Relativities recently undertaken by the Commonwealth Grants Commission (CGC), one area which attracted a considerable amount of discussion was the perceived effects of "urbanisation" on both the higher usage and the higher costs of the provision of law and order services in urban areas. The Commission had recognised certain supposed effects of population concentration and urban size on police w...

A challenge in regional inequality is to identify the relative influence of objective neighborhood context on subjective citizens’ attitudes and experiences of place. This paper first presents six groups of hierarchal neighborhoods in optimizing public service inequality (PSI) indicators based on census blocks collected in Quito, Ecuador. Multilevel models were then applied to understand the re...

Multiplayer games (both face-to-face and online) frequently feature teams. This study investigates whether it is possible to use the rules of a game to alter the team cohesion. Game rules from two face-to-face games were analyzed using Social Identity Theory to predict which will lead to more cohesive teams. Significant differences in team cohesion ratings given by the players after the games s...

The author proposes that in a democratic society, education serves to establish fundamental relationships of fraternity, generating the “social capital” that bonds citizens together. Against this perspective, he examines the cultural values transmitted in the educational systems of six Latin American countries. He finds that following world-wide trends, the curricula have shifted from privilegi...

A core axiom of sociology is that social structure affects and is affected by human behavior. The term “social structure” conveys two quite different meanings. One meaning is relational, involving networks of ties between individuals or groups of individuals. A second meaning refers to the contexts containing these individuals. Studies of neighborhood and community effects depend on variability...

Conviviality is a mechanism to reinforce social cohesion and a tool to reduce mis-coordination between individuals, groups and institutions in web communities, for example in digital cities. We use a two-fold definition of conviviality as a condition for social interactions and an instrument for the internal regulation of social systems. In this paper we discuss the use of normative multi-agent...

As is well known, average living standards in Ireland are much lower than in most of our EC partners. It is of considerable interest to Ireland whether, and in what way, its living standards will catch up or fall further behind as Europe becomes more integrated. The issue is understandably at the heart of the government's strategy towards the EC, and was at the forefront of its diplomatic effor...

The Laeken indicators are a set of indicators for measuring poverty and social cohesion in Europe. However, some of these indicators are highly influenced by outliers in the upper tail of the income distribution. This paper investigates the use of robust Pareto tail modeling to reduce the influence of outlying observations. In a simulation study, different methods are evaluated with respect to ...

Solidarity and kinship has long been an intangible emblem to Malay community especially in the rural area. It is visibly seen through the dependability among each unit of the community either in religious and social events including the matrimonial or wedding. Nevertheless, the inevitable phenomenon, modernization legitimately alters every facets of human life not only the routines, traditions,...

The use of public spaces can promote social cohesion and facilitate interpersonal interactions within the community. However, the ways racial and ethnic groups interact in public spaces can also reflect and influence informal segregation in the wider community. The present study aimed to examine patterns of intergroup contact within public spaces in Victoria, Australia through short-term observ...