Unemployment and well-being in Europe. The effect of country unemployment rate, work ethics and family ties

Subjective well-being literature shows that higher unemployment rate corresponds to lower psychological cost of own unemployment. The goal of the paper is to deepen the understanding of this regularity by investigating the role played by the work ethics and the strength of family ties. I analyze the European Values Study data (2008) for 36 countries using multilevel regression methodology. First, starting from the ?stigma hypothesis? I postulate that higher unemployment rate is associated with weaker work values, which correspond to less social pressure and feeling of guilt, in turn lowering the psychological cost of own unemployment. This is only partly supported by the data: whereas stronger work values lower the well-being of unemployed, the country work ethics has no effect. According to the second hypothesis, stronger family ties raise the well-being of the unemployed. This prediction is con?rmed: people living in countries with stronger family ties and those declaring stronger norms for family support suffer less from being unemployed. However, the strength of family ties does not mediate the link between unemployment rate and effect of own unemployment. Moreover, weaker family ties contribute to lower well-being of unemployed in western Europe.well-being; unemployment; work ethics; work values; stigma hypothesis; family ties; inter-family support

The power of indirect social ties

While direct social ties have been intensely studied in the context of computer-mediated social networks, indirect ties (e.g., friends of friends) have seen little attention. Yet in real life, we often rely on friends of our friends for recommendations (of good doctors, good schools, or good babysitters), for introduction to a new job opportunity, and for many other occasional needs. In this work we attempt to 1) quantify the strength of indirect social ties, 2) validate it, and 3) empirically demonstrate its usefulness for distributed applications on two examples. We quantify social strength of indirect ties using a(ny) measure of the strength of the direct ties that connect two people and the intuition provided by the sociology literature. We validate the proposed metric experimentally by comparing correlations with other direct social tie evaluators. We show via data-driven experiments that the proposed metric for social strength can be used successfully for social applications. Specifically, we show that it alleviates known problems in friend-to-friend storage systems by addressing two previously documented shortcomings: reduced set of storage candidates and data availability correlations. We also show that it can be used for predicting the effects of a social diffusion with an accuracy of up to 93.5%.Comment: Technical Repor

On Facebook, most ties are weak

Pervasive socio-technical networks bring new conceptual and technological challenges to developers and users alike. A central research theme is evaluation of the intensity of relations linking users and how they facilitate communication and the spread of information. These aspects of human relationships have been studied extensively in the social sciences under the framework of the "strength of weak ties" theory proposed by Mark Granovetter.13 Some research has considered whether that theory can be extended to online social networks like Facebook, suggesting interaction data can be used to predict the strength of ties. The approaches being used require handling user-generated data that is often not publicly available due to privacy concerns. Here, we propose an alternative definition of weak and strong ties that requires knowledge of only the topology of the social network (such as who is a friend of whom on Facebook), relying on the fact that online social networks, or OSNs, tend to fragment into communities. We thus suggest classifying as weak ties those edges linking individuals belonging to different communities and strong ties as those connecting users in the same community. We tested this definition on a large network representing part of the Facebook social graph and studied how weak and strong ties affect the information-diffusion process. Our findings suggest individuals in OSNs self-organize to create well-connected communities, while weak ties yield cohesion and optimize the coverage of information spread.Comment: Accepted version of the manuscript before ACM editorial work. Check http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179820-on-facebook-most-ties-are-weak/ for the final versio

Attention on Weak Ties in Social and Communication Networks

Granovetter's weak tie theory of social networks is built around two central hypotheses. The first states that strong social ties carry the large majority of interaction events; the second maintains that weak social ties, although less active, are often relevant for the exchange of especially important information (e.g., about potential new jobs in Granovetter's work). While several empirical studies have provided support for the first hypothesis, the second has been the object of far less scrutiny. A possible reason is that it involves notions relative to the nature and importance of the information that are hard to quantify and measure, especially in large scale studies. Here, we search for empirical validation of both Granovetter's hypotheses. We find clear empirical support for the first. We also provide empirical evidence and a quantitative interpretation for the second. We show that attention, measured as the fraction of interactions devoted to a particular social connection, is high on weak ties --- possibly reflecting the postulated informational purposes of such ties --- but also on very strong ties. Data from online social media and mobile communication reveal network-dependent mixtures of these two effects on the basis of a platform's typical usage. Our results establish a clear relationships between attention, importance, and strength of social links, and could lead to improved algorithms to prioritize social media content

Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook

A crucial task in the analysis of on-line social-networking systems is to identify important people --- those linked by strong social ties --- within an individual's network neighborhood. Here we investigate this question for a particular category of strong ties, those involving spouses or romantic partners. We organize our analysis around a basic question: given all the connections among a person's friends, can you recognize his or her romantic partner from the network structure alone? Using data from a large sample of Facebook users, we find that this task can be accomplished with high accuracy, but doing so requires the development of a new measure of tie strength that we term `dispersion' --- the extent to which two people's mutual friends are not themselves well-connected. The results offer methods for identifying types of structurally significant people in on-line applications, and suggest a potential expansion of existing theories of tie strength.Comment: Proc. 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), 201

Strengthening Social Ties via ICT in the Organization

Knowledge work increasingly relies on the \ utilization of information and communication \ technology (ICT). However, communication and \ knowledge sharing via ICT may be challenging due \ the lack of physical face-to-face interaction. The \ strength of social ties is critical to the success of an \ organization, since it determines how deeply \ individuals interact with each other. Prior research \ has paid only limited attention to the role of ICT in \ the strengthening of social ties within an \ organization. To address this research gap, we have \ conducted a qualitative study outlining different tie \ strengthening characteristics of ICT. The results of \ this study suggest that especially asynchronous and \ synchronous text based interaction and \ communication history forms an effective mechanism \ for an organization to facilitate social ties. As a \ theoretical contribution, we develop a new \ theoretical model representing the intra- \ organizational characteristics of ICT in relation to \ media synchronicity and tie strength. This theoretical \ model also includes new tie-strength components for \ ICT-mediated interaction