Joining the Choir: Religious Membership and Social Trust Among Transnational Ghanaians

Social Forces ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Hans-Peter Y Qvist
Keyword(s):  
Social Trust ◽  
Religious Membership

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
Immigrant Integration ◽  
Integration Process ◽  
Opposite Conclusion ◽  
Trust Networks ◽  
Personal Trust ◽  
Religious Membership ◽  
Made In

This chapter summarizes the argument made in the preceding chapters and discusses what it means for religious membership to serve as a basis of social trust, and specifically personal trust enacted within social relationships. It then takes on the question of whether religious membership is ultimately helpful for immigrant integration, a major long-running debate among sociologists. It argues that while there is some evidence that religious membership in an ethnic church can detract from integration, ultimately there is much more evidence to support the opposite conclusion. Furthermore, many of the processes that seem to fuel segregation are in fact the result of inequality and the racial order, which challenge the ability of religious membership to realize its integrative potential. As a result, for transnational Ghanaians, religious memberships and their associated trust networks are generally helpful for the integration process; but not even as much as they could be, or as much as these particular immigrants would like.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Research ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Religious Membership ◽  
Religious Landscape

The introduction to the book presents its central argument about religious membership as a basis of social trust. It explains the background of the research, particularly trends in immigration to the United States and the historic place of the religious congregation as a vehicle for integration. It describes the changes that have occurred in immigration since the 1960s, and how greater diversity among immigrants has led to wide variation in patterns of integration. It also explains how these trends, along with the global rise in Evangelical Christianity, have affected how new immigrants interact with the religious landscape of the United States, and in particular how they view available options for religious membership. Finally, it presents the central research questions of the study, and gives an overview of how the research was conducted.

Conceptions of Trust in the Qur'an

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora S. Eggen
Keyword(s):  
Social Trust ◽  
Social Ethics ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Normative Claim ◽  
Trust Relationship ◽  
Trust Relationships ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Guardian

In the Qur'an we find different concepts of trust situated within different ethical discourses. A rather unambiguous ethico-religious discourse of the trust relationship between the believer and God can be seen embodied in conceptions of tawakkul. God is the absolute wakīl, the guardian, trustee or protector. Consequently He is the only holder of an all-encompassing trusteeship, and the normative claim upon the human being is to trust God unconditionally. There are however other, more polyvalent, conceptions of trust. The main discussion in this article evolves around the conceptions of trust as expressed in the polysemic notion of amāna, involving both trust relationships between God and man and inter-human trust relationships. This concept of trust involves both trusting and being trusted, although the strongest and most explicit normative claim put forward is on being trustworthy in terms of social ethics as well as in ethico-religious discourse. However, ‘trusting’ when it comes to fellow human beings is, as we shall see, framed in the Qur'an in less absolute terms, and conditioned by circumstantial factors; the Qur'anic antithesis to social trust is primarily betrayal, ‘khiyāna’, rather than mistrust.

TrustSVD: A Novel Trust-Based Matrix Factorization Model with User Trust and Item Ratings

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
K Sobha Rani
Keyword(s):  
Matrix Factorization ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Real World Data ◽  
Recommendation Algorithm ◽  
Active User ◽  
Factorization Model ◽  
The Social ◽  
Matrix Factorization Technique

Collaborative filtering suffers from the problems of data sparsity and cold start, which dramatically degrade recommendation performance. To help resolve these issues, we propose TrustSVD, a trust-based matrix factorization technique. By analyzing the social trust data from four real-world data sets, we conclude that not only the explicit but also the implicit influence of both ratings and trust should be taken into consideration in a recommendation model. Hence, we build on top of a state-of-the-art recommendation algorithm SVD++ which inherently involves the explicit and implicit influence of rated items, by further incorporating both the explicit and implicit influence of trusted users on the prediction of items for an active user. To our knowledge, the work reported is the first to extend SVD++ with social trust information. Experimental results on the four data sets demonstrate that our approach TrustSVD achieves better accuracy than other ten counterparts, and can better handle the concerned issues.

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