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

Shiori Furukawa, Sho Tsugawa

Although beneficial information abounds on social media, the dissemination of harmful information such as so-called ``fake news'' has become a serious issue. Therefore, many researchers have devoted considerable effort to limiting the diffusion of harmful information. A promising approach to limiting diffusion of such information is link deletion methods in social networks. Link deletion methods have been shown to be effective in reducing the size of information diffusion cascades generated by synthetic models on a given social network. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of link deletion methods by using actual logs of retweet cascades, rather than by using synthetic diffusion models. Our results show that even after deleting 10\%--50\% of links from a social network, the size of cascades after link deletion is estimated to be only 50\% the original size under the optimistic estimation, which suggests that the effectiveness of the link deletion strategy for suppressing information diffusion is limited. Moreover, our results also show that there is a considerable number of cascades with many seed users, which renders link deletion methods inefficient.

M. White

Hao-Chen, Ting-Chung and Ting-Hsiu Huang, Wang and Liao

This study employs panel data from 22 counties and cities in Taiwan spanning the years 2000 to 2023, applying spatial econometric models to examine the effects of fiscal expenditure and urban public facility land use on county-level in-migration. The analysis adopts the Spatial Durbin Model (SDM) and further decomposes the results into direct, indirect (spillover), and total effects to capture the spatial interactions of migration flows. The empirical findings indicate that expenditure on education, science, and culture significantly enhances the attractiveness of counties for in-migration, while social welfare expenditure exhibits notable cross-regional spillover effects. In contrast, spending on community development and environmental protection, as well as the total area of roads and parks, shows a negative association with in-migration, likely reflecting pressures from urbanization, rising land use intensity, and higher living costs. Importantly, per capita accessible green and recreational spaces—including parks, green areas, playgrounds, and plazas—demonstrate significant positive effects, underscoring that the equitable distribution and accessibility of public facilities play a more decisive role in influencing population movements than their aggregate quantity. JEL classification numbers: C21, C23, R53. Keywords: Spatial Durbin Model, Fiscal Expenditure, Urban Public Facility Land Use, Internal Migration, Spatial Spillover Effects.

Guilherme Gouvêa de Figueiredo

O tempo presente se singulariza pela ruptura e pelo casuísmo. Ruptura e casuísmo que sugerem, atentos nós a um específico nódulo de preocupações, um esfumaçar dos limites entre o direito penal e o administrativo.

Bruce Henderson

In response to James Anglin’s challenge in this journal’s previous issue, to take an old book off the shelf and reread it, I immediately thought of Virginia Axline’s Dibs: In Search of Self. When I became an undergraduate psychology major over 50 years ago and wanted to begin to work under my mentor, Jerry Levin, it was prerequisite reading. Jerry knew Axline from Teachers College at Columbia University. As a practicing clinical psychologist and academic, Jerry was not particularly wedded to the specifics of Axline’s ‘play therapy’ method, but he thought Axline’s approach to interacting with children provided an ideal model for his students. I think he was right.

Gustavo Navarro Martins Fonseca, Alexandre Lopes Gomes, Gustavo Carvalho Moreira

Este estudo investigou os padrões espaciais das taxas de homicídios e avaliou a hipótese de convergência em microrregiões do estado de São Paulo. Utilizando ferramentas de Análise Exploratória de Dados Espaciais (AEDE) e o modelo espacial de β-convergência com dados em painel, examinou-se a dinâmica dos homicídios em 63 microrregiões paulistas de 1980 a 2020. Os indicadores LISA evidenciaram a redução de clusters Baixo-Baixo e o surgimento de clusters Alto-Alto e Alto-Baixo no interior do estado, indicando um movimento de interiorização dos homicídios. Além disso, o modelo de β-convergência indicou uma tendência à homogeneização das taxas de homicídio entre as microrregiões. Esses resultados ressaltam a importância de estratégias de segurança pública focalizadas na redução dos homicídios em áreas persistentemente afetadas, bem como medidas preventivas em regiões com maior suscetibilidade a taxas elevadas de homicídio, considerando a tendência observada de convergência.

Sho Tsugawa, Hiroyuki Ohsaki

In this paper, we address the challenge of discovering hidden nodes in unknown social networks, formulating three types of hidden-node discovery problems, namely, Sybil-node discovery, peripheral-node discovery, and influencer discovery. We tackle these problems by employing a graph exploration framework grounded in machine learning. Leveraging the structure of the subgraph gradually obtained from graph exploration, we construct prediction models to identify target hidden nodes in unknown social graphs. Through empirical investigations of real social graphs, we investigate the efficiency of graph exploration strategies in uncovering hidden nodes. Our results show that our graph exploration strategies discover hidden nodes with an efficiency comparable to that when the graph structure is known. Specifically, the query cost of discovering 10% of the hidden nodes is at most only 1.2 times that when the topology is known, and the query-cost multiplier for discovering 90% of the hidden nodes is at most only 1.4. Furthermore, our results suggest that using node embeddings, which are low-dimensional vector representations of nodes, for hidden-node discovery is a double-edged sword: it is effective in certain scenarios but sometimes degrades the efficiency of node discovery. Guided by this observation, we examine the effectiveness of using a bandit algorithm to combine the prediction models that use node embeddings with those that do not, and our analysis shows that the bandit-based graph exploration strategy achieves efficient node discovery across a wide array of settings.

Jeonghye Kim

Purpose: This study empirically evaluated the economic efficiency of correctional welfare services operated by the Korea Rehabilitation Agency, which are designed to support the social reintegration of ex-offenders and prevent recidivism, and to suggest future policy directions. Methods Using the 2023 financial statements of the Korea Rehabilitation Agency, annual reports, Alio disclosure data, Statistics Korea, and cost-of-crime research from the Korea Institute of Criminology and Justice, a cost-benefit analysis was conducted. The cost components included direct program expenses, operating costs, and personnel expenditures, while the benefit components were defined as the integration of beneficiaries into the productive population through exit from basic livelihood security, increased tax revenue from vocational and employment support, and reduced social costs from crime prevention. Results: Results indicated that the total cost of correctional welfare services in 2023 was approximately 46.21 billion KRW, while the total benefits amounted to approximately 269.08 billion KRW. The net benefit was about 222.86 billion KRW, with a benefit-cost ratio (B/C ratio) of 5.82, demonstrating strong economic feasibility. On average, the program generated an annual net benefit of approximately 13.58 million KRW per individual. Among the benefits, the prevention of recidivism accounted for the largest proportion, substantially contributing to the reduction of criminal justice expenditures and victimization costs. Conclusion: These findings suggest that correctional welfare services should be recognized not merely as welfare support but as high-efficiency public investment projects that strengthen both fiscal sustainability and community safety.

Robert Apel

This review considers recent evidence on the impact of the social safety net on crime and recidivism. The social safety net comprises means-tested public assistance (e.g., cash welfare, food assistance, disability assistance, public health insurance) and contributory social insurance (e.g., unemployment insurance). Dozens of recent studies, largely outside of criminology, evaluate the impact of shocks to the scope or generosity of social safety net programs. Findings from these natural experiments support the conclusion that public welfare policy has measurable benefits for public safety at both individual and aggregate levels. These benefits encompass property as well as violent crime and are observed over both immediate and extended time horizons. The review closes with a call for more criminological contributions to this growing literature.

Anne Kaun, A. O. Larsson, Anu Masso

ABSTRACT This article explores citizen attitudes towards automated decision-making (ADM) in the public sector, addressing concerns related to social justice and transparency. ADM, used in diverse public services, such as benefit application processing, welfare fraud detection and tax calculation, has sparked public interest and scepticism. To shed light on this complex issue and make ADM more accessible for citizens, we presented three domain-specific scenarios in a population-representative survey in Estonia (n = 1,500), Germany (n = 2,001) and Sweden (n = 1,000). These scenarios involved job seeker categorisation, child welfare risk assessment and predictive policing through facial recognition. Drawing from this survey and adopting an exploratory approach, we analyse attitudes across responses to these scenarios and conduct a regression analysis, integrating individual variables such as age, gender, education, awareness, enthusiasm and trust in ADM systems. Our findings reveal differences in citizens’ attitudes based on welfare regimes and individual characteristics. This citizen-focused approach underscores the significance of involving citizens in the governance of ADM in the digital welfare state, transcending the traditional regulatory and stakeholder-centric perspectives.

The study's relevance stems from the absence of a unified scientific or practical approach to assessing the efficiency of internal affairs bodies in the Republic of Kazakhstan and internationally, particularly from a criminological perspective. This research explores the efficacy of law enforcement based on public trust levels, a practice that proves challenging in actual application. The investigation includes an examination of various motivational forms and stimuli for internal affairs employees, such as material compensation, social security, working conditions, psychological support, and effective human resource management strategies. This study traces the evolution and reform of the legal and regulatory framework governing Kazakhstan's internal affairs system, establishing state policy priorities to enhance the social welfare of law enforcement personnel. This work synthesizes insights from legal science, sociology, psychology, criminology, and human resource theory, offering a novel perspective on defining the social efficiency of Kazakhstan's internal affairs bodies.

O. V. Lemak

The article is devoted to the theoretical analysis of the essence of the concept of the state and social state, taking into account their characteristics by philosophers and scientists from ancient times to the present, and based on the need to form a modern state as a highly developed, legal, democratic state that defines a person as the highest social value, ensures his rights and freedom, decent conditions of existence, security and well-being, by conducting an active social policy based on the principles of civil society, social justice, equality, solidarity and responsibility. The question of the justification of the state’s narrowing of its own functions and responsibility for the development of society today, regardless of its main purpose, and at the same time remaining a detached “arbiter” of the natural self-development of society, has been investigated. The interdependence and influence of the state on crime is considered not only in a positive, but also in a negative aspect, in particular, in an effort to improve the lives of citizens with the help of widespread use of criminal law measures, the result of which can be the generation of excessively large “artificial” crime, which, in turn, will contribute to the growth of “natural” crime. In the direction of the formation of a modern social state as a legal, democratic state that ensures fundamental human rights and freedoms, dignified conditions for its existence, security and well-being, the main methods and directions of the socio-political and economic organization of society are considered in terms of their productivity and contradictions, social security and determination of crime. An analysis of the interrelationship and interdependence of national security and social criteria, their common priority interests, which must be taken into account when forming the strategic priorities of the social state, among which are the guarantee of the constitutional rights and freedoms of man and citizen, the development of civil society, its democratic institutions, the strengthening of political and social stability in society, the creation of a competitive, socially oriented market economy and the provision of an ever-increasing standard of living and well-being of the population, as well as the development of spirituality, moral foundations, and the intellectual potential of the Ukrainian people, strengthening the physical health of the nation, creating conditions for expanded reproduction of the population . The position is substantiated that the main purpose of the state, its goal and its essence is the safe existence of society, where the safety of society, that is, social or public safety in this sense is synonymous with the concept of national security, based on the fact that a nation is a community of all citizens, and stateless persons who currently live on the territory of the state and fall under its jurisdiction. Conclusions were made regarding the need to create a mechanism to protect people from real and potential risks and their consequences, from existing and possible violations of individual rights and freedoms, from criminal encroachments on life, health, property, honor and dignity of a person, as well as ensuring social harmony in the state on the basis of social peace and social partnership where a developed civil society should play a key role. The argumentation of the need to exist among the main functions of the welfare state, such as a protective (compensatory) function – is the creation of a mechanism to protect people from real, potential risks and their consequences, from existing and possible violations of individual rights and freedoms, from criminal encroachments on life and health , property, honor and dignity of a person, as well as ensuring social harmony in the state on the basis of social peace and social partnership, where the analysis, forecasting of the state and development of the state itself should be the decisive components of the process of control over the social state in the state and its regions by civil society. objects of national security, both the main values of the Ukrainian people and the goals for their achievement.

Petter Gottschalk

The theory of convenience addresses white-collar and corporate crime. The theory is applied in this article to a case study of Norwegian publishing houses having to pay infringement fees because of competition act violation. Cartel members agreed and coordinated a boycott of a distribution channel. This article reviews the research literature on cartels before presenting the convenience case study. Combatting cartels is a matter of reducing the attractiveness and convenience of joining cartels. Guardianship, oversight, and controls are at the core of reducing deviance convenience. Detection is an element of oversight. However, detection is rare, as this case illustrated by email sent by mistake. Combatting cartels is a matter of control at the top of organizations where typically each chief executive officer (CEO) is involved. Therefore, the corporate compliance officer should never report to the CEO but rather to the chairperson on the board and to the external auditor.

Juarez Cirino dos Santos

Falar sobre Juarez Tavares é uma tarefa agradável, por muitas razões: a descrição de sua personalidade sugere substantivos fortes e adjetivos dignificantes, que tornam o discurso fácil e fluente. E, na comemoração dos seus 80 anos, rodeado por amigos e admiradores, é importante destacar as dimensões filosófica, política e científica de sua personalidade carismática e comunicativa, que produzem profunda impressão em todos os que o conhecem ou com ele convivem, de uma forma ou de outra.

Ori Swed, Sachith Dassanayaka, Dimitri Volchenkov

In 2016, a network of social media accounts animated by Russian operatives attempted to divert political discourse within the American public around the presidential elections. This was a coordinated effort, part of a Russian-led complex information operation. Utilizing the anonymity and outreach of social media platforms Russian operatives created an online astroturf that is in direct contact with regular Americans, promoting Russian agenda and goals. The elusiveness of this type of adversarial approach rendered security agencies helpless, stressing the unique challenges this type of intervention presents. Building on existing scholarship on the functions within influence networks on social media, we suggest a new approach to map those types of operations. We argue that pretending to be legitimate social actors obliges the network to adhere to social expectations, leaving a social footprint. To test the robustness of this social footprint we train artificial intelligence to identify it and create a predictive model. We use Twitter data identified as part of the Russian influence network for training the artificial intelligence and to test the prediction. Our model attains 88% prediction accuracy for the test set. Testing our prediction on two additional models results in 90.7% and 90.5% accuracy, validating our model. The predictive and validation results suggest that building a machine learning model around social functions within the Russian influence network can be used to map its actors and functions.

Dalsiza Cláudia Macedo Coutinho, Lanna Jackelyne de Alencar Arrais, Léia Lediane Gross et al.

O trabalho apresenta o debate sobre proteção social às famílias no contexto de crises, em que se realiza reflexões sobre o desenvolvimento das políticas de proteção social no capitalismo e os desafios postos a essas políticas diante da crise, do ajuste fiscal e do avanço das tendências neoliberais, tendo como campo de análise a realidade vivenciada pelas famílias brasileiras, considerando o contexto da pandemia do Covid-19. Entende-se, portanto, a oferta e a consolidação das seguranças sociais às famílias como responsabilidades do Estado e a concepção de seguridade social para além da legalidade constitucional. A metodologia se deu a partir de uma revisão de literatura, e de reflexões e debates acumulados construídos no processo acadêmico de pesquisa e extensão vinculadas ao Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas em Proteção Social e Famílias (GEPPSFAM) da Universidade Federal do Tocantins (UFT).

Loukas Ilias, Dimitris Askounis

Stress and depression are prevalent nowadays across people of all ages due to the quick paces of life. People use social media to express their feelings. Thus, social media constitute a valuable form of information for the early detection of stress and depression. Although many research works have been introduced targeting the early recognition of stress and depression, there are still limitations. There have been proposed multi-task learning settings, which use depression and emotion (or figurative language) as the primary and auxiliary tasks respectively. However, although stress is inextricably linked with depression, researchers face these two tasks as two separate tasks. To address these limitations, we present the first study, which exploits two different datasets collected under different conditions, and introduce two multitask learning frameworks, which use depression and stress as the main and auxiliary tasks respectively. Specifically, we use a depression dataset and a stressful dataset including stressful posts from ten subreddits of five domains. In terms of the first approach, each post passes through a shared BERT layer, which is updated by both tasks. Next, two separate BERT encoder layers are exploited, which are updated by each task separately. Regarding the second approach, it consists of shared and task-specific layers weighted by attention fusion networks. We conduct a series of experiments and compare our approaches with existing research initiatives, single-task learning, and transfer learning. Experiments show multiple advantages of our approaches over state-of-the-art ones.

Marcelo Sartori Locatelli, Pedro Calais, Matheus Prado Miranda et al.

Politicization is a social phenomenon studied by political science characterized by the extent to which ideas and facts are given a political tone. A range of topics, such as climate change, religion and vaccines has been subject to increasing politicization in the media and social media platforms. In this work, we propose a computational method for assessing politicization in online conversations based on topic shifts, i.e., the degree to which people switch topics in online conversations. The intuition is that topic shifts from a non-political topic to politics are a direct measure of politicization -- making something political, and that the more people switch conversations to politics, the more they perceive politics as playing a vital role in their daily lives. A fundamental challenge that must be addressed when one studies politicization in social media is that, a priori, any topic may be politicized. Hence, any keyword-based method or even machine learning approaches that rely on topic labels to classify topics are expensive to run and potentially ineffective. Instead, we learn from a seed of political keywords and use Positive-Unlabeled (PU) Learning to detect political comments in reaction to non-political news articles posted on Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok during the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. Our findings indicate that all platforms show evidence of politicization as discussion around topics adjacent to politics such as economy, crime and drugs tend to shift to politics. Even the least politicized topics had the rate in which their topics shift to politics increased in the lead up to the elections and after other political events in Brazil -- an evidence of politicization.

S. Ghorbani, Nadali Olfatpour, Morteza Mousakhani et al.

Introduction: Policymakers' inability to identify and analyze public issues to formulate necessary policies, the weaknesses of agents and executives in implementing the procedures, and the lack of optimal use of existing resources are among the most prominent disadvantages of public welfare governance in various societies. The purpose of this research is to provide a model to understand the inefficiency of public welfare governance in Iran. Method: The present research is a mixed-method type (quantitative-qualitative) of research. In order to identify the concepts, dimensions and indicators of the model, theme analysis (qualitative) was used, and structural equation modeling (quantitative) was employed to fit the conceptual model of the research. 26 experts, professors and experts in the field of policy and public welfare have been selected for the socio-statistics of the qualitative part. The statistical population of the quantitative part consists of 240 experts, managers and senior managers in the field of policy and social welfare. 148 people participated considering Cochran's formula. Findings: In the qualitative part; 50 initial indicators were identified and after coding, 45 indicators were confirmed by theme analysis. Six dimensions (management and decision-making; public finance of the government; planning; internal environment; external environment and sectoral governance), and four components of causal, contextual, strategy, and consequence factors were confirmed. In the quantitative part, the dimensions of management and decision-making and public finance of the government were found to have an effect on the dimensions of the internal and external environment as well as on the dimension of planning, and the dimension of planning also affects the governance of a sector. The dimension of management and decision-making was ranked first with an average of 6.54, and the dimension of governance was ranked last with an average of 5.14. Discussion: A comprehensive model for identifying public issues enables the country to determine and implement priorities and strategies. The design requirements for the pattern of public welfare pathology in Iran will be six dimensions and 45 indicators extracted in this model.

Golzar Aghaei, K. Daneshfard, Golamreza Memarzadeh

Introduction: In the implementation of public policy, there are many factors and obstacles, the identification of which will lead to the efficient way of implementing the policies. Method: The present research was conducted with the aim of identifying and prioritizing the obstacles to the implementation of Iran's social welfare policies. The research is of a meta-composite type, in the qualitative part, semi-structured interviews were used so as to collect the data with open coding, and finally the obstacles to the implementation of social welfare policies were identified. In the quantitative part, using the review of related literature and research studies, six fundamental research studies in the field of policymaking were selected according to the citations and the items affecting the implementation of policies having been extracted from other studies in the form of commonalities. Then, the 10 experts cooperated, and the three-step Delphi method was used. Findings: Based on Friedman's test, ten priorities were identified, which are as follows: existence of opposing and supporting parties, technical difficulties, lack of use of new technologies, legitimacy of the country's political and governance system, lack of attention to the intellectual and political maturity of the target group, political factors, political conflicts, the welfare state of the target group, the lack of appropriate executive instructions, the lack of alignment of programs, and the lack of optimal allocation of the country's budget. Discussion: It was found that the influential factors are in the hands of the government and the role of the executives in the implementation of social welfare policies is weaker. Therefore, it is suggested that the government should pay more attention to the use of pro and opposition parties, the legitimacy of the ruling political system, and executive guidelines.