Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Use Of Unoccupied Aerial Vehicle (Drones) Based Remote Sensing To Model Platform Topography And Identify Human-Made Earthen Barriers In Salt Marshes, Joshua J. Ward

Masters Theses

Elevation is a foundational driver of salt marsh morphology. Elevation governs inundation and hydrological patterns, vegetation distribution, and soil health. Anthropogenic impacts at grand scales (e.g., rising sea levels) and local scales (e.g., infrastructure) have altered the elevation of the salt marsh surface, changing the topography and morphology of these ecosystems. This study establishes and assesses means to document and analyze these impacts using Unoccupied Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based remote sensing to model platform topography. This thesis’s first and primary study presents and compares methods of producing high-resolution digital terrain models (DTMs) with UAV-based Digital Aerial Photogrammetry (DAP) and Light …

Buffering Effects Of Negative Intergroup Contact Through Complex Social Identities, Liora Morhayim

Masters Theses

Although negative intergroup contact occurs less frequently than positive contact, negative contact can more strongly influence outgroup attitudes and behaviors due to the effect of category salience in the generalization process. The present study (N =306) tests whether being aware of an outgroup member’s complex social identity will serve as a buffer against the adverse impact of a negative intergroup contact experience on outgroup attitudes. In a 3X2 between-subjects design, social identity complexity (SIC) of an outgroup confederate (high versus low versus control) and the valence of contact (neutral versus negative) were manipulated. Participants interacted with an outgroup confederate …

Structural Racism, Black Out-Group Preference, And Mental Health, Alexander J. Kellogg

Masters Theses

Structural racism has increasingly been implicated as a root cause of racial disparities in health and well-being. Specifically, areas where White Americans hold more negative attitudes toward Black Americans have been associated with both anti-Black discrimination and poorer Black physical and mental health. However, previous research has relied on cross-sectional designs and has neglected the potential effects of Black community-level attitudes on mental health. We hypothesized that higher aggregate pro-White bias among White Americans would be associated with higher implicit out-group preference among Black residents living in the same communities, above and beyond the effects of traditional measures of structural …

Automated Identification And Mapping Of Interesting Mineral Spectra In Crism Images, Arun M. Saranathan

Doctoral Dissertations

The Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) has proven to be an invaluable tool for the mineralogical analysis of the Martian surface. It has been crucial in identifying and mapping the spatial extents of various minerals. Primarily, the identification and mapping of these mineral spectral-shapes have been performed manually. Given the size of the CRISM image dataset, manual analysis of the full dataset would be arduous/infeasible. This dissertation attempts to address this issue by describing an (machine learning based) automated processing pipeline for CRISM data that can be used to identify and map the unique mineral signatures present in …

Local Governmental Collective Action And Mandated Policy Implementation, Michael D. Roberts

Doctoral Dissertations

Groundwater depletion is a global concern. Around the world, groundwater supplies more than half the water used for agriculture and human drinking. Many other species and ecosystems are supported by groundwater and rely on the integrity of groundwater and surface water connections. Like many social and environmental problems, addressing the overextraction of groundwater requires collective action across governmental authorities and jurisdictions. To date, there are few examples of successful, voluntary groundwater management. To steer collective action at the local level, higher levels of government often use policy mandates. This dissertation examines the implementation of one such mandate. California’s Sustainable Groundwater …

Framing Fanart, E J. Nielsen

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation, “Framing Fanart,” broadly theorizes media fanart, a form of transformative work that is enormously popular, transnational and transcultural, and at its heart an engaged response to a piece of media. Through physical and digital archival research, discourse analysis, and qualitative research methods, I consider specific examples of how fanart functions within these different framings. This work is some of the first to consider fanart broadly as both a lens through which to view patterns of cultural production and a discrete artefact which merits serious consideration as artwork in its own right.

Associations Between Early Childhood Sleep, Memory Function, And Brain Development Across The Nap Transition, Sanna Lokhandwala

Doctoral Dissertations

Preschool-age children often distribute their sleep across a midday nap and overnight sleep. Skipping the nap is suggested to increase the duration and depth of deep sleep (i.e., slow wave activity; SWA). Moreover, missing the midday nap has been shown to impair learning processes. This may be because children’s brains at this point in development are immature, necessitating the intervening nap period to strengthen memories before they are forgotten. Nonetheless, at some point during the preschool years, many children begin transitioning naturally out of napping. It is unclear whether the memory benefits of overnight SWA after a skipped nap depend …

Online Fan Communities: Welcoming Behavior, Brand Community Markers, And Multiple Identities In Sports Fandom, Blaine R. Huber

Doctoral Dissertations

Online fan communities have revolutionized the way sport consumers engage with fellow fans and the sports product. The traditional regional boundaries that once characterized sports fandom have been mitigated by the emergence of new media, social media platforms, and online fan communities. This dissertation explores the non-geographically bound nature of contemporary sports fan communities, examining the evolving dynamics of fan behavior in the digital age. In Study 1, an interactional perspective is employed to explore online fan socialization. The focus is on how new fans' self-presentation influences acceptance within NFL team-specific Reddit communities. Utilizing data mining, textual analysis, and qualitative …

The Impacts Of Environment And Host Evolutionary Relationships On Lemur Microbiota, Rachel B. Burten

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent studies have shown that the mammal microbiome is modified by environmental conditions, and that reduced microbiome functionality is associated with host health issues. Microbiome data in wild and captive primate populations can therefore be used to assess their health as they encounter a variety of environments. Comparative studies of the microbiome can also inform disease ecology, conservation, and captive management strategies tailored to different primate species. Therefore, this study examines how the hair, oral, and gut microbiota of nine wild and captive lemur species are determined by host phylogenetic relationships and host environment. I found that host species identity …

Collective Autonomy Restriction: A Theoretical Model And Empirical Investigations, Adrian Rivera-Rodriguez

Doctoral Dissertations

Collective autonomy refers to a group’s freedom to define and practice their own cultural and social identity without interference from other groups. According to the “threat and defense” hypothesis of collective autonomy restriction, group members are motivated to defend their collective autonomy from outside restriction. However, the psychological processes that influence advantaged vs. disadvantaged group members perceptions of collective autonomy, as well as the specific strategies they use to protect collective autonomy, have yet to be articulated. This dissertation presents three manuscripts that examine the social conditions and psychological processes that shape advantaged and disadvantaged group members’ perceptions of collective …

Counterdirectionality In The Grammar: Reversals And Restitutions, Jyoti Iyer

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is an exploration of counterdirectionality, a semantic notion encompassing various sorts of reversals, involving either movement along a path, or---more abstractly---the restoring of an object or a state of affairs to a prior condition. Counterdirectionality is a relationship between an asserted event and a presupposed event in a strict temporal ordering. Across languages, it is frequently expressed by presuppositional adverbs that mean BACK (as in English Ali flew back from New York, Bina hugged Ali back, The door swung back open). The distribution of BACK-adverbs tends to overlap in a systematic way with that of …

Associative Plurals, Sherry Hucklebridge

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is to present an analysis of associative plurals in Japanese, Turkish, and Armenian that captures their associative interpretation along with a series of cross-linguistically consistent behaviours that do not seem to stem directly from these special meanings. For associative plurals, group affiliation is established through spatio-temporal or conceptual contiguity rather than a shared description (Moravcsik 2003). Approaches to English-like additive plurality are unable to capture associative plurals because they predict a plurality based on similarity, where every element of a plural noun is either an element of the corresponding singular or a concatenation of those …

Sociocultural And Familial Factors Associated With Symptom Experience At Midlife Among Women In Nagaland, India, Peteneinuo Rulu

Doctoral Dissertations

This cross-sectional study examines the sociocultural and familial factors that are associated with symptom experience at midlife among women in Nagaland. More specifically, the study examines the factors associated with symptoms at midlife, the relationship between symptoms at midlife, household stressors, ethnopolitical problems, and various measures of stress, and the buffering effects of social support against the negative effects of stress on symptoms at midlife. Data from 151 women aged 40-55 were collected from 4 regions in Nagaland, India. The most common symptoms reported during the past two weeks were headaches (72%), tiredness or lack of energy (67.5%), and hot …

Alternative Power: The Politics Of Denmark's Renewable Energy Transition, Robert Darrow

Doctoral Dissertations

Global climate change is one of the defining political challenges and opportunities of the current era. Experts widely agree that technical means already exist for making the necessary transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy; the obstacles to doing so are primarily political. Careful observers also recognize that this period of transition creates an opening for political innovation and development. How can the political will be generated to take action to prevent climate catastrophe? And what will the process of transitioning mean for the political systems that have been built on cheap and abundant oil? Political scientists have largely ignored …

The Collateral Consequences Of Criminal Stigma In Higher Education: Investigating Barriers To Institutional Access And Social Inclusion, Hannah K. Chimowitz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the collateral consequences of criminal record stigma within the realm of higher education, an important institutional domain that is recognized as facilitating social mobility and providing opportunities for individuals with criminal histories. I develop an integrative theoretical framework and present two empirical studies. Study 1 investigates the relationship between criminal screening in undergraduate admissions applications and campus crime rates, as well as Black undergraduate enrollment rates. Using the Common Application's removal of criminal history questions as a natural experiment, I employ propensity score methods and estimate a series of latent growth curve models using structural equation modeling. …

The Puzzle Of Debutant Ingo Participation In Guatemala’S National Reading Program Leamos Juntos: A Comparative And Multi-Sited Case Study, Jacob A. Carter

Doctoral Dissertations

The dynamics of nongovernmental organizations (NGO) working in Guatemala can be understood as processual, evolving with and being shaped by social and cultural events in Guatemala and around the world. Central to understanding these dynamics is NGOs’ historical relationship to the State, which has ranged from collaborative to homicidal. However, as the number and activity of NGOs increase globally and in Guatemala, specifically within the education sector, some scholars characterize them less by their opposition to the State and more by their provision of education and myriad affiliations with the State. The purpose of this dissertation is to situate …

The Fear-Avoidance Model And Persistent Post-Concussion Symptoms In University Students, Michael Broggi

Doctoral Dissertations

Ten to 20% of individuals who sustain a concussion continue to experience symptoms outside the typical window of recovery. Pre-morbid and post-injury anxiety are risk-factors for persistent post-concussion symptoms (PCS). However, mechanisms linking anxiety and persistent PCS are unclear. The fear-avoidance model of disability could add clarity to associations between anxiety and persistent PCS. This study examined if factors of the fear-avoidance model (e.g., catastrophic thinking, fear of symptoms, anxiety sensitivity) would mediate the association between persistent PCS and maladaptive coping responses (e.g., avoidance, limiting activities) following concussion. To achieve this aim, university students (N = 43) with resolved …

The Near-Synonymous Classifiers In Mandarin Chinese: Etymology, Modern Usage, And Possible Problems In L2 Classroom, Irina Kavokina

Masters Theses

Many Chinese classifiers are nearly synonymic – they can be used with the same head nouns without changing the meaning of the sentence, in other words, such classifiers can be used interchangeably or almost interchangeably. This poses a challenge for Chinese language learners, especially those who lack such a grammatical category in their own native language. Another complication arises from the ambiguous English translations of many classifiers.

In this paper we investigate the collocation behavior of near-synonymous Chinese classifiers, focusing on their semantic nuances and interchangeability. Analyzing 6 pairs of classifiers — 栋 and 幢, 匹 and 头, 批 and …

Diagnostic Feature Detection And Sequential Eyewitness Lineups, Jerome D. Hoover

Masters Theses

Prior work has demonstrated that the sequential presentation of lineup members in eyewitness lineups can result in undesirable position effects. For example, some studies have shown that placing the suspect in later positions increases discriminability. However, the evidence for this late-position discriminability advantage is mixed and the processes by which the discriminability increase occurs are unclear. However, one theory in particular, diagnostic feature detection theory (DFDT) explicitly predicts a late-position discriminability increase. According to DFDT, because shared features across lineup members cannot be used as reliable recognition cues to guide identification, discounting these features from consideration improves recognition. In sequential …

Resource Allocation In Subsidy Welfare Programs: Managerial Insights For Nonprofits, Governments, And Service Providers, Wei Wei

Doctoral Dissertations

Subsidy welfare programs provide financial assistance to economically disadvantaged individuals and families to access essential and life-altering services (e.g., education, child care, and housing) that they might not otherwise have access to. Access to these services is considered critical to achieving a better and more sustainable future for all. As such, these high-quality services are directly related to several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted as a universal call to action to end poverty, save the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere." In particular, the need for these affordable and high-quality services has been …

Not All Numbers Were Created Equal: Evidence The Number One Is Unique, Jenna L. Croteau

Masters Theses

Universally across modern cultures children acquire the meaning of the words one, two, and three in order. While much research has focused on how children acquire this knowledge and what this knowledge represents, the question of why children learn numbers in order has been comparatively neglected. To address this question, a non-verbal anticipatory looking task was implemented. In this task, 35 14- to 23-month-old infants were assessed on their ability to form implicit category structures for the numbers one, two, and three. We hypothesized that children would be able to form the implicit category structure for the number one …

A Latent Profile Analysis Of Four Characteristics Of Intimate Partner Violence And Associations With Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms, Ana Uribe

Masters Theses

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a prevalent potentially traumatic experience that increases risk for posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). However, there is still considerable heterogeneity in PTSS among women exposed to IPV. Research on IPV has examined the ways in which different characteristics of IPV exposure have separately related to risk for PTSS, specifically the type (physical, psychological, economic, sexual), frequency (number of incidents), severity (minor, severe), and mode of violence (in-person, online). However, it may be important to examine how the integration of these characteristics of IPV differ across ���������������������� ���� ������ ���� ������������ �������������������� �������������� ���������� The current study …

Participatory Wetland Governance In Ramsar – Assessing Level Of Participation In India, Seema Ravandale

Masters Theses

Due to the alarming rate of global wetland depletion, the Ramsar Convention, an international wetland conservation and management treaty, was signed in 1971. As of today, 172 countries are signatories. The intricate connection of local communities, their indigenous knowledge and hence their participation in the wetland governance has been recently recognized by Ramsar to protect the community's right over wetlands and to establish the joint stewardship of government and communities on these vital resources. Ramsar Convention provides a broader framework for participatory wetland governance; however, there needs to be more clarity on how various countries understand, perceive, and adopt community …

Climate Change Attitudes Of United States Family Forest Owners And Their Influence On Forest Management Practices, Logan Miller

Masters Theses

Understanding family forest owners’ (FFOs’) attitudes and behaviors towards climate change will allow for more sustainable forest management practices to be implemented, helping to combat climate change and its impacts. The goals for this research are (1) to begin measuring U.S. FFO attitudes toward climate change, (2) to determine what factors impact these attitudes, and (3) to determine how they influence the FFO’s management practices using the Responsible Environmental Behavior (REB) framework (Hines et al. 1987). Chapter 1 explores the different facets of my thesis project focusing on forests and forests’ ecosystem services, forest ownership in the United States, and …

Professional And Personal Humility In Relation To Between-Therapist Differences In Effectiveness, Heather Muir

Doctoral Dissertations

Objective: Research demonstrates that mental health clinicians vary in their general effectiveness—the “between-therapist effect.” Thus, it is important to identify determinants of such differences in order to understand and cultivate the therapist characteristics or actions that reliably foster better patient outcomes. To date, several of such variables have emerged empirically. For example, therapists who exhibit higher versus lower levels of professional self-doubt (PSD; a critical questioning of one’s skills as a clinician) have been shown to achieve better interpersonal outcomes with their average patient. Although arguably counterintuitive, the beneficial influence of PSD may make sense if, instead of simply reflecting …

The Online Processing Of Even's Likelihood Presupposition, Erika Mayer

Doctoral Dissertations

Even is a focus-sensitive semantic operator that introduces a presupposition about likelihood. Under many semantic accounts, even’s likelihood presupposition requires the sentence with even to be less likely than a set of contextually-relevant alternatives. On one hand, even’s presupposition is complex, and this complexity may cause delays in processing. On the other hand, despite—and indeed because—of this complexity, even has the potential to be highly informative to readers. In this dissertation, I investigate whether and how even interacts with lexical predictability in online processing. If comprehenders are able to rapidly process even, they may be able to …

Essays On International Trade And Economic Growth, Mateo Hoyos

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I study the relationship between trade and economic growth, with a focus on developing economies. I specifically provide a critical review of the consensus view in trade and growth, according to which a liberal trade regime is generally the best policy stance to promote growth. In the first essay of this dissertation, I provide evidence that the relationship between trade policy and growth may depend on economic structure: tariff reductions are followed by higher levels of GDP per capita for manufacturer countries, but lower levels for nonmanufacturers. Testing for mechanisms, I find the heterogeneity seems to be …

'You' Will Always Have 'Me': A Compositional Theory Of Person, Kaden T. Holladay

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the morpho-syntactic makeup of personful expressions
in natural language; special focus is given to referential uses of personal pronouns. The central thesis guiding the inquiry is that utterance contexts, which serve to fix the semantic values of person indexicals, are specifically a kind of centered situation. This treatment of contexts puts restrictions on what kinds of person features are definable, and the resulting inventory of such features (in conjunction with independently-motivated pragmatic constraints on the use of referential expressions) provides a novel explanation for the typology of person systems.

Three Essays On The Financial Returns To Residential Solar Pv Adoption, Emma Grazier

Doctoral Dissertations

As the effects of climate change continue to accelerate, threatening human life and the environment worldwide, the need to decarbonize our energy system is urgent and imperative. Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is an important component of the United States’ decarbonization strategy. Solar diffusion policies like net metering, tax incentives, and renewable energy certificates create financial value for adopters. Evaluations of those policies tend to focus on adoption as the primary metric of success: more households adopting solar means less reliance on fossil fuels and fewer carbon emissions. However, adoption alone as a success metric fails to account for a policy’s …

Long(Er) Object Movement In Turkish, Duygu Göksu

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on long object movement (LOM), which is a type of A-movement from the embedded object position inside an infinitive to the matrix subject position. In the literature, LOM is usually equated with restructuring. The dissertation demonstrates that LOM is not a uniform phenomenon in Turkish. Verbs that allow LOM fall into two types and exhibit distinct behaviors, with only one type counting as restructuring. The infinitival complements of one class of LOM verbs show dependency on the matrix domain for structural case-checking of an embedded object. These verbs are analyzed as restructuring LOM verbs selecting a reduced-size …