Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Applications In Sentiment Analysis And Machine Learning For Identifying Public Health Variables Across Social Media, Eric Michael Clark

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Twitter, a popular social media outlet, has evolved into a vast source of linguistic data, rich with opinion, sentiment, and discussion. We mined data from several public Twitter endpoints to identify content relevant to healthcare providers and public health regulatory professionals. We began by compiling content related to electronic nicotine delivery systems (or e-cigarettes) as these had become popular alternatives to tobacco products. There was an apparent need to remove high frequency tweeting entities, called bots, that would spam messages, advertisements, and fabricate testimonials. Algorithms were constructed using natural language processing and machine learning to sift human responses from automated …

Modeling Electric Vehicle Energy Demand And Regional Electricity Generation Dispatch For New England And New York, Sarah E. Howerter

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The transportation sector is a largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the U.S., accounting for 28.6% of all 2016 emissions, the majority of which come from the passenger vehicle fleet [1,2]. One major technology that is being investigated by researchers, planners, and policy makers to help lower the emissions from the transportation sector is the plug-in electric vehicle (PEV). The focus of this work is to investigate and model the impacts of increased levels of PEVs on the regional electric power grid and on the net change in CO2 emissions due to the decrease tailpipe emissions and the increase in …

An Analysis Of Energy Transitions At Different Scales: Fossil Fuel Divestment In Higher Education And Individual Behavior, Elizabeth Palchak

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

A sociotechnical energy transition requires both a shift to new technologies and attention to social issues like political movements, policy and human behavior. This dissertation investigates social elements of the renewable energy transition occurring at different scales. The core research questions are: How are universities creating and responding to the shifting language of fossil fuel investments? How and for whom do behavioral interventions work? And finally, do in-home displays (IHDs) change behaviors and attitudes of millennial energy users?

The three studies covered here occurred within higher education and reflect the importance of colleges and universities as dynamic players in energy …

Measuring Linguistic And Cultural Evolution Using Books And Tweets, Tyler Gray

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Written language provides a snapshot of linguistic, cultural, and current events information for a given time period. Aggregating these snapshots by studying many texts over time reveals trends in the evolution of language, culture, and society. The ever-increasing amount of electronic text, both from the digitization of books and other paper documents to the increasing frequency with which electronic text is used as a means of communication, has given us an unprecedented opportunity to study these trends. In this dissertation, we use hundreds of thousands of books spanning two centuries scanned by Google, and over 100 billion messages, or ‘tweets’, …

Increasing Private Contributions To Environmental Goods With Behavioral Insights, Hilary Byerly Flint

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Privately owned lands often undersupply environmental benefits and oversupply environmental costs through land use and management decisions. Insights into human behavior suggest a range of cognitive biases and nonstandard preferences that offer alternative explanations for and, perhaps, strategies to influence landowner behavior. People respond to simple changes in context and framing, make inconsistent choices over time, and respond to social influence—the opinions and behavior of peers.

This dissertation applies insights from behavioral science to strategies that seek to influence individual decisions that impact the environment, especially related to land management. First, I review existing experimental research on behavioral insights to …

Governing Water Quality Limits In Agricultural Watersheds, Courtney Ryder Hammond Wagner

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The diffuse runoff of agricultural nutrients, also called agricultural nonpoint source pollution (NPS), is a widespread threat to freshwater resources. Despite decades of research into the processes of eutrophication and agricultural nutrient management, social, economic, and political barriers have slowed progress towards improving water quality. A critical challenge to managing agricultural NPS pollution is motivating landowners to act against their individual farm production incentives in response to distant ecological impacts. The complexity of governing the social-ecological system requires improved understanding of how policy shapes farmer behavior to improve the state of water quality. This dissertation contributes both theoretically and empirically …