Hasil untuk "Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology"

Neil McMillan

It is with deep respect and gratitude that we remember Doctor Ruby Whitelaw, a dedicated and compassionate advocate for residential childcare, whose contributions to the field have left a lasting impact. Ruby passed away suddenly on 20th December 2024 and will be dearly missed by colleagues, friends, and all those whose lives she touched.

Silvana Maria Escorsim

Resumo: O artigo reflete sobre o processo de construção do Movimento de Reconceituação brasileiro e seus desdobramentos. Objetiva elucidar a necessidade e a atualidade da tradição marxista nos debates do Serviço Social. O estudo bibliográfico apontou como resultados a maturidade do Serviço Social na produção de conhecimentos sobre as relações constitutivas da sociedade burguesa, o ressurgimento do pensamento conservador e o aprofundamento da barbárie neoliberal e fascista no mundo.

Simón Peña-Fernández, Ainara Larrondo-Ureta, Jordi Morales-i-Gras

Social media have been fundamental in the daily lives of millions of people, but they have raised concerns about content moderation policies, the management of personal data, and their commercial exploitation. The acquisition of Twitter (now X) by Elon Musk in 2022 generated concerns among Twitter users regarding changes in the platform's direction, prompting a migration campaign by some user groups to the federated network Mastodon. This study reviews the onboarding of users to this decentralised platform between 2016 and 2022 and analyses the migration of 19,000 users who identified themselves as supporters of the platform switch. The results show that the migration campaign was a reactive response to Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and was led by a group of highly active academics, scientists, and journalists. However, a complete transition was not realised, as users preferred to straddle their presence on both platforms. Mastodon's decentralisation made it difficult to exactly replicate Twitter's communities, resulting in a partial loss of these users' social capital and greater fragmentation of these user communities, which highlights the intrinsic differences between both platforms.

Zheng Wei, Yunqi Li, Yucheng He et al.

Social media use has been shown to be associated with low fertility desires. However, we know little about the discourses surrounding childbirth and parenthood that people consume online. We analyze 219,127 comments on 668 short videos related to reproduction and parenthood from Douyin and Tiktok in China, South Korea, and Japan, a region famous for its extremely low fertility level, to examine the topics and sentiment expressed online. BERTopic model is used to assist thematic analysis, and a large language model QWen is applied to label sentiment. We find that comments focus on childrearing costs in all countries, utility of children, particularly in Japan and South Korea, and individualism, primarily in China. Comments from Douyin exhibit the strongest anti-natalist sentiments, while the Japanese and Korean comments are more neutral. Short video characteristics, such as their stances or account type, significantly influence the responses, alongside regional socioeconomic indicators, including GDP, urbanization, and population sex ratio. This work provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of online discourses on family formation via popular algorithm-fed video sharing platforms in regions experiencing low fertility rates, making a valuable contribution to our understanding of the spread of family values online.

Yushawu Abubakari

The strategies that online romance fraudsters employ may vary across different socioeconomic, cultural, and political contexts. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and observations of online romance fraudsters in Ghana, this paper develops a model that explains how African online romance fraudsters deceive Western victims. While much of the model aligns with previous studies based on insights from experts, victims, and secondary data, it uncovers significant aspects of offenders' strategies that earlier research overlooked. These findings suggest that African offenders adopt a distinct approach, shaped by regional sociocultural factors, to execute their fraud schemes. The study identifies seven interconnected and systematic stages that African online romance fraudsters use to defraud Western victims: creating fake profiles, conducting reconnaissance, building trust, scamming, reinventing the truth, turning victims into partners, and abandonment. The findings also show how both cultural and personal vulnerabilities become targets for exploitation. This research offers valuable insights for law enforcement agencies, victim support organizations, and other stakeholders to develop effective policies that mitigate romance fraud and reduce its far-reaching impact on victims. The study also encourages further research to expand the understanding of this phenomenon.

Fanjun Bu, Wendy Ju

This paper introduces our dataset featuring human-robot interactions (HRI) in urban public environments. This dataset is rich with social signals that we believe can be modeled to help understand naturalistic human-robot interaction. Our dataset currently comprises approximately 15 hours of video footage recorded from the robots' perspectives, within which we annotated a total of 274 observable interactions featuring a wide range of naturalistic human-robot interactions. The data was collected by two mobile trash barrel robots deployed in Astor Place, New York City, over the course of a week. We invite the HRI community to access and utilize our dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset showcasing robot deployments in a complete public, non-controlled setting involving urban residents.

Yitong (Alice) Gao, Elizabeth E. Krans, Qingwen Chen et al.

Introduction: Risk factors and treatment rates for substance use disorders (SUDs) differ by sex. Females often have greater childcare and household responsibilities than males, which may inhibit SUD treatment. We examined how SUD, medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) receipt, and overdose rates differ by sex among parents with young children (<5 years). Methods: Using deidentified national administrative healthcare data from Optum’s Clinformatics® Data Mart Database version 8.1 (2007–2021), we identified parents aged 26–64 continuously enrolled in commercial insurance for ≥ 30 days and linked to ≥ 1 dependent child < 5 years from January 1, 2016-February 29, 2020. We used generalized estimating equations to estimate the average predicted prevalence of SUD diagnosis, MOUD receipt after opioid use disorder (OUD) diagnosis, and overdose by parent sex in any month, adjusting for age, race/ethnicity, state of residence, enrollment month, and mental health conditions. Results: From 2016 to 2020, there were 2,241,795 parents with a dependent child < 5 years, including 1,155,252 (51.5%) females and 1,086,543 (48.5%) males. Male parents had a higher average predicted prevalence of an SUD diagnosis (11.1% [11, 11.16]) than female parents (5.5% [5.48, 5.58]). Among parents with OUD, the average predicted prevalence of receiving MOUD was 27.4% [26.1, 28.63] among male and 19.7% [18.34, 21.04] among female parents, with no difference in overdose rates by sex. Conclusion: Female parents are less likely to be diagnosed with an SUD or receive MOUD than male parents. Removing policies that criminalize parental SUD and addressing childcare-related barriers may improve SUD identification and treatment.

Charity Pote, Glynnis Dykes, Shernaaz Carelse

This scoping review provides the available evidence on support interventions and networks for youths aging out of child and youth care centres (CYCCs), and makes recommendations for best practice to alleviate the plight of youths leaving CYCCs. Thirteen databases were searched, resulting in the retrieval of 80 articles, 26 of which met the review criteria: English, full-text, peer-reviewed, open-access studies conducted between 2015 and 2020 on social networks and transitional services to youths aging out of residential care. Recommendations are made for policy changes, extending the age of eligibility and strengthening social support networks for youths transitioning into independent living.

Phillip C. Raneri, Christian Montag, Dmitri Rozgonjuk et al.

Recently there has been increased interest in understanding the relationship between microtransactions, gaming, and gambling. This review aimed to synthesise the evidence on the relationship between microtransactions, ‘Internet Gaming Disorder’ (IGD), and Gambling Disorder in order to report on the: psychometric assessments used, sampling and demographic information, study design and sampling methods, relationships between microtransactions and both IGD and gambling disorder. Inclusion criteria included: refereed studies quantifying microtransactions and/or loot boxes examining their relationship with IGD and/or gambling disorder that were published between 2013 and 2021. Electronic databases were searched and the results were synthesised qualitatively. 14 studies were included. The quality of the evidence was ‘Good’ and clear positive relationships between microtransactions and both IGD and gambling disorder were identified. These relationships apply more to loot boxes than other microtransactions, and risky loot box use was identified as a possible mediator of these relationships. Additionally, microtransaction expenditure increased with the risk of gambling disorder. There is some evidence that adolescents who purchase loot boxes may be more at risk of developing gambling disorder. External validity is limited due to the cross-sectional nature of the evidence, the use of convenience sampling, and the predominantly Western samples resulting in non-representative samples. Prevalence rates of IGD and gambling disorder varied significantly across studies and were different to general prevalence rates. We conclude that there is a need to develop consistent methods for assessing IGD and microtransaction engagement in future research. Implications for policy-makers and future research are discussed.

Lars Almquist, Sarah Cusworth Walker

Abstract Background Youth experiencing homelessness have disproportionate contact with the criminal legal system. This system contact represents a critical inflection point for enhancing risk or opportunities for stabilization; however, the policy and scholarly traditions examining the criminal legal system have not traditionally incorporated housing or other social determinants as a central focus of intervention. Methods We conducted a scoping review using PRISMA-ScR guidelines to examine how the research literature is currently addressing housing within the context of youth involvement in the legal system. Databases searched included PubMed, Web of Science, and Academic Search Complete. Google Scholar was used to identify papers not indexed in the academic databases of interest. Database searches were conducted between September and December 2019 and articles were restricted to those published in English between the year 2000 and 2019. Key study components extracted included demographic information regarding each sample, type of article, study methodology, direction of effects of interest, outcome measures and primary findings, as well as theoretical frameworks engaged by the authors. Results The search results returned 2154 titles for review. After screening all 2154 titles, 75 met eligibility for inclusion. Abstract reviews were conducted for all 75 papers. 36 abstracts met eligibility criteria and underwent full-text review. Ultimately, 29 articles satisfied eligibility criteria and were included in this scoping review. Conclusions Publications are primarily focused on the social epidemiology of risk factors and behaviors determining youth justice contact, but relatively less so on studies of interventions targeting youth delinquency, crime reduction, or recidivism that included housing support. The lack of continuity in theorizing from epidemiology to applied science in this area represents a gap in the literature that is likely reducing the effectiveness of interventions to interrupt patterns of legal system contact for youth. Integrating a public health framework that emphasizes the upstream social determinants leading to contact with the youth justice system would represent a paradigm shift for the field that would have beneficial effects on long term health outcomes for youth.

Javier Fumanal-Idocin, Oscar Cordón, María Minárová et al.

Social network analysis is a popular discipline among the social and behavioural sciences, in which the relationships between different social entities are modelled as a network. One of the most popular problems in social network analysis is finding communities in its network structure. Usually, a community in a social network is a functional sub-partition of the graph. However, as the definition of community is somewhat imprecise, many algorithms have been proposed to solve this task, each of them focusing on different social characteristics of the actors and the communities. In this work we propose to use novel combinations of affinity functions, which are designed to capture different social mechanics in the network interactions. We use them to extend already existing community detection algorithms in order to combine the capacity of the affinity functions to model different social interactions than those exploited by the original algorithms.

Clara Moge, Katherine Wang, Youngjun Cho

As an emerging interaction paradigm, physiological computing is increasingly being used to both measure and feed back information about our internal psychophysiological states. While most applications of physiological computing are designed for individual use, recent research has explored how biofeedback can be socially shared between multiple users to augment human-human communication. Reflecting on the empirical progress in this area of study, this paper presents a systematic review of 64 studies to characterize the interaction contexts and effects of social biofeedback systems. Our findings highlight the importance of physio-temporal and social contextual factors surrounding physiological data sharing as well as how it can promote social-emotional competences on three different levels: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and task-focused. We also present the Social Biofeedback Interactions framework to articulate the current physiological-social interaction space. We use this to frame our discussion of the implications and ethical considerations for future research and design of social biofeedback interfaces.

Sören Pirk, Edward Lee, Xuesu Xiao et al.

Enabling socially acceptable behavior for situated agents is a major goal of recent robotics research. Robots should not only operate safely around humans, but also abide by complex social norms. A key challenge for developing socially-compliant policies is measuring the quality of their behavior. Social behavior is enormously complex, making it difficult to create reliable metrics to gauge the performance of algorithms. In this paper, we propose a protocol for social navigation benchmarking that defines a set of canonical social navigation scenarios and an in-situ metric for evaluating performance on these scenarios using questionnaires. Our experiments show this protocol is realistic, scalable, and repeatable across runs and physical spaces. Our protocol can be replicated verbatim or it can be used to define a social navigation benchmark for novel scenarios. Our goal is to introduce a protocol for benchmarking social scenarios that is homogeneous and comparable.

Cibelle Doria da Cunha Bueno

O presente trabalho busca apresentar a relação entre a constituição do Estado Penal brasileiro, o sistema prisional e a crise do humanismo. O objetivo é aferir a relação entre as categorias supramencionadas no tocante à construção e execução do arcabouço institucional que permeia a política prisional brasileira na contemporaneidade. Nesse sentido, busca-se lançar luzes ao sistema prisional e à naturalização das violações de direitos humanos nesse contexto aferidas, como produto da sociedade instituída a partir da crise do humanismo na contemporaneidade. O estudo em questão foi realizado por meio de pesquisa bibliográfica e documental, tendo nas teorias de Lukács a inspiração para as reflexões aqui apresentadas. Dessa forma, compreende-se que a crise do humanismo, que potencializa o Estado Penal na contemporaneidade, permeou a formação social brasileira e, portanto, demonstra ser característica marcante de nossa sociabilidade, mostrando-se evidente na política prisional atualmente idealizada, planejada e executada no Brasil.

Jesse Cui, Tingdan Zhang, Kokil Jaidka et al.

Modeling differential stress expressions in urban and rural regions in China can provide a better understanding of the effects of urbanization on psychological well-being in a country that has rapidly grown economically in the last two decades. This paper studies linguistic differences in the experiences and expressions of stress in urban-rural China from Weibo posts from over 65,000 users across 329 counties using hierarchical mixed-effects models. We analyzed phrases, topical themes, and psycho-linguistic word choices in Weibo posts mentioning stress to better understand appraisal differences surrounding psychological stress in urban and rural communities in China; we then compared them with large-scale polls from Gallup. After controlling for socioeconomic and gender differences, we found that rural communities tend to express stress in emotional and personal themes such as relationships, health, and opportunity while users in urban areas express stress using relative, temporal, and external themes such as work, politics, and economics. These differences exist beyond controlling for GDP and urbanization, indicating a fundamentally different lifestyle between rural and urban residents in very specific environments, arguably having different sources of stress. We found corroborative trends in physical, financial, and social wellness with urbanization in Gallup polls.

Tokichen Tricot, Germán Bidegain

Este artículo presenta y analiza los hechos más relevantes que, en el marco más amplio de conflicto entre el Estado de Chile y el Pueblo Mapuche, tuvieron lugar durante 2018 en la arena institucional chilena. Para ello, se desarrollan aquellos procesos e hitos, actuaciones y disputas por poder e influencia, en el contexto de los diversos canales institucionales. El año estuvo cargado de hechos significativos que expresan esfuerzos de acercamiento, tensiones y conflictos. El artículo analiza estos hechos desde una perspectiva diacrónica que busca determinar si los hechos destacados de 2018 corresponden a dinámicas novedosas o si, por el contrario, representan una continuidad con lo que históricamente ha caracterizado la participación y la política institucional mapuche. Esta mirada permite poner en perspectiva los distintos ejes de participación convencional en los que se centra el artículo. El trabajo visibiliza que los acontecimientos del año 2018 expresan problemas de larga data que siguen sin ser resueltos y requieren de un tratamiento urgente para evitar hechos trágicos como los que analiza este Anuario. Palabras clave:

Johan Arturo Barrera-Castellanos

El artículo presenta una reflexión sobre la experiencia de cinco trabajadoras sociales que se encontraban adscritas laboralmente a instituciones estatales y de la sociedad civil realizando procesos de intervención con trabajadores sexuales masculinos en la ciudad de Bogotá, Colombia. Lo anterior, desde un enfoque cualitativo enmarcado bajo los planteamientos del construccionismo social, razón por la cual, se utilizó la entrevista semi estructurada como instrumento de recolección de información.  La investigación demostró la escasez de orientaciones teórico-metodológicas que reconozcan a los sexo-servidores y es por ello que se tiende a feminizar la asistencia que les es brindada. Dicha tendencia se ve justificada, además, por preceptos reduccionistas que configuran una lógica de intervención sesgada. Esto a partir tanto del accionar profesional como de la visión institucional, ya sea de tipo estatal o de la sociedad civil. En consecuencia, se plantean algunos retos desde el Trabajo Social, situados en la reflexión basada en la evidencia, para el abordaje de las personas masculinas que ejercen el comercio sexual, entendido como un fenómeno social complejo.

Oladunni Oluwoye, Liat S. Kriegel, Karl C. Alcover et al.

Background: Few studies exist examining alcohol and opioid co-use mortality rates among racially and ethnically diverse communities, presenting a critical gap in understanding the contribution of alcohol on opioid-related deaths and strategies for prevention. The purpose of the study was to assess whether alcohol and opioid-related deaths differ by race/ethnicity subgroups and if there has been an increase in alcohol and opioid-related deaths between 2011 and 2017. Design: Secondary data analysis of publicly available alcohol and opioid mortality data among non-Hispanic Whites, Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native individuals in Washington State. Measurements: The primary outcomes were alcohol-only, opioid-only, and alcohol-opioid co-use mortality, 2011–2017. Alcohol and/or opioid-related deaths were assigned an International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10) code for the underlying or multiple cause of death. Findings: Between 2011 and 2017, alcohol-only mortality rates increased among non-Hispanic White (P = 0.003) and Hispanic individuals (P = 0.008). Opioid-only mortality rates increased among American Indian/Alaska Native (P = 0.004) and Hispanic individuals (P = <0.001). American Indian/Alaska Native individuals had the highest alcohol-only, opioid-only, and co-use-related mortality rates when looking at between-group incidence rates. Conclusions: Although the opioid epidemic has been characterized as a public health crisis that predominantly impacts non-Hispanic White individuals, racial and ethnic minorities are increasingly impacted by fatal and non-fatal overdose related to co-occurring substance use. Our findings using data from Washington State, align with existing data and signal a dire need to address alcohol and opioid misuse through targeted interventions to prevent overdose and poisoning, with special considerations for American Indian/Alaska Native communities.

Abeer AlDayel, Walid Magdy

Stance detection on social media is an emerging opinion mining paradigm for various social and political applications in which sentiment analysis may be sub-optimal. There has been a growing research interest for developing effective methods for stance detection methods varying among multiple communities including natural language processing, web science, and social computing. This paper surveys the work on stance detection within those communities and situates its usage within current opinion mining techniques in social media. It presents an exhaustive review of stance detection techniques on social media, including the task definition, different types of targets in stance detection, features set used, and various machine learning approaches applied. The survey reports state-of-the-art results on the existing benchmark datasets on stance detection, and discusses the most effective approaches. In addition, this study explores the emerging trends and different applications of stance detection on social media. The study concludes by discussing the gaps in the current existing research and highlights the possible future directions for stance detection on social media.

Shadi Shahsavari, Pavan Holur, Timothy R. Tangherlini et al.

Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive in environments of low confidence and low trust. Consequently, it is not surprising that ones related to the Covid-19 pandemic are proliferating given the lack of any authoritative scientific consensus on the virus, its spread and containment, or on the long term social and economic ramifications of the pandemic. Among the stories currently circulating are ones suggesting that the 5G network activates the virus, that the pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by a global cabal, that the virus is a bio-weapon released deliberately by the Chinese, or that Bill Gates is using it as cover to launch a global surveillance regime. While some may be quick to dismiss these stories as having little impact on real-world behavior, recent events including the destruction of property, racially fueled attacks against Asian Americans, and demonstrations espousing resistance to public health orders countermand such conclusions. Inspired by narrative theory, we crawl social media sites and news reports and, through the application of automated machine-learning methods, discover the underlying narrative frameworks supporting the generation of these stories. We show how the various narrative frameworks fueling rumors and conspiracy theories rely on the alignment of otherwise disparate domains of knowledge, and consider how they attach to the broader reporting on the pandemic. These alignments and attachments, which can be monitored in near real-time, may be useful for identifying areas in the news that are particularly vulnerable to reinterpretation by conspiracy theorists. Understanding the dynamics of storytelling on social media and the narrative frameworks that provide the generative basis for these stories may also be helpful for devising methods to disrupt their spread.