking sites (SNSs) are a way in which sociocultural influences regarding body image are propagated. Negative body talk was predicted as an outcome to frequent exposure to friends’ fitness posts (e.g. pictures and status updates about working out, fitness inspiration quotations/images, etc.); we also explored whether this relationship was moderated by body surveillance and social comparison. Results revealed that friends’ fitness posts were positively associated with negative body talk, and this relationship was strongest for individuals who reported a higher tendency to compare themselves to others – even after controlling for body satisfaction, healthy eating and exercise behaviors, and frequency of SNS use. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Persistent school shootings have generated ongoing pressure to assess and enhance crisis communication effectiveness via strategies such as resilience-building and post-crisis restoration. A network perspective offers a robust, multilevel approach for examining complex information flows among community, campus, and individual actors affected by crises. Drawing on relational and structural embeddedness and Uncertainty Management Theory, we offer nine propositions that help explain structural and relational changes in a network over time. Although theoretically driven, these propositions are primarily functional, offering practical implications for safety officials and administrators trying to understand, prepare for, and respond to crises. Thus, we suggest measures and recommendations to improve information flow, uncertainty management, and resilience before, during, and after a crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We search for agent behavior rules which lead to the emergence of social networks that exhibit empirically observed phenomena: small-world property, scale-free degree distribution and stability in time. We assume that agents form and sever links using a cost-benefit analysis. Agents receive benefit from own links and from links that their friends form. On the other hand, link formation, deletion and keeping is costly. We find that a simple model structure which relies only on convex cost of link upkeep leads to stable networks which exhibit the small-world property. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article refines our understanding of the building blocks of civic capacity. It argues that the development of civic capacity depends heavily on the tractability or “wickedness” of public problems. Problem tractability, in turn, depends on leaders’ ability to manage processes of learning and bargaining strategically by influencing policy networks, governance institutions, and collective cognitive frames. Longitudinal case studies of urban growth and transportation in Seattle highlight the benefits for civic capacity of building robust networks and legitimate, transparent governance institutions, and of adjusting the frames of debate in light of situational demands. The article concludes with propositions and implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying the dense subgraphs from large graphs is important and useful to various social media mining applications. Most of existing works focus on the densest subgraph problem in the unweighted and undirected represented social network which can maximize the average degree over all possible subgraphs. However, considering the frequent signed relationships occurred in real-life social network, this paper introduces the social-balanced densest subgraph problem in signed social network by incorporating the social balance theory. We obtain a novel problem formulation that is to identify the subset of vertices that can maximize the social-balanced density in signed social networks. Further, we propose an efficient approach for identifying the social-balanced densest subgraph based on formal concept analysis. The case study illustrates that our algorithm can efficiently identify the social-balanced densest subgraph for satisfying the specific application's requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]