What is it about?

The experience that individuals feel when belong to social groups and the level of empowerment they achieve in each social context is highly determined by the interactions they maintain with other group members. Social network analysis provide powerful tools to quantify the level of embeddedness of subjects in group, organizational and community settings. This investigation shows that sense of community and empowerment are intertwined process and the effects of relational environment on both process are especially powerful in organizational contexts.

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Why is it important?

Human beings are social beings. People interact everyday with other people in multiple social environments (organizations, schools, universities, organizations, communities...) and this interactions adopt the form of social networks. Scholars have shown that this connections affects our behaviour in various ways via contagion and social influence processes. Thus, to know how the position occupyed in social networks is related to psychocial factors as sense of community and psychological empowerment is important for developing evidence-based theories on social behavior

Perspectives

From my perspective as author, this research is importante because to date, studies that shows the relationships between psychosocial processes and network measures are mostly theoretical and the scarce empirical works are centered on a single case study, usually with a single and relatively homogeneous sample. In contrast, our study (1) includes five case studies developed en two countries, (2) is conducted in organizational and community settings and (3) the structural analysis is based in ego-centric and socio-centric networks data which enrich the conclusions drawn from this empirical research.

Ignacio Ramos-Vidal
Universidad de Sevilla

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This page is a summary of: Sense of community, psychological empowerment, and relational structure at the individual and organizational levels: Evidence from a multicase study, Journal of Community Psychology, October 2019, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/jcop.22261.
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