Digital Commons Network^™

Voices, Stories And Experiences Of Black Women: Informing The Establishment Of A Trenton-Based Maternal And Infant Health Innovation And Research Center, Tirzah R. Spencer Phd, Mph, Barbara George Johnson Mph, J.D., Consuelo Bonillas

Center for Health Policy Development

The establishment of a Maternal and Infant Health Innovation and Research Center is one of nine recommendations outlined by the 2021 Nurture NJ Strategic Plan to reduce maternal and infant mortality and morbidity and ensure equity in care and in outcomes for mothers and infants of all ethnic groups. The purpose of this environmental scan is to provide input for the design of a Maternal and Infant Health Innovation and Research Center within Trenton.

Building on the Nurture NJ Initiative, this project is a deeper dive in its focus on Black and Latina women living in Trenton and surrounding areas. …

Massachusetts Community Mediation Center Grant Program: Fiscal Year 2022 Report & Evaluation, Madhawa Palihapitiya

Massachusetts Office of Public Collaboration Publications

The FY2022 evaluation report prepared by MOPC for the tenth year of the Grant Program operations confirms that the state’s FY2022 appropriation of $2.7 million[1]continued to strengthen community mediation center operations statewide, expanded public awareness and utilization of community mediation, and maintained critical public programs focused on housing stability, youth empowerment, reducing recidivism and building capacity for diversity, equity and inclusion for center practices and services, while producing significant social and economic impacts, including a $22.1 million return on the state’s investment in cost-savings and leveraged resources. This impact demonstrates the public value and cost-effectiveness of this local …

Competitive Intelligence And Academic Entrepreneurship As Innovative Vectors Of A Resilient, Business-Oriented Education, Daniel Gabriel Dinu, Andreea Stoian Karadeli, Larisa Mihoreanu, Elena Iuliana Pașcu Gabără, Mihail Păduraru

Public Affairs and Security Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose – The present paper substantiates that the concepts of competitive intelligence and academic entrepreneurship are genuinely connected to the modern society and, through their perpetual and versatile evolution, have an important role in moving the development on the right way.

Design/methodology/approach – Their evolutive is completed by a comparative analysis as appropriate method to point out similarities and differences and identify the way their application may serve innovation as a tool for those activating in the related domains of education, within our highly dynamic world.

Findings – The development of the concepts is meant to link and accelerate the …

Development Of A Web-Based Diabetes Prevention Program (Dpp) For Chinese Americans: A Formative Evaluation Approach, Ming-Chin Yeh, Wincy Lau, Zoey Gong, Margrethe Horlyck-Romanovsky, Ho-Jui Tung, Lin Zhu, Grace X. Ma, Judith Wylie-Rosett

Department of Health Policy and Community Health Faculty Publications

Increasing evidence demonstrates that an online Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) can delay the onset of type 2 diabetes. However, little has been done for Chinese Americans. This study, using Community-Based Participatory Research and Intervention Mapping approaches, describes a formative research process in the development of a culturally and linguistically tailored online DPP program among Chinese Americans with prediabetes living in New York City. Using a triangulation approach, data were collected to inform the development of an online DPP curriculum through (1) a literature review, (2) three focus groups (n = 24), and (3) a community advisory board meeting among 10 …

The Fiscal Sustainability Of Retiree Health Care Benefits Among New York State School Districts, Robert Bifulco, Minch Lewis, Iuliia Shybalkina

Center for Policy Research

We examine spending on retiree health care as a percentage of revenues for a sample of New York State school districts. The fiscal burden of these benefits grew from 2010 to 2021, and big city school districts have faced the largest burdens. Assuming CBO forecasts regarding growth in health care costs and continuation of recent trends in revenue growth, we project that the burden of retiree health care benefits will exceed 10 percent of revenue by 2050. Projected burdens are greatest big city and high need rural districts. We discuss cutting benefits and pre-funding as possible policy responses.

“Model Minorities” In The Classroom? Positive Evaluation Bias Towards Asian Students And Its Consequences, Ying Shi, Maria Zhu

Center for Policy Research

The fast-growing demographic group of Asian Americans is often perceived as a “model minority.” This paper establishes empirical evidence of this stereotype in the context of education and then analyzes its consequences. We show that teachers rate Asian students’ academic skills more favorably than observationally similar White students in the same class, even after accounting for test performance and behavior. This contrasts with teachers’ lower likelihood of favoring Black and Hispanic students. Notably, teachers respond to the presence of any Asian student in the classroom by exacerbating Black-White and Hispanic-White assessment gaps. This suggests that the “model minority” stereotype can …

Equivalent Hazard Magnitude Scale, Yi Victor Wang, Antonia Sebastian

Institute for ECHO Articles and Research

Hazard magnitude scales are widely adopted to facilitate communication regarding hazard events and the corresponding decision making for emergency management. A hazard magnitude scale measures the strength of a hazard event considering the natural forcing phenomena and the severity of the event with respect to average entities at risk. However, existing hazard magnitude scales cannot be easily adapted for comparative analysis across different hazard types. Here, we propose an equivalent hazard magnitude scale to measure the hazard strength of an event across multiple types of hazards. We name the scale the Gardoni Scale after Professor Paolo Gardoni. We design the …

Robust Dynamic Space-Time Panel Data Models Using Ε- Contamination: An Application To Crop Yields And Climate Change, Badi H. Baltagi, Georges Bresson, Anoop Chaturvedi, Guy Lacroix

Center for Policy Research

This paper extends the Baltagi et al. (2018, 2021) static and dynamic ε-contamination papers to dynamic space-time models. We investigate the robustness of Bayesian panel data models to possible misspecification of the prior distribution. The proposed robust Bayesian approach de-parts from the standard Bayesian framework in two ways. First, we consider the ε-contamination class of prior distributions for the model parameters as well as for the individual effects. Second, both the base elicited priors and the ε-contamination priors use Zellner (1986)’s g-priors for the variance-covariance matrices. We propose a general “toolbox” for a wide range of specifications which includes the …

A Community-Led Central Kitchen Model For School Feeding Programs In The Philippines: Learnings For Multisectoral Action For Health, Vanessa T. Siy Van, Carmina P. Siguin, Andrew C. Lacsina, Lean Franzl Yao, Zarah G. Sales, Normahitta P. Gordoncillo, Leslie Advincula-Lopez, Joselito T. Sescon, Eden Delight Miro

Health Sciences Faculty Publications

In devolved governments like the Philippines, local government units (LGUs) must be engaged to develop and coordinate responses to tackle the multisectoral problem of childhood undernutrition. However, current Philippine nutrition interventions, such as decentralized school feeding programs (SFPs), generally rely on the national government, public school teachers, or the private sector for implementation, with mixed results. The central kitchen model for SFPs was developed by 2 Philippine nongovernmental organizations and facilitated large-scale in-school feeding through community multisectoral action. This case study documented coordination processes in February 2018 for 1 urban city and 1 rural province-the model's earliest large-scale implementation sites-that …

Frequently Asked Questions: 2022 Public Access Policy Guidance, White House Office Of Science And Technology Policy

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Includes a list of frequently asked questions and answers for the 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Public Access Policy guidance, including answering questions such as "What is meant by public access to federally funded research?" and "What impact will the policy guidance have on specific business models for scholarly publishing?"

Manufactured Homes In Nevada Counties, Joshua Padilla, Annie Vong, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Housing & Real Estate

This fact sheet presents data on the share of manufactured homes in each of Nevada’s 17 counties, as reported in the June 2022 The Daily Yonder article, “With Housing Shortage Still Ongoing, Manufactured Homes are Gaining Ground,” by Kristi Eaton. The original report includes data made available by the Housing Assistance Council (HAC) for each county in the United States from 2009 and 2018.

Crisisready's Novel Framework For Transdisciplinary Translation: Case-Studies In Wildfire And Hurricane Response, Andrew Schroeder, Caleb Dresser, Akash Yadav, Jennifer Chan, Shenyue Jia, Caroline Buckee, Satchit Balsari

Institute for ECHO Articles and Research

Extreme weather events including wildfires and hurricanes are becoming increasingly hazardous due to climate change, and often result in transient or permanent population displacements. Disaster-related disruptions in infrastructure, workforce, wages, and social networks can combine with population displacements to result in interruptions in health care access and prolonged impacts on morbidity and mortality. The data needed to make health systems and emergency management approaches more resilient to these hazards, and more responsive to the needs of affected populations, are sequestered in silos across private corporations and public agencies. In two case studies, we describe how our research team at CrisisReady …

Advocacy Journalism And Climate Justice In A Global Southern Country, Shafiq Ahmad Kamboh, Muhammad Ittefaq

School of Communication Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Being among the world’s most affected countries by climate change, Pakistan is facing a variety of cases of climate injustice committed by internal and external drivers. Waisbord’s referred “Advocate-journalist” model carries a good potential to advocate these injustices to stimulate democratic dialogue among the audience that eventually pushes leadership to make eco-friendly policies. This study critically analyses advocacy journalism coverage of cases of local and regional climate injustice in the editorial contents of mainstream Pakistani newspapers by using the quantitative content analysis method. Results reveal that selected newspapers gave inappropriate coverage to climate injustice issues both in quantity and quality. …

Investing In The Future: A Case Study On Demographic Trends And The Policy Implications For Clark County School District, Joshua Alexander Padilla

Student Research

Clark County School District (CCSD) is the 5th largest school district in the nation. Through the use of the United States Census Bureau’s 2020 ACS 5-year survey, demographic trends will be analyzed for CCSD. This brief will focus on three demographic trends that have direct connections to educational success. Those three demographic trends are: internet access, poverty level (households on SNAP), and school enrollment. Potential policy interventions include technology device loan programs, adopting meal programs for students and their families, and new staff recruiting plans for CCSD.

Spatial Validation Of Agent-Based Models, Kristoffer Wikstrom, Hal T. Nelson

Public Administration Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper adapts an existing techno–social agent-based model (ABM) in order to develop a new framework for spatially validating ABMs. The ABM simulates citizen opposition to locally unwanted land uses, using historical data from an energy infrastructure siting process in Southern California. Spatial theory, as well as the model’s design, suggest that adequate validation requires multiple tests rather than relying solely on a single test-statistic. A pattern-oriented modeling approach was employed that first mapped real and simulated citizen comments across the US Census tract. The suite of spatial tests included Global Moran’s I, complemented with bivariate correlations, as well as …

Payday Loans In The Mountain West, 2022, Issac Hernandez-Alcaraz, Vanessa M. Booth, Katie M. Gilbertson, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

This fact sheet examines data on payday loans, produced by the Pew Charitable Trusts. We examine payday lending costs, most common loan type, and the average annual percentage rate in the Mountain West (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah), and include specific analysis on differences between the states by regulatory category.

Births In The Mountain West, 2016-2020, Corryn Richardson, Hira Ahmed, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Health

This fact sheet examines state-level data on births and health indicators from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a government health statistics unit of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This fact sheet presents data related to births in the Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah.

Handwringing Over How To Slice The Pie When Ustr Should Be Focused On Growing It, Christine Mcdaniel

Yeutter Institute International Trade Policy Review

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) recently released its report on the distributional effects of trade and trade policy on U.S. workers and “underrepresented and underserved communities.” The report catalogs a host of information gathered from a literature review and several roundtables on the adverse effects of U.S. manufacturing imports. But the report’s laser focus on manufacturing imports leaves a huge gap for readers interested in the distributional effects of trade.

Manufacturing imports are an important part of trade, but they aren’t all of trade. Trade is imports and exports, goods and services, inputs and final goods. Trade is manufacturing, …

Drought Levels In Nevada Counties, 2022, Julianna Jovillar, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Environment

This fact sheet synthesizes data on drought levels within Nevada counties from the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) in 2022. The information presented in this document focuses on the breakdown of the number of Nevada residents affected by the droughts within each county and the drought experience in each county.

Violence Risk Assessment Of Sovereign Citizens: An Exploratory Examination Of The Hcr-20 Version 3 And The Trap-18, Lee Vargen, Darin Challacombe

Psychology Faculty Publications

Sovereign Citizens comprise an understudied right-wing extremist movement in the United States who have grown in notoriety in recent years due to several high- profile instances of violence. Despite this, little empirical research has been conducted on Sovereign Citizens, including research on assessing their risk for violence. In this study, we sought to replicate and extend a prior study on Sovereign Citizen violence. Using open-source data, we added several new cases to a pre-existing dataset of violent and non-violent Sovereign Citizen incidents, yielding a total sample of 107 cases. We scored each case using the HCR-20V3 and TRAP-18 risk assessment …

Tanf Work Policy Influences On Family Behaviors And Child Development, Robert William Sturgill Jr

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

There has been a lack of research on how work participation policies have impacted child development through their influences on family decisions. The purpose of this qualitative research study was to explore the perspectives of families toward TANF work participation policies, discover how those policies have influenced family behaviors, and analyze how those policy-behavior phenomena have impacted child development. First, the literature review showed that families with chronic welfare dependency had negative impacts on child development. The research showed that when TANF work participation policies were unenforced or income limits were too low, some recipients worked less and persisted in …

Training Transfer, Sarah Stepanek, Megan Paul

Umbrella Summaries

What is training transfer? Training transfer is formally defined as “the degree to which trainees effectively apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes gained in a training context to the job” (Baldwin & Ford, 1988, p. 63). Training transfer has been conceptualized based on three main factors, which are detailed further below. ► Maintenance versus generalization: Maintenance consists of the degree to which knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) from the learning environment are able to persist over time, whereas generalization consists of being able to take KSAs acquired from a learning environment and apply them to situations or settings that are …

Who Has The Right To Pull The Plug?, Laila El Baradei

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Rural Health Action Network Enhanced Outreach Initiative. Year One Final Report, Mary Lindsey Smith Phd, Karen Pearson Mlis, Ma, Evelyn Ali Bs

Substance Use Research & Evaluation

Healthy Community Coalition (HCC), in coordination with the Rural Health Action Network (RHAN) of greater Franklin County, is implementing a multi-faceted outreach program to improve health outcomes among the rural poor living with chronic conditions in greater Franklin County, Maine.

The goals of the Franklin County Rural Health Action Network Enhanced Outreach Initiative (RHAN-EOI) include:

• Expand access to quality services;
• Expand training for community health extenders;
• Decrease hospital admissions, emergency department use, and costs; and
• Improve communication and care coordination across project partners

This report highlights the implementation and progress of HCC RHAN in Year 1. For more information, please …

Medication Assisted Treatment: Prescription Drug And Opioid Addiction Expansion Project, Mary Lindsey Smith Phd, Katharine Knight Mph, Mark Richards Bs, Tyler Egeland Ba, Evelyn Ali Bs

Substance Use Research & Evaluation

Greater Portland Health (GPH) in collaboration with Preble Street Resource Center was awarded a Medication Assisted Treatment: Prescription Drug & Opioid Addiction (MOUD-PDOA) grant from SAMHSA. The GPH MOUD-PDOA project will include a mixed-methods evaluation led by Catherine E. Cutler Institute. The evaluation team will build knowledge and provide feedback to inform the implementation and refinement of the GPH MOUD-PDOA Program.

Evaluation Goals:

• Document program strategies and identify barriers and facilitators to implementation
• Examine the efficacy of using a continuum of treatment services to increase access to MOUD among vulnerable populations in underserved communities
• Assess the impact of the intervention …

Criminal Justice Update - December 2022, Patrick Mahoney

Criminal Justice Updates

The Criminal Justice Update is a monthly newsletter created by the Adams County Bar Foundation Fellow providing updates in criminal justice policy coming from Pennsylvania's courts and legislature as well as the US Supreme Court.

Contents:

• Updates from PA Governor's Office (no updates this month)

• Updates from the PA Legislature (no updates this month)

• Updates from the Courts

  • U.S. Supreme Court: Criminal Law & Procedure (no updates this month)

  • PA Supreme Court: Criminal Law & Procedure (no updates this month)

  • PA Superior Court: Criminal Law & Procedure

How Can Supervisors Support New Employees?, Quality Improvement Center For Workforce Development

QIC-Tips

When the Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD) recently asked public child welfare agency staff and leaders about their concerns related to improving the workforce, one of the questions was, “How do we support new employees?” This QIC-Tip aims to answer this question with research-informed recommendations and practical advice from the field.

The process by which newcomers make the transition from being organizational outsiders to being insiders is known as onboarding, or organizational socialization (Bauer et al., 2007). The overall goal of onboarding is to facilitate newcomer adjustment, meaning that new employees understand the key tasks of …

Death And Dignity: Approaches To Medical Aid-In-Dying And Recommendations For Nevada, Cecilia Winchell

Student Research

Advancements in medicine, surgery, and treatment have prolonged life spans in a way that presents new considerations for death and dying. When it comes to terminal illnesses, all of these innovations increase life expectancy but cannot do the same for a patient’s quality of life. In fact, many people with terminal illnesses lose their autonomy and dignity, leading to the emergence of assisted dying as a way to provide terminally ill patients with an alternative to palliative care. This report takes a look at how assisted dying has developed within the US over the past two and a half decades, …

The Relationship Between Residential Land-Use Regulations And Regional Air Pollutants, Caren Royce Yap

Student Research

As cities continue to grow at exponential rates, land use regulations, specifically density restrictions, have been implemented to mitigate economic effects, from increasing housing prices to difficult public transportation construction. These regulations range in type, taking into account factors regarding the most effective urban form for cities and recently the presence of COVID-19. Land use effects on housing prices are also adjacent to tackle the climate crisis. Two of the most common air pollutants, PM 2.5 and Ozone, are run in a comparative analysis to areas with varying measures of density restrictions to detect a possible association using multiple regression …

Psychological Self-Sufficiency And Financial Literacy Among Low-Income Participants: An Empowerment-Based Approach To Financial Capability, Philip Young P. Hong, Maria V. Wathen, Alanna Shin, Intae Yoon, Jang Ho Park

Social Work: School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Other Works

Building on theory and research in financial capability, this study enhances a financial capability model by integrating psychological self-sufficiency (PSS) theory as part of the financial literacy component. Using PSS, a concept from workforce development literature, this study investigates the extent to which an empowerment-based PSS process in targeting financial goals is associated with financial literacy. Path analyses were conducted using a sample of 187 low-income individuals from a large social service agency in Chicago. Findings suggest that perceived financial barriers and financial hope—the two targets of PSS interventions—are associated with financial attitude and behavior, controlling for other demographic variables. …