Differentiating specialists and generalists within college students' social support networks

In order to examine the relationships among social network structure, types of social support, and determinants of support satisfaction, an alternative method was used to score the Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ). Factor analysis procedures suggested that college students' (N=198) social networks consisted of four groups: nuclear family, other family, friends, and others. Satisfaction with support was positively related to the proportion of the network occupied by nuclear family and negatively related to the proportion of friends in the network. Evidence was found for the presence of both support specialists and support generalists in the networks of the college students. These results are discussed from a developmental perspective with attention to the implications for interventions.     

Patent Related Indicators for Assessing Knowledge-Generating Institutions: Towards a Contextualised Approach

This contribution aims at examining the extent to which patent related indicators are relevant for shedding light on the notion of excellence within knowledge-generating institutions. Traditionally, excellence has been looked upon as the ability to create interesting and valuable new scientific concepts, theories and data. From such a perspective, scientific excellence can be assessed through scientometric measures of publication output and impact. The recent interest in the entrepreneurial phenomenon within knowledge-generating institutes justifies efforts to examine the relevancy of broadening the set of indicators used to assess such institutions into the direction of entrepreneurial excellence. In this paper we will examine the relevancy of using patent data in order to delineate such additional, more entrepreneurial oriented, indicators. The arguments and findings presented in this respect will lead us to a plea for the use of these indicators in a contextualized manner.