Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Quest To End Human Trafficking: An Educational And Practical Guide For Everyone Who Wants To Help Break The Bonds And Assist Survivors, Dennis W. Mccarty

Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity Faculty Scholarship

People often assume that only legislators and law enforcement personnel can take meaningful steps to fight human trafficking, one of the most lucrative transnational crimes in the world. This inquiry sought to assess the validity of that belief. The study was informed by the author’s experience as a college instructor of human trafficking and the inspiration he drew from the range and quality of his students’ projects.

The methodology included examining the strategies that governmental and non-governmental organizations are using to fight trafficking and assist survivors. It also considered the work of individual activists and service providers such as social …

How The “Black Criminal” Stereotype Shapes Black People’S Psychological Experience Of Policing: Evidence Of Stereotype Threat And Remaining Questions, Cynthia J. Najdowski

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Cultural stereotypes that link Black race to crime in the U.S. originated in and are perpetuated by policies that result in the disproportionate criminalization and punishment of Black people. The scientific record is replete with evidence that these stereotypes impact perceivers’ perceptions, information processing, and decision-making in ways that produce more negative criminal legal outcomes for Black people than White people. However, relatively scant attention has been paid to understanding how situations that present a risk of being evaluated through the lens of crime-related stereotypes also directly affect Black people. In this article, I consider one situation in particular: encounters …

Evaluation Of The Legal And Historical Perspectives On Piracy In The Gulf Of Aden, Diana Slobodian

Public Administration & Policy

This paper will consider piracy in Somalia, focusing on the two emerging perspectives that define the way that research and counter-piracy efforts are planned and executed. Through an examination of Somalia’s political and legal history, the violence which has occurred in the Gulf of Aden will be deconstructed and understood using socio-economic reasoning. The piracy for protection narrative will provide the groundwork for understanding the causes for piracy. The piracy for profit narrative will distinctly show why some researchers believe that piracy in the Gulf of Aden persisted for so many years. This paper will review certain counter-piracy measures, which …

Performance Management And Contracting Out To Support Public Health Objectives : Evidence From U.S. Local Health Departments, Philip Gigliotti

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Contracting out and performance management have been universally adopted in public sector organizations, based on theoretical arguments that they would improve the efficiency and quality of public services. However, this broad adoption was carried out despite minimal empirical evidence that these interventions improve public service outcomes in practice. Traditionally, few studies have attempted to quantitatively link performance management and contracting out interventions to improvements in organizational performance and public service quality. A growing literature has investigated this relationship with inconclusive results, suggesting these interventions do not have a clear ability to improve organizational performance. This dissertation examines these relationships in …

Human-Wildlife Coexistence With Coyotes In Los Angeles County, Ca And Cook County, Il, Alan Eapen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The expansion of coyotes (Canis latrans) into urban and suburban areas where human concentration is high has led to human-coyote conflicts often leading to increased management actions against coyotes. Recently in Los Angeles and Cook Counties, municipalities have developed coyote management plans to foster human-wildlife coexistence in an effort to reduce conflict, an emerging concept that promotes the cohabitation of humans and animals in shared landscapes. The thesis investigates coyote management plans and policies concerning human-coyote interactions in Los Angeles and Cook Counties to address human-wildlife. Using a case study analysis of Los Angeles and Cook Counties, this study analyzed …

Treating Anonymous Patients : The Effectiveness, Costs, And Strategies Of Promoting The Use Of Expedited Partner Therapy, Andre Kiesel

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Despite decades of concerted efforts to prevent their spread, chlamydia andgonorrhea remain two of the most prevalent sexually transmitted infections in the United States (U.S.) — exacting a high toll in terms of human health and healthcare expenditure. Though easily cured with antibiotics, both infections may lead to damaging secondary health conditions – known as sequelae – if untreated, including infertility among females. However, treating diagnosed individuals (known as “index patients”) is not enough—it is critical to also care for their recent sex partners as well, lest they reinfect the treated patient. Partner referral is the traditional approach to partner …

Explaining The Nras Radical Transformation : The Role Of Identity And Strategy In Discursive Boundary Work And The Emergence Of Sub-Group Dominance, William A. Sisk

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation asks how a radical faction within the National Rifle Association (NRA) took over the organization and transformed it into such a dominant force in American politics. To address this question, the researcher conducted a historical discourse analysis of articles and letters in two prominent gun magazines – Guns & Ammo and Field & Stream – during a critical period of development from 1958 to 1978. The project integrates existing theoretical models based on identity (Castells 2004) and discourse coalitions (Dodge & Metze 2016; Hajer 1995) to understand the process by which coalitional boundaries get shaped and reshaped in …

Policy Side Effects : How Do Policies Become A Source Of Social Problems?, Yongjin Choi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

How do the consequences of a policy become a source of another social problem? Social science scholars have long recognized the possibility that policies often generate new social problems, unintentionally or even intentionally. However, public policy scholarship has been somewhat slow to translate these insights into systematic research inquiries and accumulate concrete knowledge about this issue. As a result, when confronted with the widespread social and political repercussions of unavoidable but strong policy responses, such as COVID-19 associated lockdowns and vaccine mandates, the policy literature has largely failed to advise on how to anticipate, handle, and overcome the hardships generated …

The Communicative Capacities Of The Medical Discourse In Authoritarian Societies : The Case Of Aids In Iran, Elham Pourtaher

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study explores the role of medical discourse in the Iranian formal public sphere. It examines how an epidemiological wave of HIV/AIDS—known as "the third wave"—highlighted nontraditional sexual behaviors in public and enabled a shift in policy and discourse by the Islamic Republic State. Through analyzing published content on HIV/AIDS from five major Iranian newspapers between 2009 and 2013, this study identified four competing narratives of the third wave which coexist and have a dynamic relationship with one another. First, the medical narrative warns of an unfolding public health crisis and provides a technical perspective to make sense of the …

Evaluation Of Aquatic Plant Survey Methods For Efficacy In Invasive Species Detection, Izaac Cooper

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Aquatic invasive plants can often be ecologically devastating to ecosystems where they are introduced. This devastation has been widely apparent in the United States, including many locations in New York State over many decades, following anthropogenic transport of species from their native ranges. Due to the difficulty involved in eradicating these plants once they have become fully established, there is keen interest in strategies for early detection to assist with prevention and monitoring to mitigate future management costs. Invasive species detection research aims to find methods for detecting new invaders more effectively. I evaluated three detection methods for their effectiveness …

From Dissenting-Voice To Democratic Bureaucracy : Three Essays On Bureaucratic Whistleblowing, Minsung Michael Kang

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Public administration scholars have long believed that bureaucratic whistleblowers help make bureaucracies more democratic, effective, and accountable. With these firm convictions, the U.S. federal government has introduced a series of whistleblower protection systems to balance administrative power and external political accountability of public organizations. Building on this intellectual history of public administration scholarship on whistleblowing, this dissertation aims to: 1) understand bureaucratic whistleblowing at the theory-level, 2) examine the effects of whistleblower protection laws on bureaucrats at the individual-level, and 3) investigate how whistleblowing outcomes can reshape bureaucracies at the organizational-level.

A Call To Dismantle Systemic Racism In Criminal Legal Systems, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Margaret C. Stevenson

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Objectives: In October 2021, APA passed a resolution addressing ways psychologists could work to dismantle systemic racism in criminal legal systems. The present report, developed to inform APA’s policy resolution, details the scope of the problem and offers recommendations for policy and psychologists to address the issue by advancing related science and practice. Specifically, it acknowledges the roots of modern-day racial and ethnic disparities in rates of criminalization and punishment for people of color as compared to White people. Next, the report reviews existing theory and research that helps explain the underlying psychological mechanisms driving racial and ethnic disparities …

Towards A Psychological Science Of Abolition Democracy: Insights For Improving Theory And Research On Race And Public Safety, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Phillip Atiba Goff

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

We call for psychologists to expand their thinking on fair and just public safety by engaging with the “Abolition Democracy” framework that Du Bois (1935) articulated as the need to dissolve slavery while simultaneously taking affirmative steps to rid its toxic consequences from the body politic. Because the legacies of slavery continue to produce disparities in public safety in the U.S, both harming Black people and the institutions that could keep them safe, psychologists must take seriously questions of history and structure in addition to immediate situations. In the present article, we consider the state of knowledge regarding psychological processes …

When It Hits The Fan, Does Network Management Matter? : A Study On Policy Shocks And The Production And Delivery Of Public Goods And Services By Service Delivery Networks, Jennie Rhodes Law

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARYFor decades public administration and management scholars have conceptualized organizational networks as solutions to failures of markets and hierarchies (see, for example, Goldsmith and Eggers 2005; Osborne and Gaebler 1992). Relationships among organizations or actors within a network are framed positively as channels through which human, financial, and knowledge resources flow to address complex or “wicked” social problems (see, for example, Rittel and Weber, 1973). However, recent scholarship has sought to pull the curtain back and identify the pitfalls of networked arrangements for public service delivery (see, for example, O’Toole & Meier, 2006; O’Toole & Meier, 2004). Such studies …

Tightening Your Grip : The Unintended Consequences Of Export Control Policies, Keon C. Weigold

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation examines the effects that policies instituted to restrict the diffusion of technology between countries have on the development of technology and international relations. Diffusion restrictions such as export controls or strategic trade controls are often instituted for the purpose of increasing the national security of the implementing country. However, this project theorizes that these types of restrictions can have unforeseen effects on the level of technological development in the implementing country and other countries around the world. The implementing country will see a decrease in their relative level of technological development while other countries around the world will …

Economic Sanctions And Opportunism, Keith A. Preble

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Sanctions busting refers to instances where third-party states increase their material support for states targeted by economic sanctions by increasing trade as well as foreign aid and investment, which, in turn, minimize the economic costs that sanctions imposed on target states. This concept privileges the sender and contributes to the “sender bias” inherent in the literature on economic sanctions. My dissertation instead argues that the terms sanctions opportunism may better reflect the nature of the processes at work when third-party states engage in sanctions busting either for commercial profit or as a “black knight” (or a combination of them both). …

Barriers To Hiv Testing Among Cameroonian Men : The Role Of Stigma And The Impact Of Covid-19, Heidi Iyok

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

ABSTRACT

The Effects Of Head Start On Parenting: A Systematic Literature Review, Julia Alotta

Public Administration & Policy

Head Start (HS) is federally funded early childhood development program that provides services, including daycare and parenting classes for low-income families. However, debates exist over its efficacy in improving child development outcomes throughout the child’s life course. This research aimed to review the evidence that Head Start improves parenting skills, which, in turn can foster improved health through a systematic review of recent empirical literature on Head Start and parenting. The study identified nine studies measuring the impact of parental involvement in HS on child outcomes. After reviewing these articles, we conclude that the HS program allows for parents to …

Caregivers’ Expectations, Reflected Appraisals, And Arrests Among Adolescents Who Experienced Parental Incarceration, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Melissa Noel

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

This research sought to identify a potential process by which intergenerational crime occurs, focusing on the effect of parental incarceration on adolescents’ subsequent arrests. We drew from Matsueda’s work on reflected appraisals as an explanatory mechanism for this effect. Thus, the present research examined whether caregivers’ and adolescents’ expectations for adolescents’ future incarceration sequentially mediated the effect of parental incarceration on adolescents’ actual arrest outcomes. Propensity score matching was used to examine this effect in a sample of 1,735 15- to 16-year-olds using NLSY97 data. Parental incarceration was positively related to caregivers’ expectations of adolescents’ future arrest. Moreover, caregivers’ expectations …

Administrative Easing: Rule Reduction And Medicaid Enrollment, Ashley Fox, Wenhui Feng, Edmund Stazyk

Public Administration and Policy Faculty Scholarship

Administrative burden is widely recognized as a barrier to program enrollment, denying legal entitlements to many eligible individuals. We examine what effect voluntary state reductions in administrative burden (what we call administrative easing) have had on Medicaid enrollment rates using differential implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Using a novel dataset that includes state-level data on simplified enrollment and renewal procedures for Medicaid from 2008-2017, we examine how change in Medicaid enrollment is conditioned by the adoption of rule-reduction procedures. We find that reductions in the administrative burden required to signup for Medicaid were associated with increased enrollments. Real-time eligibility …

Modeling An Open Data Ecosystem : The Case Of Food Service Establishments Inspection In New York State, Mahdi Mirdamadi Najafabadi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Open Government Data (OGD) is becoming an increasingly popular initiative around the world. OGD initiatives have a broad number of stakeholders from different sectors and are influenced by many political, societal, and technological factors. In this thesis, I used the notion of Open Government Data Ecosystem (OGDE) as a holistic perspective to the OGD phenomenon, which encompasses important actors, their reciprocal interactions, and their impacts on the OGD environment.

Naral And The Art Of Playing Defense : How Interest Groups Act When They Seek To Protect The Status Quo Of Public Policy, Katherine Elaine Slye-Hernandez

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Why do interest groups take certain actions in policy debates and not others? How do groups seeking to protect the status quo of policy act? These questions, and others, cannot be answered well by the current interest group literature, and this dissertation seeks to delve into this line of research with a case study of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). While certain aspects of the interest group literature, and a large part of the venue shopping literature specifically, can help scholars understand some actions of groups like NARAL, there are a whole host of actions NARAL took that …

Leveraging Big Data : Predicting Traffic Risk And Providing Early Warning Due To Adverse Weather Conditions, Sreekumar E. Nampoothiri

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The proliferation of big data has allowed researchers to delve deeper into data and gain better understandings within almost every field. In the fields of transportation planning and traffic management, past research has shown direct relationships among weather conditions and traffic speed, volume, and congestion. However, these studies have mostly relied on static data that were spatially and temporally sparse or collected on a specific roadway for a specific time period for research purposes. With the need to address the impacts of climate change, including an increasing number of extreme weather events as well as an increasing intensity of such …

An Exploratory Mixed Methods Study Of Geographic Mobility And Homeless Service Use In Northeastern New York State, Amanda Aykanian

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study used a mixed methods design to explore the geographic mobility of homeless service users in northeastern New York State and the relationship between mobility and homeless service use, engagement, and delivery. For the quantitative component, a sample of Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) data—that includes adults accessing homeless services in 2017 across 21 counties in northeastern New York State—was used to describe service users’ mobility and the demographic, background, and service use characteristics associated with mobility. For the qualitative component, semi-structured interviews with homeless service providers in those same counties were used to understand providers’ views of mobility, …

Using Systems Archetypes And Generic Structures To Support Water Resource Management Studies : The Case Of Cropping Pattern Change In New Mexico State, Babak Bahaddin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

A wide range of managerial problems are similar in nature, and yet they continuously appear in different forms and in different geographical locations. Compared to other sciences, it seems that in the field of management, managers have a hard time facing these similar problems. Part of this issues is caused by the extreme complexity of the systems and another part is caused by the lack of a universal language with which managers can communicate their lessons. This dissertation offers a set of tools that have been previously manufactured in systems science, and more specifically in System Dynamics.

Awareness Of Sex Offender Registration Policies And Self-Reported Sexual Offending In A Community Sample Of Adolescents, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Hayley M. D. Cleary

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Sex offender registration laws are widely implemented, increasingly restrictive, and intended to serve both specific and general deterrent functions. Most states have some form of policy mechanism to place adolescents on sex offender registries, yet it remains unclear whether adolescents possess the requisite policy awareness to be deterred from sexual offending. This study examined awareness of sex offender registration as a potential sanction and its cross-sectional association with engagement in several registrable sexual behaviors (sexting, indecent exposure, sexual solicitation, and forcible touching) in a community sample of 144 adolescents. Results revealed that many adolescents were unaware that these behaviors could …

Sanctions And The Proliferation Of Terrorism: Cases Of Iran, Libya, And Bosnia-Herzegovina, Savanah Courtney

Public Administration & Policy

This study tests the hypothesis that the use of sanctions as a foreign policy tool produces favorable conditions for an increase in terrorism activity using cases of sanctions against Bosnia-Herzegovina, Libya, and Iran. Using literature as the basis for this hypothesis, data suggests that there is not significant evidence to support this theory using these cases. The circumstances surrounding the political environment and stability of each country tells different stories, where attributing rising terrorist activity to sanctions themselves ignores the complexity of foreign economies their political and social atmospheres in which they operate. This thesis alludes to several questions and …

Winners And Losers In The Remaking Of American Healthcare Payment Systems Following The Aca : A Theory Of Private-Actor Policymaking And Implications For Democratic Decision Making, Heather G. Bennett

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law, thereby ushering in the most sweeping, expansive changes to the American healthcare system since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. Supporters, including healthcare advocates, celebrated the passage of the ACA as a defining moment in healthcare history. As broad policy reform influenced practice on the ground in the months and years after passage, physicians working in private practices and hospitals changed some things about the way that they treat patients. Yet, following interviews with doctors and medical office practice managers to talk …

Right Size Me : Policy Responses To The Obesity Eidemic And Behavioral Change, Wenhui Feng

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Obesity is a critical health and social concern. Almost 40% of American adults are obese, creating more than $300 billion dollars in annual medical costs. While obesity is a public concern that has been on the policy agenda for some time, obesity policies have proven difficult to formulate, adopt and implement in practice. In this dissertation, I explore three obesity-related policies – adoption of obesity prevention policies by local health department, calorie labeling on restaurant menus and food assistance benefits – and find the importance of ideological and political considerations for obesity policies at different stages in the policy process …

Endogenous Policy Design In Healthcare : A Case Study Of Emergency Department Crowding, Katrina Alexandra Hull

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The United States’ health care system has faced growing per capita use, and subsequent crowding, of the emergency department since the 1990’s, evidenced by longer wait times and the institution of ambulance diversions. Emergency departments are but one element of a complex system, with difficulties which persist despite policy efforts.