Browsing by Subject "Social Network"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    A case study investigation of employed mothers' workplace formal social networks.
    (2009-08) Schultz, Jennifer Lynn
    Employer-based social networks for working mothers can be low-cost, innovative interventions designed to assist women in managing multiple life roles. This study presents research using a case study framework, specifically aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of how and to what extent social networks for working mothers impact their participants with regard to effectiveness, value and connection. This study was preceded by a positioning survey and included meeting observations, a pilot interview, and seven subsequent individual interviews with leaders and participants of a workplace social network for working mothers. The unit of measure for this study was the individual, featuring diversity of participants with regard to education, age, professional expertise, tenure with the organization, parenting experience, and network involvement. Individual interview results were transcribed and analyzed to identify and confirm outcomes among participants that revealed impacts of advice, confidence, work-life balance, knowledge of employer and community, employer support of mothers, internal research resource, helping colleagues, positive feelings, social capital and support and empathy. This study concluded with research-based recommendations for the network, employing organization, and for further research.
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    A Computational Approach to Identify Covertness and Collusion in Social Networks
    (2020-10) Mohanty, Pronab
    Mathematical and computational interventions in the field of social networks have a fairly recent history. Social networks analysis exists at the intersection of several fields, including social sciences, psychology, organizational behavior, business studies, mathematics, physics, and biology. Studies were often manually facilitated in the last century as the social networks’ sizes were typically small. But, the recent emergence of the internet, the world wide web, big data, and numerous platforms of social media have triggered a period of intense academic activities in this field, which is also true in the field of criminology where advances in social network analytics have engendered a flourishing sub-culture that has influenced enforcement techniques spawning new fields such as predictive policing, investigation techniques specifically based on network analytics, and even studies of criminal behavior patterns. Interest in studying criminal and terrorist networks, generally called covert networks, has peaked after recent attacks by terror organizations. There is a felt necessity of presaging criminal or covert activities well before they erupt into public consciousness. However, recent research has been reactive rather than proactive and has essentially focused on analyzing illegal networks unearthed, and the accent is on disrupting such networks. Relatively little focus has centered on the question of why some networks are termed covert or, indeed, if covertness is innate to all networks., which further leads to the related issues of identifying metrics to measure the characteristics that typify covertness and to detect the presence of covert communities in social networks leveraging the metric so developed. A further challenge is an increasing emphasis on privacy rights, data protection measures, and exponential growth in encryption measures, which has placed a ceiling limit on the information obtained on communications. Added to this aspect is the vast volumes of data that need to be processed, requiring commensurately vast use of computational resources, often with very little time. These aspects have been comprehensively addressed by the dissertation, which has used the ENRON email corpus to identify the employees who had been connected with the financial fraud in some manner. The research seeks to identify covertness within networks without any intrusive analysis or content-based measures, which is necessary given the increasing legal and policy constraints based around privacy, encryption, and general exclusion of personal data from the public domain, and also by reducing the size of the problem. The dissertation also develops specific metrics to define covertness in communications among network entities and defines a separate metric to identify covert entities' clusters with common aims. In the process of defining metrics, the dissertation also seeks to solve the problem of resource-constraints common in law-enforcement agencies by reducing the volume of information to be processed.
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    In God Do We Trust? an analysis of trust reformation in a Catholic Parish
    (2013-12) Reandeau, Dawna Carling
    In my research, I examined two avenues of trust; trust in the organization and trust in God. In an effort to revitalize a Catholic parish, a model of total stewardship was introduced. The purpose was to bring parishioners to an awareness of God's generosity. This reformation consolidated financial collection efforts exclusively to the Sunday offering, including financial support for the parochial school which had previously collected tuition payments. I analyzed the response of the school parents from surveys with respect to the changes in tuition charging and the high level of trust extended to them. Network analysis was used to gauge aspects of organizational trust. The survey asked parents about whom they get information about parish matters. The process of the trust negotiation from the perspective of the administration was captured with interviews of a few key parish administrators. One of the key findings was that as ministry participation increased; trust in the school administration decreased. Since most ministries were parish based, information in parish ministries reinforced and circulated negative information about the school. The second aspect of the research was trust in God. I hypothesized that a stronger religious belief or trust in God would create a stronger behavioral response and school parents would more likely embrace the stewardship model. Questions on the survey regarding four religious belief and four religious behaviors combined together to create a scale to measure religiosity or trust in God. I worked under the assumption that a deep faith transforms our behavior, or as it is said in Roman Catholic tradition, Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi, and this would translate to greater stewardship commitment. The indicators used to measure religiosity showed some strong levels of commitment and trust in God. This trust in God did not directly show a correspondence of trust in either the school or parish administration. Only when the parents had a trust in the parish administration did their trust in God manifest in greater giving.
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    The rhetoric of Facebook icons: general principles and examples of how icons impact and form identity in social networking
    (2014-02) Weinberg, Joseph M.
    The visual rhetoric of icons plays a major role in the establishment of online identity. In many cases of online discourse, particularly social networking, the icon provides a first impression of a rhetor online. By examining the theories of identity and of (visual) rhetoric, I establish the ways the icon can be used in the establishment of online identity, on the creation of that first impression. Once that theory is laid as groundwork, I investigate several sets of specific examples on Facebook where icons have been chosen in order to better explain the rhetorical decisions behind those icons. The icons that are chosen with no knowledge of the audience who will form that first impression help to highlight the decisions behind the icon, behind the intended message sent by the rhetor. Icons that are chosen to create secondary identities, such as those of performers, help to highlight the intentional role of icons in establishing online identity. In this study, I investigated how identity online changes over time and the way icons always act as a first impression, even when an identity has been established for a long period of time. Finally, looking at the icons chosen for a different social network site, gendersociety.com, has allowed me to examine the icon selection process when the rhetor has a very clear and specific understanding of the audience who will be interacting with and receiving the first impression of that icon in social networking.