Gossip is an important part of adolescent development. Although gossip can be used for negative influence, it can also be used for positive relational purposes such as establishing norms and creating intimacy. Discerning the gossip sharer's motives is important for receivers to determine how to react. However, the lack of visual and tonal cues in…

The implementation of the competency-based approach in a multi-level education system has posed the problem of continuity of its levels. The search for common grounds in choosing the content and results of education has intensified. The scientific interest in the student's experience has grown, as the basic basis for the formation of competencies.…

Urgent societal challenges have led to unease in our socio-cultural interactions and the production systems that underpin our lives. To confront such challenges, collaboration stands out as an essential approach in accomplishing joint goals and producing new knowledge. It calls for interdisciplinary methodologies such as co-design, an approach…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how online full-time faculty define, implement, and invest in social presence. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit 15 full-time online faculty participants at a private Christian university in the Southwest. The participants of this study met specific criterion, which included…

OTHERISM is the disuniting of a country or varying sizes of groups. Otherism is the process of unconsciously planned and contradictory "preparation" to "push" an individual(s) "out" of a group to "defend" against the entry of a person into a group or arrange "downward" in rank the person in the…

Drawing on the framework of social domain theory, this multi-method, multi-informant longitudinal study examined whether callous-unemotional (CU) tendencies moderated the association between U.S. 4 to 7 year olds' (n = 135; M[subscript age] = 5.65, 50% male; 75% White) ability to differentiate hypothetical, prototypical moral and conventional…

The paper uses actor-network theory (ANT) to analyze the sociotechnical networks of three groups of adolescents who played online games in different physical and social contexts. These include: an internet café, which allowed the players to be co-present; a personal laptop, which gave the player more control over how he played; and at home through…

The purpose of this study was to explore the symbolic interaction theory in a sample of Arab American adolescents. Four areas of self-concept were investigated in relation to school environment, including perceived discrimination and social supports. Sixty-one Arab American adolescents (28 males and 33 females) between the ages of 12 and 18 years…

This case study examines how one study abroad student oriented to social interaction during a semester in Spain. Using an activity theoretical approach, the findings indicate that the student not only viewed social interaction with his Spanish host family and an expert-Spanish-speaking age peer as an opportunity for second language (L2) learning,…

The study focuses on how young children are socialised in early childhood education practice in activities with and around toys. A premise of this study is the theoretical notion of sociocultural theory that people do things with artefacts and other cultural tools, and tools do things with people. This is captured in the unit of analysis,…

Students are accessing graduate study online in ever-increasing numbers with interactive experiences differing from those who traditionally enroll in corresponding face-to-face (F2F) classes. Soft skills such as collaboration/teamwork, communication and presentation are important to learning but difficult to practice outside the F2F environment.…

This article proposes an analytical consideration for social capital research in education by exploring a pragmatic combination of social network analysis (SNA) and symbolic interactionism (SI) as a research method. The article first delineates the theoretical linkages of social capital theory with SNA and SI. The article then discusses how SNA…

Restorative justice (RJ) is both a methodology for dealing with conflict and a process for modeling more positive human relations after social harm. As both method and process, the benefits of developing restorative practices on college campuses go well beyond just the many positive community-oriented outcomes of facilitated conflict resolution…

With the advent of ubiquitous computing, interaction design has broadened its object of inquiry into how smart computational artifacts inconspicuously act in people's everyday lives. Although user-centered design approaches remains useful for exploring how people cope with interactive systems, they cannot explain how this new breed of…

The juxtaposition of classic sociological theory and the, relatively, young discipline of human-computer interaction (HCI) serves as a powerful mechanism for both exploring the theoretical impacts of technology on human interactions as well as the application of technological systems to moderate interactions. It is the intent of this dissertation…