Personal Network

Die ehemalige konservative Oppositionsfuhrerin Park Geun-hye (2004-2006) gilt als aussichtsreiche Kandidatin fur die kommenden Prasidentschaftswahlen im Dezember 2007. Die Tochter des so genannten Entwicklungsdiktators Park Chung-hee, der wahrend seines Regimes (1961-1979) den wirtschaftlichen Aufschwung des Landes in die Wege leitete, konnte oder wollte bis dato nicht aus dem Schatten ihres Vaters heraustreten. Sie nutzte die Nostalgie fur ihren Vater wahrend der regionalen Wirtschaftskrise Ende der 1990er als Einstieg fur ihre politische Laufbahn. Ihre familiare Herkunft ist uber ihr daraus resultierendes politisches Netzwerk, ihre konservative Wahlhochburg und ihre traditionell weibliche Erscheinung hinaus ihr starkstes politisches Kapital.

... For example, tourists need indoor navigation services in some large museums to see the artifacts in different places in sequence. In addition, posi-tion information brings benefits to self-organization and self-formation of ad hoc networks in the future communications systems. ...

Evidence from the US General Social Surveys (GSS) suggests that during the past 20 years, people have become increasingly socially isolated and their core discussion networks have become smaller and less diverse. One explanation offered for this trend is the use of mobile phones and the Internet. This study reports on the findings of a 2008 survey that replicates and expands on the GSS network methodology to explore the relationship between the use of new technologies and the size and diversity of core networks. The findings conflict with the results of the 2004 GSS, i.e. we find that social isolation has not increased since 1985. However, the current study supports the conclusions that the size of core networks has declined and the number of nonkin in core networks has diminished. Mobile phone and Internet use, especially specific uses of social media, were found to have a positive relationship to network size and diversity. In discussing these trends, we speculate that specific social media provide for a ‘pervasive awareness’ within personal networks that has increased the specialization of close ties. We argue that this same pervasive awareness provides for heightened surveillance of network members, the result of which is a higher level of perceived diversity within networks based on metrics that include political affiliation.

Zusammenfassung: Zur Analyse der Einbettung von Akteur/innen in soziale Strukturen werden in der Netzwerkforschung zunehmend offene Forschungszugänge auch in Kombination mit standardisierten methodischen Ansätzen verwendet. Die Entwicklung eines Vorgehens zur qualitativen strukturbezogenen Analyse stellt bislang ein Desiderat dar. Am Beispiel der Analyse einer egozentrierten Netzwerkkarte und eines erzählgenerierenden Interviews entwerfen, explizieren und begründen wir ein methodisches qualitatives Analyseverfahren, das Standards einer strukturalen Analyse – als theoretisch-methodologische Position der sozialen Netzwerkanalyse – Rechnung trägt. Entlang des Beispiels entwerfen wir qualitative Verfahren der Interpretation (Sequenzanalyse, sensibilisierendes Konzept, Memos) für die Auswertung von Netzwerkkarten und des narrativen Materials, für das wir Konzepte der formalen Netzwerkanalyse adaptieren. Unser Vorschlag dieser qualitativen strukturalen Analyse – kurz QSA – stellt damit eine Kombination aus der analytischen Perspektive der strukturalen Analyse mit analytischen Standards der qualitativen Sozialforschung dar.

... The great barrier [in communication]…is the language. ... The interview data from the case study suggest that by operating as a barrier and a facilitator in cross-cultural communication, language imposes its own structure on communication patterns, flows and informal networks. ...

Using a representative national sample of personal networks, this article explores how the spatial dispersion of networks, residential mobility and social support are linked. Three issues will be addressed here. Firstly, how is the spatial dispersion of personal networks related to individuals’ social characteristics, network composition and residential mobility? Secondly, how do the spatial dispersion of networks, residential mobility and their combined effect influence the number and (thirdly) the structure of emotional support ties? Results showed that the extent of the support was affected neither by the geographical distribution of the networks nor by residential mobility. Living far from one's birthplace, however, exerted two distinct, and opposite effects on the support network structure. On the one hand, mobility led to high spatial dispersion of personal contacts, which in turn favored a sparsely knit network centered around the mobile individual. On the other hand, by controlling for the effect of distance between the contacts, we found that individuals that cited long-distance ties tended to be part of more transitive support networks than those that cited local ties. We interpreted the latter effect as evidence that transitive ties may survive greater spatial distances than intransitive ones. These findings are discussed in view of spatial mobility and social network research.► Residential mobility increases spatial dispersion of personal networks. ► Degree of personal support is not affected by network spatial dispersion. ► Residential mobility exerted two opposite effects on support network structure. ► Distance between personal contacts fosters sparsely knit and centralized networks. ► Distance from the mobile individual and personal contacts fosters transitive networks.

Respondent-driven sampling is a network sampling technique typi- cally employed for hard-to-reach populations (for example, drug users, men who have sex with men, people with HIV). Similarly to snowball sampling, initial seed respondents recruit additional respondents from their network of friends. The re- cruiting process repeats iteratively, thereby forming long referral chains. Unlike in snowball sampling, it is crucial to obtain estimates of respondents’ personal network sizes (that is, number of acquaintances in the target population) and information about who recruited whom. Markov chain theory makes it possible to derive population estimates and sampling weights. We introduce a new Stata command for respondent-driven sampling and illustrate its use. Copyright 2012 by StataCorp LP.

When the need for development goes beyond economic growth to include also ecological, social and cultural concerns, the means must be broadened beyond financial capital to include also human, social and emotional capital. While human capital concern the intellectual capabilities that people have in term of formal and personal knowledge, social capital refers to the resources that they have access to thanks to their personal networks. Emotional capital is more seldom considered by includes the ability of people to get committed, to engage and passionately get involved in the enactment of own ideas or the protecting the local community from being deconstructed. There are two major strategies to cope with a need for sustainable development - (inter)action or reaction. The last-mentioned creates correctives to the negative consequences of economic focus in present operations. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) may be considered as such a corrective. The first-mentioned strategy is an...

In this paper, we present a visionary concept referred to as Collaborative and Cognitive Network Platforms (CCNPs) as a future-proof solution for creating a dependable, self-organizing and self-managing communication substrate for effective ICT solutions to societal problems. CCNP creates a cooperative communication platform to support critical services across a range of business sectors. CCNP is based on the personal network (PN) technology which is an inherently cooperative environment prototyped in the Dutch Freeband PNP2008 and the European Union IST MAGNET projects. In CCNP, the cognitive control plane strives to exploit the resources to better satisfy the requirements of networked applications. CCNP facilitates collaboration inherently. Through cognition in the cognitive control plane, CCNP becomes a self-managed substrate. The self-managed substrate, in this paper, is defined as cognitive and collaborative middleware on which future applications run without user intervention. Endemic sensor networks may be incorporated into the CCNP concept to feed its cognitive control plane. In this paper, we present the CCNP concept and discuss the research challenges related to collaboration and cognition.

One of the most visible trends on the Web is the emergence of “Social Web” sites which facilitate the creation and gathering of knowledge through the simplification of user contributions via blogs, tagging and folksonomies, wikis, podcasts, and the deployment of online social networks. The Social Web has enabled community-based knowledge acquisition with efforts like the Wikipedia demonstrating the “wisdom of the crowds” in creating the world’s largest online encyclopaedia. Although it is difficult to define the exact boundaries of what structures or abstractions belong to the Social Web, a common property of such sites is that they facilitate collaboration and sharing between users with low technical barriers, although usually on single sites. As more social websites form around the connections between people and their objects of interest, and as these “object-centred networks” grow bigger and more diverse, more intuitive methods are needed for representing and navigating the content items in these sites: both within and across social websites. Also, to better enable user access to multiple sites, interoperability among social websites is required in terms of both the content objects and the person-to-person networks expressed on each site. This requires representation mechanisms to interconnect people and objects on the Social Web in an interoperable and extensible way. The Semantic Web provides such representation mechanisms: it can be used to link people and objects by representing the heterogeneous ties that bind us all to each other (either directly or indirectly). In this paper, we will describe methods that build on agreed-upon Semantic Web formats to describe people, content objects, and the connections that bind them together explicitly or implicitly, enabling social websites to interoperate by appealing to some common semantics. We will also focus on how developers can use the Semantic Web to augment the ways in which they create,reuse, and link content on social networking sites and social websites.

Explanations of leisure travel must take the influence of participants' social contacts into account. To analyze this influence, transport planning uses social network analysis methods. While most past projects have focused on isolated network components, this paper presents a study collecting data on connected personal networks by taking a snowball sample. The paper explains difficulties for transport planning in approaching and explaining leisure travel and then introduces both the survey methodology and the instrument in detail. Advantages and disadvantages of snowball sampling are addressed, and the question why this strategy is important for approaching leisure travel, followed by experiences from the field about response rate, the fit between survey and target population, and sources of bias are given. Descriptive analyses highlight the potential of the data to produce new empirical insights.

Researchers generally use nonprobability methods such as chain-referral sampling to study populations for which no sampling frame exists. Respondent-driven sampling is a new form of chain-referral sampling that was designed to reduce several sources of bias associated with this method, including those from the choice of initial participants, volunteerism, and masking. This study expands this method by introducing "steering incentives," supplemental rewards for referral of members of a specific group, injection drug users (IDUs) aged 18-25. The results are based on an interrupted time series analysis in which 196 IDUs from Meriden, CT, were interviewed before introduction of the steering incentives, and another 190 were interviewed afterwards. The steering incentives increased the percentage of younger IDUs sampled by 70%. We compared recruitment patterns with institutional data and self-reported personal networks to determine representativeness and whether volunteerism or ...