Lost and Saved . . . Again Hampton, Keith N.; Wellman, Barry
Contemporary sociology (Washington),
11/2018, Volume:
47, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Why does every generation believe that relationships were stronger and community better in the recent past? Lamenting about the loss of community, based on a selective perception of the present and ...an idealization of "traditional community," dims awareness of powerful inequalities and cleavages that have always pervaded human society and favors deterministic models over a nuanced understanding of how network affordances contribute to different outcomes. The bêtes noirs have varied according to the moral panic of the times: industrialization, bureaucratization, urbanization, capitalism, socialism, and technological developments have all been tabbed by such diverse commentators as Thomas Jefferson (1784), Karl Marx (1852), Louis Wirth (1938), Maurice Stein (1960), Robert Bellah et al. (1996), and Tom Brokaw (1998). Each time, observers look back nostalgically to what they supposed were the supportive, solidary communities of the previous generation. Since the advent of the internet, the moral panic-ers have seized on this technology as the latest cause of lost community, pointing with alarm to what digital technologies are doing to relationships. As the focus shifts to social media and mobile devices, the panic seems particularly acute.
Well before the coming of the Internet, strong ties with friends and relatives stretched beyond the neighborhood: the traditional domain of community. Phones, cars and planes allowed people to have ...contact over substantial distances. But the mere fact that ties stretched over long distances does not tell us the extent to which distance mattered for contact and support in pre-Internet days. Although, scholars have mused about this question, they have not provided empirical evidence. This paper applies multi-level analysis to assess the extent contact and support declines with distance. It shows a marked drop in the frequency of face-to-face contact at about 5miles. The frequency of contact continues to decrease steadily further away, with substantial declines happening at about 50 and 100miles. Distance affects telephone contact somewhat differently, with a marked drop only happening at about 100miles. Distance also has a significant impact on providing tangible support. As our data were gathered in 1978 in the Toronto area of East York, they allow comparisons with how relationships have changed in light of new forms of communication, such as the Internet and mobile phones. Copyright 2007 Elsevier B.V.
Getting Ahead in Singapore Chua, Vincent; Swee, Eik Leong; Wellman, Barry
Sociology of education,
04/2019, Volume:
92, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Is education the social leveler it promises to be? Nowhere is this question better addressed than in Singapore, the emblematic modern-day meritocracy where education has long been hailed as the most ...important ticket to elite status. In particular, what accounts for gender and ethnic gaps in enrollment into Singapore’s elite junior colleges—the key sorters in the country’s education system? We consider how the wealth of neighborhoods has combined with the elite status of schools to affect the social mobility of gender and ethnic groups. Analyzing data from 40 years of junior college yearbooks (1971–2010), we find persistent differences in educational opportunity. Women and Malays have historically experienced inequality in Singapore, and their student routes to becoming elites differ markedly. For female students, attending an elite junior college in a wealthy neighborhood is associated with wealthy neighborhoods that have a disproportionate number of elite girls’ secondary schools that feed into the junior colleges. By contrast, for Malays, not attending an elite junior college in a wealthy neighborhood has more to do with wealthy neighborhoods underrepresenting Malays in demographic composition. Elite families thus now include better educated women as well as men, yet Malays still rarely become better educated elites. These results underscore the need to carefully map the complex associations and mechanisms between gender and ethnic categorizations, the status of schools, and the characteristics of neighborhoods.
Special Issue Part II Dimitrova, Dimitrina; Wellman, Barry
The American behavioral scientist (Beverly Hills),
05/2015, Volume:
59, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Describes three phases of Internet research. The first phase, in the mid-1990s, coincided with the dot.com boom, & was characterized by optimism on one hand & dystopianism on the other. The second ...phase, beginning around 2000, focused on the everyday uses of the Internet as it continued to proliferate & democratize, bearing out neither the utopian hopes nor the dystopian fears of the prior phase. The third, current phase emphasizes more pointed, theoretically based research & the personal & organizational uses of social network software. 21 References. K. Coddon
We analyze changes in intimate ties in personal community networks. Our data come from interviews conducted a decade apart with 33 Torontonians. There is much turnover in these networks, with only ...27% of intimate ties persisting. Durable ties tend to be with intimates who have provided social support, are in frequent telephone contact, or are kin. There was almost complete turnover in the networks of those respondents who got married during the decade. By contrast, the amount of turnover in networks is not associated with whether the respondents had children, moved to a different home, or started/stopped doing paid work during the decade.
We describe an interview-based data-collection procedure for social network analysis designed to aid gathering information about the people known by a respondent and reduce problems with data ...integrity and respondent burden. This procedure, a participant-aided network diagram (sociogram), is an extension of traditional name generators. Although such a diagram can be produced through computer-assisted programs for interviewing (CAPIs) and low technology (i.e., paper), we demonstrate both practical and methodological reasons for keeping high technology in the lab and low technology in the field. We provide some general heuristics that can reduce the time needed to complete a name generator. We present findings from our Connected Lives field study to illustrate this procedure and compare to an alternative method for gathering network data.
We analyze the effect of different types of online and offline ties - acquaintanceship, advice, and co-authorship - on researchers' productivity and influence. Unlike static studies of networked ...work, we look at how changes in these networks affected researchers' performance and influence. Using the number of publications as an indicator of productivity and the number of citations as an indicator of influence, we investigate when researchers were more productive and influential. We study whether their networks were cohesive, if the researchers were central in their networks or linked to central players, and whether their work had more opportunities to be disseminated through diverse, non-redundant ties. Although the connectedness of their networks was positively associated with the researchers' productivity, it was the non-redundant effective size of the networks that was positively associated with the researchers' influence.
Summary
This study examines a sample of 1705 cases of unaccompanied and separated children (UASCs) included in a pilot project for early recovery child protection intervention. The project was ...started in two Southern Italian regions; multidisciplinary teams ensured an immediate intervention at the moment of disembarkation, working on children engagement and need assessment. Data were gathered about minors’ characteristics and services activated. Descriptive information was selected to develop a profile of cases and bivariate analysis was used to assess the relationship between case characteristics and outcomes.
Findings
The UASCs belong to 38 different nationalities, forming a very diverse group in terms of culture, reasons for leaving their country and past experiences, most of them traumatic. A high number of children were victims of torture, maltreatment, and human trafficking. The empirical evidence highlights that, at the end of the intervention, the majority of UASCs were still hosted in first-level facilities that could respond to basic needs only. Second-level centres were not always equipped to promote their integration process.
Applications
Findings suggest that even if an early child protection intervention to identify children’s strengths and vulnerabilities was crucial for the children engagement, a parallel action for advocacy at national and European level needs to be carried out to raise awareness about human rights violations, the complexity of these minors’ needs, and the necessity to promote adequate services in the reception system, giving voice to these children.
This paper describes using wearable computing devices to perform "sousveillance" (inverse surveillance) as a counter to organizational surveillance. A variety of wearable computing devices generated ...different kinds of responses, and allowed for the collection of data in different situations. Visible sousveillance often evoked counter-performances by front-line surveillance workers. The juxtaposition of sousveillance with surveillance generates new kinds of information in a social surveillance situation.
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