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Communication Is A Two Way Street: Race, Gender, And Elite Responsiveness In U.S. Politics, Mia Costa Jul 2018

Communication Is A Two Way Street: Race, Gender, And Elite Responsiveness In U.S. Politics, Mia Costa

Doctoral Dissertations

At the heart of a representative democracy is the need for open lines of communication between citizens and their representatives. This dissertation is comprised of three stand-alone chapters which examine how responsive American public officials are to constituent communications, Americans' attitudes about elite responsiveness, and how race and gender condition this relationship. In the first chapter, I conduct the first meta-analysis of all experiments that examine how responsive public officials are to constituent communication. I demonstrate at a higher level of precision than any single study the degree to which legislators are biased against racial and ethnic minorities, and find …


Mothering In A Era Of Choice: Race And Gender In Schooling Decisions Of Homeschool And Public School Families, Mahala Stewart Jul 2018

Mothering In A Era Of Choice: Race And Gender In Schooling Decisions Of Homeschool And Public School Families, Mahala Stewart

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation draws from in-depth interview data to compare the schooling choices of 95 mothers living in United States. The sample is split between white and black mothers. Within each racial group, one set teaches their children at home and a second set sends them to public schools. School choice, which places the responsibility of selection on individual families, is central to current U.S. education debates. Yet homeschooling, an option that transfers labor from schools to home, is often overlooked in these debates. To date no research has compared homeschoolers to other schooling families in the same region, or examined …


Two Of The Same? Infants' Conceptual Representation Of Faces Based Upon Gender, Race, And Kind Information, Charisse Pickron Jul 2018

Two Of The Same? Infants' Conceptual Representation Of Faces Based Upon Gender, Race, And Kind Information, Charisse Pickron

Doctoral Dissertations

Infants’ perceptual abilities allow them to distinguish faces of different races and genders from an early age (for a review, see Pascalis et al., 2011). However, it is still unknown when infants begin using these perceptual differences to represent faces in a conceptual, kind-based manner. The current dissertation examined this issue by testing whether 12- and 24-month-old infants represent faces of different races and genders as distinct ‘kinds’ or instead as variations of a single broader category (e.g., ‘human face’). The current dissertation included two experiments each with a different type of violation-of-expectation individuation paradigm. Experiment 1 used a passive …


The Para Predicament: Investigating The Intersectionality Of Race, Disability, And Paraeducator Assignment, Christina Saccoccio Apr 2018

The Para Predicament: Investigating The Intersectionality Of Race, Disability, And Paraeducator Assignment, Christina Saccoccio

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examined the relationship between student characteristics and paraeducator assignment. A Disability Critical Race framework was chosen to investigate whether current models of special education service delivery, which rely heavily on paraeducator supports, may be further marginalizing Students of Color with disabilities. A secondary dataset from one school district of 322 students serviced under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in grades PK-12 was analyzed. This quantitative study utilized multivariate logistic regression with a focus on student characteristics as a predictor variable for paraeducator assignment. My first research question investigated whether individual student characteristics (i.e., race/ethnicity, disability category, …