Explanation of social phenomena by mathematical models

Abstract

In my paper, which got the best paper award, I challenged to unravel the mechanism in which people help each other in loose-knit organization. Firstly, I carried out empirical research on the helping activities in the individual affiliate labor unions, called community unions. Then I represent the focal phenomenon by the mathematical model to analyse the mechanism of it. The importance of this paper is twofold. One is that I focused on the contemporary problem such as human cooperation in flexible relationships. The other is that I combined the mathematical analysis with the empirical research in order to explain the focal phenomenon. In this paper, putting the more emphasis on the latter issue, I would argue the impact of this multi-method approach on only the mathematical sociology but also the sociology as a whole.