Members of virtual communities generally expect that their groups satisfy some given requirements. For this aim, the profile matching between user requirements and group characteristics can be considered as the most natural way to represent the group homogeneity, measuring how much the group members are mutually linked. However, optimizing profile matching does not guarantee that the group will...

Previous criminological literature has mostly neglected rural communities, often treating these places as smaller pieces of urban culture. Literature suggests communities operate differently than neighborhoods, with distinctive values, norms, and community cohesion. For example, concepts surrounding collective efficacy may work counterproductively in areas—further exploiting outed members withi...

Alcohol use contributes to morbidity and mortality in developing countries by increasing the risk of trauma and disease, including alcohol dependence. Limited research addresses determinants of alcohol use beyond the individual level in sub-Saharan Africa. We test the association of community collective efficacy and alcohol outlet density with young men's drinking in a cross-sectional, locally ...

Class cohesion is an important object oriented software quality attribute. Assessing the class cohesion and improving the class quality accordingly during the object oriented design phase allows for cheaper management of the later phases. Most of the cohesion metrics planned in the journalism describes static cohesion measurement at design level. Static metrics is a measure that is applied at t...

This article asks if and under what conditions ethnic diversity could become a foundation for a prosperous society. Recent studies on ethnic diversity and social cohesion suggest that diversity has a negative effect on social cohesion and therefore is detrimental to the social prosperity of individuals and communities. This paper argues that although such a negative correlation may apply to con...

This article starts with a critical review of the current literature on the Islamic radicalization and Uighur insurgency in Xinjiang, pointing out that existing literature focuses too narrowly on certain aspects of the Uighur insurgency, and is insufficient to explain the causal mechanism of the insurgency and Islamic radicalization. Built upon historical evidence, this article uses sociologica...

This study informs community science, and seeks to narrow the research-to-practice gap, by examining how the interpersonal networks within a setting influence individuals' use of interventions. More specifically, it explores the role of two network mechanisms-cohesion and structural similarity-in urban elementary school teachers' use of interventions designed to improve academic and behavioral ...

This study uses data on campaign contributions and methods of network analysis to investigate the significance of interlocking directorates for political cohesion among corporate elites. Using quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) regression, the author shows that social ties formed through common membership on corporate boards contribute more to similarity of political behavior than commonaliti...

Alleviating poverty is among the most laudable aim of the Millennium Development Goals. However, policies aimed at alleviating poverty could only be successful if they are underpinned by clear understanding of mechanisms which contribute to poverty incidences and distributions. This study seeks to investigate the effect of major capitalist crises, such as the Asian financial crisis on health di...

The author identified three main processes (a vision-based process, an identity or a community-based process and a complementarity-based process) by which participants may respectively produce cohesion, coherence and consistency. Arguing the interconnection of the processes, the paper further analyses how each process builds upon the others and in particular why the complementary process could ...