VIRTUALLY AMISH: PRESERVING COMMUNITY AT THE INTERNET’S MARGINS

My forthcoming book (MIT Press), Virtually Amish, is an ethnographic study of the adoption, design and use of digital communication technologies among members of Old Order Amish communities. This paper explores a section of the book focusing on Amish strategies for internet management. These strategies are in place to protect Amish communities from perceived negative impacts of technologically mediated connectivity. Today it is increasingly common for the Amish to adopt computers, the internet and mobile devices in calculated ways to remain competitive in business. Often the use of these devices blends into the personal sphere as well. This research is notable for its empirical observations that show shared values are key to determining patterns of technology use in Amish communities. Data was collected via semi-structured interviews with thought-leaders (business and religious leaders) in Indiana Amish settlements. Findings show that the Amish consider their own cultural, social, political and religious autonomy in deciding how to engage with a broader social and economic system as technologies are essential to the mediation of these relationships.

Studying and Understanding Characteristics of Post-Syncing Practice and Goal in Social Network Sites

Many popular social network sites (SNSs) provide the post-syncing functionality, which allows users to synchronize posts automatically among different SNSs. Nowadays there exists divergence on this functionality from the view of sink SNS. The key to solving this problem is to understand the characteristics of users’ post-syncing practice and goals and evaluate whether they are consistent with an SNS’s norms, cultures, and goals. However, studying and understanding the characteristics of post-syncing practice and goal are challenging tasks as a result of the difficulty of data sampling and the complexity of post-syncing behavior. In this article, we focus on investigating this question by quantitative analysis in combination with qualitative analysis. In the quantitative study, by utilizing 211,233 synced-posts sampled from Weibo, we aim to investigate characteristics of post-syncing from three perspectives: user, content, and goal. The results suggest that post-syncing plays an important role in exhibiting one’s current activities, creations, and skills as well as advertisements but involves a risk of exhibiting personal sensitive profiles. To understand the results, we present an interview-based qualitative study based on thematic analysis. It indicates that the publicity, urgency, and remarkableness of contents and differences of social affordances and social circles between sink SNS and source SNS as well as the one-time consent of post-syncing authentication jointly account for the major role of post-syncing. Based on these results, we propose insights for post-syncing functionality’s adoption, design, and promotion.

Using an adoption design to test genetically based differences in risk for child behavior problems in response to home environmental influences

Differential susceptibility theory (DST) posits that individuals differ in their developmental plasticity: some children are highly responsive to both environmental adversity and support, while others are less affected. According to this theory, “plasticity” genes that confer risk for psychopathology in adverse environments may promote superior functioning in supportive environments. We tested DST using a broad measure of child genetic liability (based on birth parent psychopathology), adoptive home environmental variables (e.g., marital warmth, parenting stress, and internalizing symptoms), and measures of child externalizing problems (n = 337) and social competence (n = 330) in 54-month-old adopted children from the Early Growth and Development Study. This adoption design is useful for examining DST because children are placed at birth or shortly thereafter with nongenetically related adoptive parents, naturally disentangling heritable and postnatal environmental effects. We conducted a series of multivariable regression analyses that included Gene × Environment interaction terms and found little evidence of DST; rather, interactions varied depending on the environmental factor of interest, in both significance and shape. Our mixed findings suggest further investigation of DST is warranted before tailoring screening and intervention recommendations to children based on their genetic liability or “sensitivity.”