Juxtaposing symbolic interactionist and postmodern interpretations of cyberself-ing, I bring data to bear on the tensions between these two theoretical stances. I argue that postmodernist accounts are no longer tenable; such studies were based on multi-user domains (MUDs), but generalized to cyberspace. I examine the evolving internet population, which has reached a critical mass of the America...

This paper attempts to contribute to the positivist-interpretivist and rigor-relevance debates in IS research. We accomplish this by reflecting on the implications of symbolic interactionist ethnography for enriching interpretive research, and by highlighting how the adaptation of the “constant comparison” technique from grounded theory may help move the ethnography study towards theoretical in...

This paper is part of a research project called "A Computational Model of Distance Learning based on the Socio-Interactionist Approach". This project is related to situated learning, i.e., in the conception of cognition as a social practice based on the use of language, symbols and signs. The objective is the construction of a Distance Learning environment, implemented as a multi-agent system c...

From a classical Cartesian perspective, interactionism implies the transfer of thoughts and feelings from a non-physical phenomenal consciousness to the physical brain. Thereby, phenomenal consciousness is thought to control the physical body somehow like a marionette hanging by strings of non-physical thought. Differing from this depiction, a basic premise of the current interactionist hypothe...

SISTER: A SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST SIMULATION OF TRADE AND EMERGENT ROLES Deborah Vakas Duong George Mason University, 2004 Thesis Director: John Grefenstette SISTER, a Symbolic Interactionist Simulation of Trade and Emergent Roles, captures the fundamental social process by which macro level roles emerge from micro level symbolic interaction. SISTER may be used for the computational social scie...

This study examined personality during adolescence as a predictor of later parenting of toddler-aged offspring. On the basis of empirical research on the timing of parenthood and the interactionist model (Conger & Donnellan, 2007), we examined age at parenthood and family socioeconomic status (SES) as mediators of the relation between personality and parenting. Participants were 228 emerging ad...

OBJECTIVE A psychosocial interactionist model was presented to provide a systematic account of individual differences in perceived functional dyspeptic symptom severity. METHODS In a population-based survey, 4038 Hong Kong subjects (age 18-80 years) were interviewed. Five hundred ninety interviewees (14.6%) met the diagnostic criteria for functional dyspepsia (FD), and 396 of them participate...

In this paper, we adopt a symbolic interactionist perspective on Multi-Agent Systems. We investigate the uses and genesis of agent models, both Self and acquaintance models and argue that the symbolic interactionist view is superior to the ad hoc, static and somewhat low-level approach adopted at present. We consider agent models|both Self and acquaintance models|as devices for making predictio...