Extending the Coordination of Cognitive and Social Perspectives

Cognitive analyses are typically used to study individuals, whereas social analyses are typically used to study groups. In this article, I make a distinction between what one is looking with?one’s theoretical lens?and what one is looking at?e.g., an individual or a group?. By emphasizing the former, I discuss social analyses of individuals and cognitive analyses of groups, additional analyses that can enhance mathematics education research. I give examples of each and raise questions about the appropriateness of such analyses

Social dynamics in conferences: analyses of data from the Live Social Semantics application

Popularity and spread of online social networking in recent years has given a great momentum to the study of dynamics and patterns of social interactions. However, these studies have often been confined to the online world, neglecting its interdependencies with the offline world. This is mainly due to the lack of real data that spans across this divide. The Live Social Semantics application is a novel platform that dissolves this divide, by collecting and integrating data about people from (a) their online social networks and tagging activities from popular social networking sites, (b) their publications and co-authorship networks from semantic repositories, and (c) their real-world face-to-face contacts with other attendees collected via a network of wearable active sensors. This paper investigates the data collected by this application during its deployment at three major conferences, where it was used by more than 400 people. Our analyses show the robustness of the patterns of contacts at various conferences, and the influence of various personal properties (e.g. seniority, conference attendance) on social networking patterns

Theoretical perspective in social analyses of computerization : an addendum

Since I wrote "Social Analysis of Computing" in 1979, more than 200 scholarly books and articles and several literature surveys have been published about the social dimensions of computerization. In addition, there have been interesting empirical and theoretical studies published in Danish, French, German, Italian, and Norwegian, among other languages. This addendum serves as a brief guide to some of this newer literature

What Can Talk Tell Us About Design? Considering Practice Through Symbolic Interactionism and Conversation Analysis

How can scholars conduct rigorous research into the social activities that help constitute design practice? This paper considers this question through exploring how the interactive aspects of design may be fruitfully examined from the perspective of social psychology, especially through the approaches and methods of Symbolic Interactionism (SI) and Conversation Analysis (CA). The social activities of design refer to those situations wherein design is conducted in relation to face-to-face talk, or conversation. Since many aspects of design involve discussion, this paper argues that an SI-informed CA can offer an effective approach that may help us to better understand how communication and negotiation are central aspects of design. The author first outlines why social psychology is a significant perspective from which to study design through associating this perspective with the work of previous design researchers (Rittel, Schön). This is followed by an exploration of SI’s concern with the relationship between social structure and personal agency. Through considering design-based talk through an SI- focused lens, we can see how participants in design negotiate both personal creativity and externally-imposed constraints. The concepts of creativity and constraint are discussed in more detail through analyses of excerpts of conversations from two design-education critiques. These analyses demonstrate how CA’s methods can help scholars delineate the micro processes that link design practice to both personal opinion and wider social conditions. In summary, social psychology, SI, and CA are presented as distinctive, rigorous, and inter-related approaches that can help scholars of design practice to better understand the precise manner in which design is enacted through contexts of social interaction. Keywords: Conversation Analysis; Design Practice; Interaction; Social Psychology; Symbolic Interactionism.</p

The Effects of Social Media Use on the Perceptions of Mental Illness Among College Students

This study examined individuals’ use of and perceptions of social media networking sites (i.e. Facebook and Twitter) on their perceptions of mental illness. Previous studies have consistently found that media, by means of TV shows, movies, and news reports, depict distorted views of the mentally ill. Previous studies have also consistently found that these media depictions are related to increased stigma of mental illness and the mentally ill. This current study goes a step further by examining the role of social media networking sites on individual’s perceptions, since they are newer and more widely used forms of social media today. This study aimed to answer the research question, “does the use of social media networking sites, and the negative posts on them, perpetuate the stigma of mental illness?” Data was collected using a survey asking participants about their social media use, perceptions of, and attitudes about mental illness, as well as posts they have seen on social media about mental illness. Participants were 183 undergraduate college students at Butler University. The majority of the sample were female, upper-class, Liberal Arts and Sciences students. Using regression analyses, the results of this study showed no significant relationship between social media and mental illness perceptions as hypothesized. Social media use was found to be positively correlated with social media views, and additional analyses indicated that the more one uses social media, the more often they see posts regarding mental illness, as well as see posts involving mass shootings. Gender was found to have a significant relationship with mental illness perceptions. This finding indicated that males, on average, reported higher scores on the mental illness perceptions index, indicating that they hold more stigmatizing views of mental illness in comparison to females

Quantifying Triadic Closure in Multi-Edge Social Networks

Multi-edge networks capture repeated interactions between individuals. In social networks, such edges often form closed triangles, or triads. Standard approaches to measure this triadic closure, however, fail for multi-edge networks, because they do not consider that triads can be formed by edges of different multiplicity. We propose a novel measure of triadic closure for multi-edge networks of social interactions based on a shared partner statistic. We demonstrate that our operalization is able to detect meaningful closure in synthetic and empirical multi-edge networks, where common approaches fail. This is a cornerstone in driving inferential network analyses from the analysis of binary networks towards the analyses of multi-edge and weighted networks, which offer a more realistic representation of social interactions and relations.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, 6 table

Social desirability bias in self-reported wellbeing measures. Evidence from an online survey

Social desirability seems to enhance well-being measures because individuals tend to increase the degree of their satisfaction and happiness resulting in response artifacts and in a serious threat to the validity of self-reported data. This paper explores social desirability bias in self-reported subjective well-being, controlling for several sociodemographic variables such as gender, age, education, marital/relationship status, and employment status. This is in order to test whether social desirability has incremental validity in predicting some well-being measures. Three different facets of well-being are proposed which deal with subjective happiness, general life satisfaction, and gratitude and loneliness, respectively regarded as a positive and negative emotional response. Through a web-based survey a convenience sample of 170 participants completed an online questionnaire including measures of social desirability, subjective happiness, life satisfaction, gratitude, and loneliness. Correlation analyses and two-step hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted. All well-being measures show modest significant correlations with social desirability ranging from 0.235 to 0.309, except subjective happiness. Social desirability accounted for from about 3% to 6% of the variance of these measures, after controlling for socio-demographic variables. Social desirability seems thus to play little role in well-being self-report measures, as revealed by previous studies. Some limitations are discussed, as well as issues about social desirability bias in online investigation

Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1947–2016: a retrospective using citation and social network analyses

In anticipation of the journal’s centenary in 2027 this paper provides a citation network analysis of all available citation and publication data of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1923–2017). A total of 2,353 academic articles containing 21,772 references were collated and analyzed. This includes 175 articles that contained author-submitted keywords, 415 publisher-tagged keywords and 519 articles that had abstracts. Results initially focused on finding the most published authors, most cited articles and most cited authors within the journal, followed by most discussed topics and emerging patterns using keywords and abstracts. The analysis then proceeded to apply social network analysis using Kumu© – a visualization platform for mapping systems and relationships using large datasets. Analysis reveals topic clusters both unique to the journal, and inclusive of the journal’s history. Results from this analysis reaffirm the journal’s continuing focus on topics in traditional analytic philosophy such as morality, epistemology and knowledge, whilst also featuring topics associated with logic and paradox. This paper presents a new approach to analysing and understanding the historic and emerging topics of interest to the journal, and its readership. This has never previously been done for single philosophy journal. This is historically important given the journal’s forthcoming centenary