“You’re free from just a girl or a boy”:Nonbinary children’s understanding of their gender

BackgroundIn recent years, research on gender diversity in early childhood has increased significantly. However, much of the published literature still focuses on children whose experiences align with binary gender norms, inadvertently excluding nonbinary experiences from analysis.AimsWe seek to explore how nonbinary children, aged five to eight, perceive and understand their gender modality and experiences.MethodsNine American nonbinary children were interviewed using a semi-structured approach, which included two book readings, a drawing activity, and approximately 23 pre-determined questions. Inductive reflexive thematic analysis was utilized for developing, analyzing, and interpreting patterns across a qualitative dataset. All authors engaged in various aspects of reflexivity throughout the process, including personal, functional, and disciplinary reflexivity.AnalysisWe constructed five themes, which were evident across the accounts of participating children. The first one, Being nonbinary has different meanings for different people, illustrates the diverse interpretations of nonbinary identities. Gender is hard to describe but my pronouns help me make sense of it, highlights the challenges of explaining gender, yet pronouns help participants lucidly put their and others’ gender into words. People can change their gender for good or just for a little while, reflect participants’ view of gender as dynamic and fluid. “I have the agency to decide who I am with a little help of others”: feeling, learning, choosing and telling, explores participants’ journey in adopting the label “nonbinary”. Lastly, Being nonbinary is both easy and hard: easy because I am myself, hard because of other people, depicts the multifaceted experiences of being nonbinary, from the affirmation to bullying.DiscussionIn an era marked by a contentious political climate and ongoing debates about trans/nonbinary individuals, these young children defy conventional norms and establish themselves as active architects of their identity narratives, driven by their agency and self-determination

Determinants of Sexual Literacy of Senior High School Students in De La Salle University-Manila

Sexual literacy is an important aspect of the formative development of individuals as it influences their capacity to think about and act upon factors affecting the sexual aspect of their lives. However, achieving a certain level of sexual literacy is still a complex path in society, especially in prestigious schools in the Philippines such as De La Salle University Manila (DLSU-M). This study aims to assess DLSU-M Senior High School (SHS) students’ level of sexual literacy, determine factors significantly explaining it, and form statistical models based on the significant factors. Both Poisson regression models and Logistic regression models revealed significantly higher sexual literacy scores among students with Chinese ethnicity, teacher as main source of information on relationships and sex, and mother as secondary source of information on reproductive health. Furthermore, Poisson regression models also revealed that favoring Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and/or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual and/or Ally, and others (LGBTQIA+) rights is also a significant predictor of sexual literacy. Therefore, educators such as parents and teachers positively impact an SHS student’s sexual literacy. Their immediate environment is especially significant in honing their comprehension regarding sexual and reproductive health, thus, a more open yet secure space must be reinforced

Social determinants of content selection in the age of (mis)information

Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called \emph{collective intelligence}, conspiracy theories -- e.g. global warming induced by chemtrails or the link between vaccines and autism -- find on the Web a natural medium for their dissemination. Users preferentially consume information according to their system of beliefs and the strife within users of opposite narratives may result in heated debates. In this work we provide a genuine example of information consumption from a sample of 1.2 million of Facebook Italian users. We show by means of a thorough quantitative analysis that information supporting different worldviews -- i.e. scientific and conspiracist news -- are consumed in a comparable way by their respective users. Moreover, we measure the effect of the exposure to 4709 evidently false information (satirical version of conspiracy theses) and to 4502 debunking memes (information aiming at contrasting unsubstantiated rumors) of the most polarized users of conspiracy claims. We find that either contrasting or teasing consumers of conspiracy narratives increases their probability to interact again with unsubstantiated rumors.Comment: misinformation, collective narratives, crowd dynamics, information spreadin

Spreading in Social Systems: Reflections

In this final chapter, we consider the state-of-the-art for spreading in social systems and discuss the future of the field. As part of this reflection, we identify a set of key challenges ahead. The challenges include the following questions: how can we improve the quality, quantity, extent, and accessibility of datasets? How can we extract more information from limited datasets? How can we take individual cognition and decision making processes into account? How can we incorporate other complexity of the real contagion processes? Finally, how can we translate research into positive real-world impact? In the following, we provide more context for each of these open questions.Comment: 7 pages, chapter to appear in "Spreading Dynamics in Social Systems"; Eds. Sune Lehmann and Yong-Yeol Ahn, Springer Natur

Overt and subtle discrimination and psychological well-being:Examining the mediating and moderating role of ethnic-racial identity among emerging adults

Ethnic-racial identity (ERI) has been reported as mediator and moderator of the relation between discrimination and psychological well-being. However, it remains unclear how different forms of discrimination (i.e., overt and subtle) predict well-being over time, and whether ERI exploration and commitment mediate or moderate this association. This preregistered study explored the associations of overt and subtle discrimination with well-being (i.e., depression, substance use, life satisfaction) in a sample of 323 ethnic-racial minoritized college students (M age W1 = 18.03, 62.7% female) from longitudinal data collected in the US. Cross-lagged panel models across three waves indicated no associations of overt discrimination, but participants experiencing more subtle discrimination during their transition to college reported more depressive symptoms after four months. Ethnic-racial identity did not function as mediator or moderator. Findings indicate the need for a more nuanced understanding of the role of ERI during emerging adulthood.</p

Individualization as driving force of clustering phenomena in humans

One of the most intriguing dynamics in biological systems is the emergence of clustering, the self-organization into separated agglomerations of individuals. Several theories have been developed to explain clustering in, for instance, multi-cellular organisms, ant colonies, bee hives, flocks of birds, schools of fish, and animal herds. A persistent puzzle, however, is clustering of opinions in human populations. The puzzle is particularly pressing if opinions vary continuously, such as the degree to which citizens are in favor of or against a vaccination program. Existing opinion formation models suggest that "monoculture" is unavoidable in the long run, unless subsets of the population are perfectly separated from each other. Yet, social diversity is a robust empirical phenomenon, although perfect separation is hardly possible in an increasingly connected world. Considering randomness did not overcome the theoretical shortcomings so far. Small perturbations of individual opinions trigger social influence cascades that inevitably lead to monoculture, while larger noise disrupts opinion clusters and results in rampant individualism without any social structure. Our solution of the puzzle builds on recent empirical research, combining the integrative tendencies of social influence with the disintegrative effects of individualization. A key element of the new computational model is an adaptive kind of noise. We conduct simulation experiments to demonstrate that with this kind of noise, a third phase besides individualism and monoculture becomes possible, characterized by the formation of metastable clusters with diversity between and consensus within clusters. When clusters are small, individualization tendencies are too weak to prohibit a fusion of clusters. When clusters grow too large, however, individualization increases in strength, which promotes their splitting.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Dynamics in online social networks

An increasing number of today's social interactions occurs using online social media as communication channels. Some online social networks have become extremely popular in the last decade. They differ among themselves in the character of the service they provide to online users. For instance, Facebook can be seen mainly as a platform for keeping in touch with close friends and relatives, Twitter is used to propagate and receive news, LinkedIn facilitates the maintenance of professional contacts, Flickr gathers amateurs and professionals of photography, etc. Albeit different, all these online platforms share an ingredient that pervades all their applications. There exists an underlying social network that allows their users to keep in touch with each other and helps to engage them in common activities or interactions leading to a better fulfillment of the service's purposes. This is the reason why these platforms share a good number of functionalities, e.g., personal communication channels, broadcasted status updates, easy one-step information sharing, news feeds exposing broadcasted content, etc. As a result, online social networks are an interesting field to study an online social behavior that seems to be generic among the different online services. Since at the bottom of these services lays a network of declared relations and the basic interactions in these platforms tend to be pairwise, a natural methodology for studying these systems is provided by network science. In this chapter we describe some of the results of research studies on the structure, dynamics and social activity in online social networks. We present them in the interdisciplinary context of network science, sociological studies and computer science.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, book chapte

Social Cohesion, Structural Holes, and a Tale of Two Measures

EMBARGOED - author can archive pre-print or post-print on any open access repository after 12 months from publication. Publication date is May 2013 so embargoed until May 2014.This is an author’s accepted manuscript (deposited at arXiv arXiv:1211.0719v2 [physics.soc-ph] ), which was subsequently published in Journal of Statistical Physics May 2013, Volume 151, Issue 3-4, pp 745-764. The final publication is available at link.springer.com http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10955-013-0722-