China’s elaborate system of local mediation committees has piqued researchers’ curiosity for decades and sparked an argument in these pages. Crucial questions— concerning how much mediation actually takes place, what kinds of disputes are mediated, who seeks mediation, and how successful it is—have gone unanswered for lack of data. This article addresses these issues using original surveys from...

OBJECTIVES This study conceptualized loneliness as a mediator in the relation between social engagement and depressive symptoms and explored gender differences in the mediation model. Various indices of social engagement were considered including living arrangement, social network, and activity participation. METHOD Using data from 674 community-dwelling Korean American older adults, we first...

Sense of virtual community is an important component of successful virtual communities. Defined as members’ feelings of belonging, identity, and attachment with each other in computer-mediated communication, sense of virtual community distinguishes virtual communities from mere virtual groups. Sense of virtual community is believed to come from members’ exchange of social support as well as cre...

Penal mediation has been a longtime process of criminal settlement used in the Ngaju Dayak indigenous people Kalimantan. They Belom Bahadat philosophy as form reform field procedural law stemmed from politics which makes customary part national law. This article is aimed to analyze concepts penal Indonesia and international perspectives; with philosophy-based community its future use qualitativ...

Expert practical knowledge emerges through sustained participation in some community of practice. However, participation alone is not the sole factor that contributes to high levels of expertise in the workplace. Our multi-year ethnographic study of one fish hatchery and associated activity systems shows that deeper experiential (practical) and conceptual (scientific) knowledge emerged when fis...

BACKGROUND Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) is a widely used, community-based approach to tackle open defecation and its health-related problems. Although CLTS has been shown to be successful in previous studies, little is known about how CLTS works. We used a cross-sectional case study to identify personal, physical, and social context factors and psychosocial determinants from the Risks,...