The Exchange of Social Support via Social Networks of Maternal Caregivers for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

The role of social support in the lives of the 16.8 million caregivers for children with special needs in the U.S. is not adequately understood. Many studies have explored seeking health information online, but failed to consider information exchanged through social networks (i.e., family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, etc.). Caregivers of children with special needs spend on average 30 hours per week providing such care. The burden of caregiving can negatively affect caregivers physically, mentally and emotionally, socially, and financially. Social support is one potential mediator for the effects of caregiver burden. The objective of this study was to explore the flow of four dimensions of social support within the social networks of maternal caregivers for children diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A convenience sample was gathered via electronic distribution lists for Indiana parents of children with special needs. Participants could elect to complete a face-to-face interview or an anonymous online survey. The typical participant was Caucasian, married, college-educated, and located in Central Indiana. Respondent social networks are composed of multiplex relations, indicating strong ties. Significant correlations were found for participant age, child age, and the age of diagnosis, and network members for various networks. Specifically, a later age of child diagnosis is associated with fewer network members for the caregiver. Correlational analyses between dimensions of social support and network characteristics suggest options for further study. Overall, the results of this exploratory study are inconclusive, but can provide direction for future research

TESTING ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN PERSONAL NETWORKS, VAPING OUTCOME EXPECTANCIES, AND PERCEPTIONS OF ANTI-VAPING ADVERTISEMENTS: A DISSERTATION

American young adults are among the cohorts most at risk of using electronic cigarettes. Despite the prevalence of use, there have thus far been no dedicated national campaigns aimed at curbing young adult vaping. This dissertation sought to examine how the composition and structure of a young adult’s social network as well as their baseline beliefs about e-cigarettes were associated with both young adult susceptibility and vaping frequency as well as their reactions to anti-vaping advertisements. Data for this dissertation comes from over 2,000 young adults recruited from online survey panels. Egocentric network data, baseline usage, susceptibility, quit intentions and vaping outcome expectancies were collected before respondents viewed one of two anti-vaping advertisement conditions and answered perceived message effectiveness items. Finally, post-exposure quit intentions, susceptibility, and vaping risk beliefs were assessed. Results indicate strong support for the associations between both the composition (attitudes, behaviors) and the structure (density, size) of young adults’ social networks with vaping outcome expectancies, usage, and perceptions of anti-vaping advertisements. Theoretical and empirical implications for message testing and anti-vaping campaigns are discussed.Doctor of Philosoph

Online community as a source of social capital - A qualitative case study of "The Other IBM"

The goal of this study was to better understand the life in an intra-organizational online community. A framework of social capital was selected to be used in studying and describing the social life inside a community through exploring what social capital in this context and environment really means. A research question of “What kind of social capital is formed in an intra-organizational online community?” was set. A goal of finding out if a community really could be formed in this type of an environment and to study the case community based on sociological definitions of a community to explore if these groups could rightfully be called communities was also set. To answer these questions, various qualitative research methods were used, drawing influence from ethnographic research. This particular set of research methods enabled the researcher to gain a reflexive understanding of what it is like to be a part of the Internet, and to capture the richness and complexity of social life. For the purposes of this study one online social group from a large multinational company was selected to be studied. Research was conducted during a three months period during which the researcher participated in community’s life almost daily. The most important method used was participative observation which was augmented with 20 semi- structured interviews with members and nine community calls. Also publicly available data and forum or blog discussions were gathered and analyzed. All the data was analyzed using techniques from grounded theory and discursive analysis. Based on the findings from this study it can be said that community formation is possible also in cyberspace inside the firewall. The group studied was found to be a community in its traditional sense while its members shared common activities and interests, even passions, and the group had a strong common identity. While some relationships were more professional, also relations of affect and strong friendships were created. It seems that with regards being active in promoting community’s mission the membership is divided into two camps – the teachers and the learners. This model fits well into Leave and Wenger’s (1991) concept of a community of practice with apprenticeship model and legitimate peripheral participation. All three types of social capital – structural, cognitive and relational – were found from this community. The community offers a resource or a platform for the network formation though leaving the resulting network quite open and interlinked with many other communities. Narratives and stories were used extensively and knowledge and practices were also transferred through artifacts. The community demonstrated to have a collectivist group norm and a strong norm of reciprocity was also visible. Members identified with the community and a common identity existed. The relationship between a community and social capital seems to be a complex and bidirectional one. While social capital can contribute to community formation, community also creates new social capital during the course of its daily life. Especially bonding social capital was thought to interact with the community

Complex network tools to enable identification of a criminal community

Retrieving criminal ties and mining evidence from an organised crime incident, for example money laundering, has been a difficult task for crime investigators due to the involvement of different groups of people and their complex relationships. Extracting the criminal association from enormous amount of raw data and representing them explicitly is tedious and time consuming. A study of the complex networks literature reveals that graph-based detection methods have not, as yet, been used for money laundering detection. In this research, I explore the use of complex network analysis to identify the money laundering criminals’ communication associations, that is, the important people who communicate between known criminals and the reliance of the known criminals on the other individuals in a communication path. For this purpose, I use the publicly available Enron email database that happens to contain the communications of 10 criminals who were convicted of a money laundering crime. I show that my new shortest paths network search algorithm (SPNSA) combining shortest paths and network centrality measures is better able to isolate and identify criminals’ connections when compared with existing community detection algorithms and k-neighbourhood detection. The SPNSA is validated using three different investigative scenarios and in each scenario, the criminal network graphs formed are small and sparse hence suitable for further investigation. My research starts with isolating emails with ‘BCC’ recipients with a minimum of two recipients bcc-ed. ‘BCC’ recipients are inherently secretive and the email connections imply a trust relationship between sender and ‘BCC’ recipients. There are no studies on the usage of only those emails that have ‘BCC’ recipients to form a trust network, which leads me to analyse the ‘BCC’ email group separately. SPNSA is able to identify the group of criminals and their active intermediaries in this ‘BCC’ trust network. Corroborating this information with published information about the crimes that led to the collapse of Enron yields the discovery of persons of interest that were hidden between criminals, and could have contributed to the money laundering activity. For validation, larger email datasets that comprise of all ‘BCC’ and ‘TO/CC’ email transactions are used. On comparison with existing community detection algorithms, SPNSA is found to perform much better with regards to isolating the sub-networks that contain criminals. I have adapted the betweenness centrality measure to develop a reliance measure. This measure calculates the reliance of a criminal on an intermediate node and ranks the importance level of each intermediate node based on this reliability value. Both SPNSA and the reliance measure could be used as primary investigation tools to investigate connections between criminals in a complex network

ISSUES, PUBLICS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND PERSONAL NETWORKS: TOWARD AN INTEGRATED ISSUE ENGAGEMENT MODEL

Public relations scholars have long devoted efforts to conducting empirical research andbuilding theories about publics. While existing theories of publics tend to focus on theirpsychological dynamics, there is a lack of theoretical work that accounts for how publics areinfluenced by their social environments. This dissertation examines publics’ engagement with anissue from both their individual and social network levels. By drawing from and integrating thesituational theories, a framework of engagement, organization-public relationship, and egocentricnetwork approaches, this dissertation constructs an issue engagement model that captures threemajor dimensions of issue engagement. Cognitive and affective issue engagement concerns howpublics perceive, think, and feel about an issue. Issue engagement with organizations refers topublics’ issue-specific communicative actions (i.e., reviewing content or interacting withorganizations on social media) and substantive actions (e.g., making donations, attending specialevents) taken with organizations. Intra-public issue engagement examines how individualsdiscuss an issue with their social contacts (e.g., friends, families, coworkers etc.). The studyinvestigates the relationships among the three dimensions of issue engagement. To test the hypotheses, the study completed an egocentric network survey with 1,255respondents. The questionnaire collected data about respondents’ perceptions about an issueselected by themselves, their communicative and substantive actions about the issue, with whomthey discussed this issue, and the perceived attributes of these discussants. Results suggest thatissue capital (i.e., the amount of issue information, viewpoints, and opinions accessible indiscussion networks) is positively associated with cognitive and affective issue engagement,which further positively influences communicative actions and substantive actions. Moreover,issue mobilization (e.g., norms and expectations from one’s close issue discussants) has a strongpositive association with substantive actions. Results also reveal several influential variables thatconnect the three dimensions together. Discussions are provided regarding how the theoreticalmodel and research findings contribute to public relations theories and practices.Doctor of Philosoph

Isomorphic effects of managerial and directoral career paths

The extensive array of interlocking directorate research remains near-exclusively cross-sectional or comparative cross-sectional in nature. While this has been fruitful in identifying persistent structures of inter-organisational relationships evidence of the impact of these structures on organisational performance or activity has been more limited. This should not be surprising because, by their nature, relationships have strong longitudinal and dynamic qualities that are likely to be difficult to isolate through cross-sectional approaches. Clearly, managerial practice is inevitably strongly conditioned by the specific contingencies of the time and the information available through networks of colleagues and advisers (particularly at board level) at the time. But managerial and directoral capabilities and mental sets are also developed over time, particularly through previous experiences in these roles and the formation of long-lasting 'strong' and 'weak' relationships. This paper tests the influence of three longitudinal dimensions of managers and directors' relationships on a set of indicators of financial performance, drawing from a large dataset of detailing historic board membership of UK firms. It finds evidence of isomorphic processes through these channels and establishes that the longitudinal design considerably enhances the detection of performance effects from directorate interlocks. More broadly, the research has implications for the conception of collective action and the constitution of 'community'

Mining Twitter: Graph Analysis of Interactions among Users

Starting from early 2000s, social network websites became very popular; these social media allow users to interact and share content using social links. Users of these platforms often have the possibility to establish hundreds or thousands of social links with other users. While initial studies have focused on social networks topology, a natural and important aspect of networks has been neglected: the focus on user interactions. These links can be monitored to generate knowledge on said users as well as their relationships with others. There has been, lately, an increasing interest on examining the activity network - network able to provide, once traversed, the actual user interactions rather than friendships links - to filter and mine patterns or communities. The goal of this work is to exploit the Twitter traffic in order to analyze the users interactions. In order to do so, our work models tweets posted by users as activities list in a graph called activity network. Then, we traverse it looking for Direct (e.g. mentions by user, retweets, direct replies etc.) and indirect (list of users mentioned in a tweet, users retwitting the same tweet produced by another user, etc.) relationships among users in order to create the users interactions graph. We provide a weight schema by which assign a value to interactions found. The obtained graph shows the connections among users and, thanks to their weighted links, those users who have stronger links, such as Verified Accounts or "propaganda users" or cliques of users, clusters of users interacting with each other. Those entities may be interesting to investigate in several fields like Open Source Intelligence or Business Intelligence. This work has been developed on a distributed infrastructure able to perform these tasks efficiently. The network analysis leads to some considerations: firstly, it is necessary to identify all meaningful interactions among users, which typically depend from the social network and the activities performed. Secondly, many nodes (profiles) with high indegree are associated to mass media and famous people, and thus a filtering phase is a crucial step. Finally, it is remarkable to see that experiments carried out at different moments could lead to very different results since many similar topics may not involve the same users in different moments. This work will describe the state-of-the-art of the network analysis, and will introduce the architectural design of the system, as well as the analysis performed with the challenges encountered. Results collected by our analysis lead us to the conclusion that, despite being in its preliminary stages, focusing on social interactions is important because it may reveal connection of particular users willing to perform actual activities which may gain interest in intellingence organizations