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Online communities are changing the way people enjoy leisure activities through computer-mediated interactions, yet little is known about how these groups form, function, and network. The current study draws on two years of involvement with a Meetup group, using participant observation and ethnographic interviews of the group's live interactions and content analysis of the group's online communication. Throughout this article, the author analyzed the life cycle of online communities and discovered that technology acts as a catalyst for group formation and that the fast and exponential growth of groups centered on common leisure interests. Computer-mediated communications also accelerated the pace of conflict among groups and the formation of alternate communities to satisfy the same need. Patterns of group formation, consolidation, conflict, splintering, and re-grouping repeated themselves throughout the observation period. Finally, the present research discusses how this new form of social interaction facilitates leisure pursuits and encourages creativity in the creation of diverse activities which foster continued participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a data-based comparison of three indicators of social isolation that are frequently used in contemporary social research: (a) low frequency of social contact with friends, relatives, and neighbors (social contact indicator); (b) absence of a discussion network (discussion network indicator); (c) absence of social support (support indicator). All three indicators are in line with an understanding of social isolation as the absence of close personal relationships. However, as shown in this paper, they are correlated only weakly to each other and lead to different results concerning the overall share of social isolation, age disparities, and gender differences of social isolation. Against this background, the paper proceeds with considerations on the content validity and criterion validity of the three indicators. Different versions of each indicator are scrutinized to gain insights on content validity. Conclusions on criterion validity are drawn from an examination of the correlations between the indicators and health, poverty, satisfaction with family life, and satisfaction with social life. Findings suggest a higher validity of the social contact indicator compared to the other two indicators. Data source is the German Socio-Economic Panel. Discussions of content validity are additionally based on analyses using the German Family Survey and the German Aging Survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social cooperation has historically played a pivotal role in developing socio‐educational services for people with disability, thereby contributing to counteracting the social isolation often associated with this condition. Using a mixed‐method methodology, this study maps the diversity of perspectives on how the use of disability‐related services run by social cooperatives impacts on and becomes meaningful to family life. One hundred twenty‐nine interviews with family members of adults with different kinds of disability were studied using emotional textual analysis. It provides a multi‐dimensional model to read and map the multiplicity of emotional meanings related to disability and the use of services, shedding light on key diversities in how family members emotionally make sense of care and support. The results reveal the importance of supporting family‐carers on two main issues: accessing a less passive representation of their relative with disability; and being able to test and acknowledge limits without succumbing to a sense of powerlessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing complex problems in communities has become a key area of focus in recent years (Kania & Kramer, 2013, Stanford Social Innovation Review). Building on existing approaches to understanding and addressing problems, such as action research, several new approaches have emerged that shift the way communities solve problems (e.g., Burns, 2007, Systemic Action Research; Foth, 2006, Action Research, 4, 205; Kania & Kramer, 2011, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 1, 36). Seeking to bring clarity to the emerging literature on community change strategies, this article identifies the common features of the most widespread community change strategies and explores the conditions under which such strategies have the potential to be effective. We identify and describe five common features among the approaches to change. Then, using an agent-based model, we simulate network-building behavior among stakeholders participating in community change efforts using these approaches. We find that the emergent stakeholder networks are efficient when the processes are implemented under ideal conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the resurgence of community organizing in Great Britain. The high profile of Citizens UK have attracted the attention of politicians, trades unions and faith organizations. The government that came to power in 2010 made a commitment to train 5000 community organizers through a four-year Community Organizers Program.

Community organizing refers to a particular way of working in public life that aims to enhance the capacity of community leaders to act for the common good in collaboration across civil society. In the last two decades, this practice, founded in the United States, has spread to Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. This article develops a definition of community organizing, then explores the history of the practice. The article focuses on the translation of community organizing to Australia and the development of the Sydney Alliance. The article identifies a series of 'key factors' that helped create a successful adaptation of community organizing 'universals' to another country. In doing so the article applies several frameworks developed in Power in Coalition to help understand the successes and challenges that the Sydney Alliance has endured (Tattersall (2010) Power in Coalition: Strategies for Strong Unions and Social Change, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY). The author has a distinctive perspective, as she was the founder of the Sydney Alliance as well as the author of Power in Coalition. The article does not pretend to provide 'objective', disinterested observation, but is presented from the vantage point of active participant observation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined relations between social isolation, loneliness, and social support to health outcomes in a sample of New Mexico seniors. Method: We used random-digit dialing to obtain a random sample of 755 southern New Mexico seniors. Participants answered questions pertaining to demographics, social isolation and loneliness, social support, and disease diagnosis including diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, liver disease, arthritis, emphysema, tuberculosis, kidney disease, cancer, asthma, and stroke. The sample allowed for comparison of Caucasian and Hispanic participants. Results: Correlational and logistic analyses indicated that belongingness support related most consistently to health outcomes. Ethnic subgroup analysis revealed similarities and differences in the pattern of associations among the predictor and outcome variables. Discussion: The results demonstrate the importance of social variables for predicting disease outcomes in the elderly and across ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an edited transcript of an interview with Gustavo Esteva, a Mexican activist, "deprofessionalized intellectual" and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in the Mexican city of Oaxaca, that took place during a Thinkery on the Commons held in Dublin, Ireland, in June 2014. Esteva advocates an understanding of the commons as first and foremost an activity and says that certain kinds of contemporary "commoning" are the beginnings of a new post-capitalist society.

The reported declining significance of gay neighborhoods has raised questions about the role of gay enclaves as a locus for community building. Using Wellman and Leighton's community 'lost,' 'saved,' and 'liberated' frameworks, we examine the degree to which gay enclave residence and network socializing are associated with experiences of gay community among men in the New York City area. Multilevel models indicate that enclave residence is neither directly nor indirectly associated with perceived community cohesion or community attachment. Increased socializing with gay men and heterosexuals were, respectively, positively and negatively associated with our community outcomes. Increased socializing with lesbians was associated with greater community attachment, while socializing with bisexuals was associated with greater perceived community cohesion. Our findings lend support for a 'gay community liberated' perspective; experiences of gay community are shaped principally by network relations rather than residential proximity to gay institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory pilot study analyzes the role a facilitated neighborhood intervention, geared towards meeting one's neighbors and discussing local needs and civic action, can play in moving individuals from isolation to community. It focuses on whether NeighborCircles (NC), a neighborhood intervention run by a nonprofit in Massachusetts, is associated with increases in social capital (SC); the main constructs used are Perkins and Long's (2002) 4 dimensions of SC (sense of community [SOC], collective efficacy, neighboring, and participation), with a primary focus on SOC. Surveys and interviews with a majority Latino sample group reveal NC is associated with reported increases in all 4 dimensions of SC. The author concludes by considering what may have led to these reported increases, as well as implications for both future research about and experimentation with similar interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about a pub that is also a live music venue: the Oxford Tavern in Wollongong. It tells the story of the alternative live music scene that existed there for twenty years before the venue closed in 2010. More than this, it makes an argument for vernacular cultural histories of subcultural places within Australian cities, taking seriously the forgotten venues where marginal social groups find meaning and community. Resonating are more universal themes in Australian cultural life: accommodating difference, a space for expression of otherness, and the importance of music and of a venue in shaping a time and place of life transition from youth to adulthood. We explore the peculiar character of the live music pub as quintessential Australian cultural infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the conflagrations that took hold of the South Bronx in New York City from the 1960s to the 1980s and the widespread devastation that resulted focused attention on not only the US ‘urban crisis’ but also on the area’s potential for cultural resurrection and targeted economic development, the struggles of its immediate neighbours to the Northwest have received much less attention. What were the factors that stayed the arson ‘epidemic’ from consuming Northwest Bronx so that it retained some viability? While neighbourhood community organisation has been largely credited with this, and undoubtedly had a major impact, much less attention has been paid to the consequences of cheaply and cynically housing refugees from war-torn Southeast Asia, under a so-called resettlement programme, in the Northwest’s semi-derelict, unheated buildings. Here, perforce, they had no option but to survive and carry on their lives; survival can itself be a form of political resistance, one that does not easily submit to a premature resolution of the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses a critical and historical perspective to examine some of the achievements of Indonesian community media, the problems they have encountered, as well as the solutions they are offfering. It analyses the similarities and diffferences with earlier genres with an explicit participatory agenda, including certain forms of LEKRA literature and art of the 1950s and 1960s, 'people's theatre' since the 1970s, and 'conscientization art' since the 1980s. One of the main challenges for contemporary community media has been to reconcile class diffferences in the collaboration between media or art facilitators and local communities. These and other factors have afffected the accessibility, distribution, sustainability and reach of their ideas, activities and outputs. The article demonstrates how facilitators and practitioners have tried to solve some of these problems through the exploration of alternative media networks, formats and content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inhabitants of Szadek and its neighbourhood, gathering in the parish church to participate in the liturgy and listen to the Church teaching, shaped their religious and moral attitudes. The source materials providing the basis for establishing the religious and moral state of the parish of Szadek in the second half of the 18th century include primarily the preserved records of five canonical inspections carried out in 1759-1760, 1762, 1779, 1788 and 1798. The worship of God was mainly performed during services and masses in three churches: the parish church under the invocation of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin and St. James the Apostle, renovated in 1788, with rich interior decorations (13 altars, many paintings and sculptures), St. Giles' Church, also renovated in 1788 and used only occasionally, and the Holy Trinity Church at the local hospital. The religious and moral condition of the parishioners depended largely on the parish clergy - their personal attitude and pastoral care. In the first half of the 18th century, the person responsible for pastoral work was the local parish-priest, supported by the missionary college priests (performing also other functions in the parish) and the hospital provost. The parishioners themselves took active part in the religious and moral formation of their community through activities of church brotherhoods, guilds and a parish school, as well as in the care for the sick, elderly, poor and homeless (the hospital, fulfilling also the function of a poor-house). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Elderly social isolation could be prevented by facilitating communication or mutual helping at the neighborhood level. The helping of elderly neighbors by local volunteers may relate to their community commitment (CC), but ways to measure CC have not been identified. The aim of the present study was to develop a Community Commitment Scale (CCS) to measure psychological sense of belonging and socializing in the community among local volunteers, for research in prevention of elderly social isolation. We also tested the CCS in a general population of the elderly. Methods: A pilot test of 266 Japanese urban residents was conducted to examine face validity for 24 identified items, of which 12 items were selected for the CCS, based on a 4-point Likert-type scale. The CCS was developed via self-report questionnaires to 859 local volunteers in two suburban cities and to 3484 randomly sampled general residents aged 55 years or older living in one of the cities. To assess concurrent validity, data were collected using the Brief Sense of Community Scale (Peterson; 2008) and two types of single questions on self-efficacy for helping elderly neighbors. Results: Item analysis and factor analysis identified 8 items, which were classified between two datasets under the domains of "belonging" and "socializing" in the local volunteers and the general residents. Cronbach's alpha (which conveyed the internal consistency of the CCS) was 0.75 in local volunteers and 0.78 in general residents. The correlation coefficients between the scores of the CCS and BSCS were 0.54 for local volunteers and 0.62 for general residents. ANOVA comparing the CCS between the confidence levels of the two types of single question of self-efficacy on helping elderly neighbors showed a strong relationship in the volunteers and residents. Conclusions: These results demonstrate acceptable internal consistency and concurrent validity for the CCS, with the two dimensions "belonging" and "socializing", among the local volunteers and general residents in urban Japanese areas. Community commitment measured by the CCS was related to the degree of confidence for self-efficacy in helping elderly neighbors to prevent elderly social isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that participation and inclusion are independent dimensions of public engagement and elaborates the relationships of inclusion with deliberation and diversity. Inclusion continuously creates a community involved in defining and addressing public issues; participation emphasizes public input on the content of programs and policies. Features of inclusive processes are coproducing the process and content of decision making, engaging multiple ways of knowing, and sustaining temporal openness. Using a community of practice lens, we compare the consequences of participatory and inclusive practices in four processes, finding that inclusion supports an ongoing community with capacity to address a stream of issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional information - how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group members. Emotions in turn are known to be important in affecting interaction partners in offline communication in many ways. Could emotions in Internet exchanges affect others and systematically influence quantitative and qualitative aspects of the trajectory of e-communities? The development of automatic sentiment analysis has made large scale emotion detection and analysis possible using text messages collected from the web. However, it is not clear if emotions in e-communities primarily derive from individual group members' personalities or if they result from intra-group interactions, and whether they influence group activities. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here, for the first time, we show the collective character of affective phenomena on a large scale as observed in four million posts downloaded from Blogs, Digg and BBC forums. To test whether the emotions of a community member may influence the emotions of others, posts were grouped into clusters of messages with similar emotional valences. The frequency of long clusters was much higher than it would be if emotions occurred at random. Distributions for cluster lengths can be explained by preferential processes because conditional probabilities for consecutive messages grow as a power law with cluster length. For BBC forum threads, average discussion lengths were higher for larger values of absolute average emotional valence in the first ten comments and the average amount of emotion in messages fell during discussions. Conclusions/Significance: Overall, our results prove that collective emotional states can be created and modulated via Internet communication and that emotional expressiveness is the fuel that sustains some e-communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social capital is increasingly of interest to researchers and service providers given its relationship to outcomes ranging from wellness to social and civic participation. However, available instruments measuring social capital have insufficient reliability and validity. The current study tests the reliability and validity of the Personal Social Capital scale-English version. This study focuses on people of Mexican descent (N = 322) because this validation was part of a larger study involving this population. Results from the validation indicate acceptable global (a=.85) and subscale (bonding a=.83; bridging a=.85) reliability. In addition, a confirmatory factor analysis revealed a well-fitting model. The scale demonstrates convergent validity with psychological sense of community (r = .44). However, the statistically significant correlation between a person's irrational values and social capital (r =.17) does not demonstrate discriminant validity. Further, gender is not a statistically significant predictor, thus failing to support the scale's criterion validity. Relationship status was a statistically significant predictor but did not support the anticipated relationship. We discuss several directions for future research, scale construction, and scale improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gifted adolescents are considered to have high IQs with advanced mathematical and logical performances, but are often thought to suffer from social isolation or emotional mal-adaptation to the social group. The underlying mechanisms that cause stereotypic portrayals of gifted adolescents are not well known. We aimed to investigate behavioral performance of gifted adolescents during social decision-making tasks to assess their affective and social/non-social cognitive abilities. We examined cooperation behaviors of 22 gifted and 26 average adolescents during an iterative binary public goods (PG) game, a multi-player social interaction game, and analyzed strategic decision processes that include cooperation and freeriding. We found that the gifted adolescents were more cooperative than average adolescents. Particularly, comparing the strategies for the PG game between the two groups, gifted adolescents were less sensitive to loss, yet were more sensitive to gain. Additionally, the behavioral characteristics of average adolescents, such as low trust of the group and herding behavior, were not found in gifted adolescents. These results imply that gifted adolescents have a high cognitive ability but a low ability to process affective information or to adapt in social groups compared with average adolescents. We conclude that gain/loss sensitivity and the ability to adapt in social groups develop to different degrees in average and gifted adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent geographical interventions have begun to question the power relations among lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people, challenging assumptions that LGBT communities have homogeneous needs or are not characterised by hierarchies of power. Such interventions have included examinations of LGBT scenes as sites of exclusion for trans people. This article augments academic explorations of trans lives by focusing on 'the gay capital' of the UK, Brighton & Hove, a city that is notably absent from academic discussions of gay urbanities in the UK, despite its wider acclaim. The article draws upon Count Me In Too (CMIT), a participatory action research project that seeks to progress social change for LGBT people in Brighton & Hove. Rather than focusing on LGBT scenes, the article addresses broader experiences of the city, including those relating to the city as a political entity that seeks to be 'LGBT inclusive' and those relating to the geographies of medical 'treatment' that relocate trans people outside the boundaries of the city, specifically to the gender identity clinic at Charing Cross Hospital in London. It argues that trans lives are both excluded from and inextricably linked to geographical imaginings of the 'gay capital', including LGBT spaces, scenes and activism, such that complex sexual and gender solidarities are simultaneously created and contested. In this way, the article recognises the paradoxes of the hopes and solidarities that co-exist - and should be held in tension - with experiences of marginalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]