Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Fast Food, Slow Brain: The Effect Of Diet On Brain Volume, Kayla Alder, Dr. Brock Kirwan

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The hippocampus is a brain structure in the medial temporal lobe that mediates the encoding of sensory information into long-term memory (Squire, Clark, & Stark, 2004). Studies have found a relationship between the volume of the hippocampus and behavioral memory tests; that is, the smaller the volume of the hippocampus, the less accurate the performance on memory tests (Rajah, Kromas, Han, & Jens, 2010). Previous research also demonstrates that a high fat and sugar (HFS) diet impairs the hippocampus and affects memory (Francis & Stevenson, 2011).

The Effect Of The Nsf Grant On Future Academic And Career Outcomes, Tanner Eastmond, Dr. Joseph Price

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 with the stated mission “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare.” This institution supports scientific research in various scientific fields primarily by funding promising research and researchers. Our investigation focused on the NSF grant for prospective graduate students in the field of economics. Specifically, we examine those who won the award and those who received an ‘honorable mention’. The applicants who only received an ‘honorable mention’, have very similar qualifications to those who were offered the grant. The …

Family Structures In Japan And Korea: How Are Children Affected?, Jennifer Burdge, Kristie Rowley

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Recently, Japan and Korea have experienced increased strain in their society. In Japan, citizens ranging from ages 55 to 64 years make up 38.3 percent of the population, and those 65 years and over account for 24.8 percent of the population. This means those that are 55 years old or more make up over 52 percent of the entire population (“East & Southeast,” 2013). Due to the aging population, and declining birth rates, there is much pressure put upon adults, young adults, and youth. This pressure has dramatically changed marriage and divorce rates, education attainment, and employment, which all impact …

Domestic Violence And Marital Homogamy, Carly Landgrave, Renata Forste

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Introduction: Domestic violence is one of the most pressing global human rights issues of the 21st century. It is estimated that roughly half of the women killed globally in 2012 were killed by intimate partners or family members (U.N. Facts and Figures, 2012). In 2014, three in ten women in Egypt reported that they had experienced domestic violence during their lifetime and almost onefifth reported that they were the target of an episode of spousal violence in the past twelve months. More than one third of these women experiencing spousal physical or sexual violence were injured as a result …

Transnationalism And Civic Engagement: An Ethnographic Study Of The Hmong Diaspora In France, Jacob Hickman

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Hmong are an ethnic minority group from southeast Asia who were displaced as refugees after the Second Indochina War. Before the war, Hmong lived in kinship-based, highland, semi-nomadic, subsistence-based farming communities. In these traditional villages, Hmong developed various means of social mediation and problem solving based on hierarchies of kinship and village or clan leadership. As they have been displaced to locations like the United States and France, however, legal structures of these new communities have challenged traditional structures of authority.

Phd’S, Professionalism, And Public Office: The Effeect Of Education And Professional Experience On Effectiveness In The U.S. House Of Representatives, Mckenna Westra, Jay Goodliffe

Journal of Undergraduate Research

We commonly attribute advanced levels of education with increased skill and capabilities. While the theory backing this assumption has been proven to be true in a variety of applications, often times the trend can unintentionally be extrapolated to other areas. As voters, we are inclined to view candidates with higher or more prestigious education as more experienced than other candidates. I will study the effects that professional and educational backgrounds have on legislators’ performance in office. If the assumption holds true that those with more education are better qualified, then these individuals should remain in office for more terms, should …

The Rise Of The Small Super Donor & The Looming Transformation Of Political Influence, Dustin Phelps, Jay Goodliffe

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In light of ongoing controversy over Super PACS, I chose to study how small donors might offset the disproportionate influence that the wealthy have traditionally maintained in the American campaign finance system. The dramatic rise of small donors in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections heralds a democratic force that could theoretically balance the donor landscape in unprecedented ways.1 Since small donors are much more representative of the general population than the traditional wealthy donor, a strong enough presence of small donors could potentially close America’s political influence gap.2

Hungry, Homeless, And Hopeless: The Injustices Of The China Hukou Registration System, Lauren Barden, Celeste Beesley

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This study analyzes the destructive social and economic consequences of the Chinese hukou registration system through quantitative analysis of the inequality gap between rural-urban migrants and urbanites in Chinese cities between 1995-2002. By performing statistical tests on individual-level survey data, this paper documents the economic gap between urban hukou holders and non-urban hukou holders in 1995. It also shows that rural-urban migrant inequality has not increased between 1995 and 2002, and that the costs of migrating to the cities under a rural hukou were less in 2002 than previously. However, results also confirmed that the hukou policy significantly restricted the …

Substitution Of Religiosity For Socioeconomic Status And Its Correlation With Adolescent Drug Use, Jordan Coburn, Mikaela Dufur

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Adolescents with higher socioeconomic status participate in fewer negative activities. Religiosity is correlated with more positive activities. Religiosity can help through socialization: interacting with people who influence pro-social norms.

Collaborating On Description And Digitization: The Perry Special Collections Land Indentures Project, Rebecca A. Wiederhold, Ryan K. Lee, Shanna Bessendorfer

Faculty Publications

A unique collection of English land indentures from the 16th to 20th centuries is at the center of a large undertaking at BYU’s Perry Special Collections. Born of a simple faculty digitization request, a much larger project with the potential to benefit other classes and researchers developed through the collaboration and coordination of multiple departments and individuals. This project required close collaboration between the faculty member who made the original digitization request, the Special Collections curator, our Collection Management team, the Conservation lab, our Manuscripts Cataloger, the digital lab, our Metadata Cataloging Specialist and multiple student workers. This presentation gives …

Supercharged Digital Collections: Moving To The Fast Lane With Scalable Open Source Infrastructure, Jeremy Myntti, Anna Neatrour, Matt Brunsvik, Brain Mcbride, Harish Maringanti, Alan Witkowski

Faculty Publications

What we’ll cover today

• History
• SIMP demo
• Migration
• Lesson Learned

Social Anxiety Disorder In College Students And Its Differing Treatments, Taylor Hubbert

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

• Approximately one in six College Students report having anxiety or being treated for anxiety
• Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is defined as anxiety that is caused by social experiences, and an individuals fear/ phobia of social situations
• Research available to us on Social Anxiety Disorder is extensive. This review examined the symptomology and prevalence of SAD, and compared both individual therapy and group therapy as treatments for college students.

Choose Your Own Research Adventure: Developing A Technical Services Based Research Project, Jeremy Myntti, Liz Woolcott

Faculty Publications

How to Create a Research Project

What Did We Find?

The Challenges And Solutions Of Online Surveys, Rachel Cannon, Amanda Loh, Dan Dewey

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Surveys are a valuable tool in research. However, there is currently no place where researchers can find compiled information about the challenges of online surveys and their corresponding solutions. Research publications typically address a specific single issue, and these articles are published in a wide range of journals, making it difficult to access various findings. Our findings, which we presented as a work in progress at the Georgetown University Round Table (GURT) 2016 conference, provide a useful source that researchers can use to easily learn about the challenges of online surveys and the solutions to these challenges, helping them to …

Mongolian Vowel Harmony And Palatalization, Joshua Sims, Dirk Elzinga

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The Mongolian language is spoken by approximately 3,000,000 people in the East Asian nation of Mongolia. The language exhibits vowel harmony, a rare phenomenon where the vowels in a single word must belong to matching categories. Mongolian grammars traditionally classify the seven vowels as either “male” or “female,” as well as rounded or unrounded. The “male” vowels are pronounced with a retracted tongue root (RTR), sounding “darker,” while “female” vowels are pronounced with an advanced tongue root (ATR), sounding “lighter.” The vowel /i/ is considered neutral, neither male nor female, but its presence tends to change the pronunciation of male …

Strength-Based Assessment For Children With Autism And Related With Disabilities In Kosovo, Ari Kokol, Blake Hansen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Kosovo was a focal point of conflict in the wars in Yugoslavia in the late 1990s. In 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia leaving Kosovo partially recognized as an independent state today. Due to the combination of war, ethnic conflict, and poverty, Kosovo has been left with little resources available to meet the needs of parents and educators. Caring for children with these types of disabilities puts a heavy strain on Kosovar Families. “For parents of children with autism, identifying positive characteristics of the child and the relationship may be particularly beneficial because the stressors associated with the disability are …

Western Philosophy For A New Generation, Sondra Sasser, Dennis Packard

Journal of Undergraduate Research

As planned, Dr. Packard and I finished researching and writing our textbook, Western Philosophy for a New Generation. We are still editing some things and getting advice from other academics, but we deem the book to be a great success, and so do the classes who have used it for two semesters at BYU. Students who were initially uninterested in philosophy made comments like, “I finally understand what before was totally unintelligible,” and “Now I see how it could be valuable for me.”

Town Hall Drama: What's All The Gossip About?, Mckay Randall

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

When the new Congress took their seats at the beginning of 2017, Republicans were on a mission to replace Obamacare. To gear up for the legislative struggle, legislators took to the streets and towns of their districts to speak to constituents about Obamacare and other policies. During the first town halls in January and February, Republican legislators found themselves confronted with rowdy and raucous crowds who nearly shouted them down every time they had chance to speak. The News took note of this phenomena in late February and started reporting on the story. The popular headlines from The Washington Post, …

Comparison Of Lifestyles Between Married And Unmarried Emerging Adults, Braden Wake, Jessica Hadfield, Makenzie Lewis, Toree Hafen

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Emerging adulthood contains many lifestyle changes such as leaving the comfort of home, working full time, and for some, getting married (Arnett, 2012). To unmarried emerging adults, marriage seems to be an important factor in the changing dynamics of friendship. Married friends seem to no longer attend social gatherings or participate in the same activities they once did. The question that this research team set out to answer is whether or not these observations actually exist or if they are imagined. This study examined areas of lifestyle, such as sociality, financial trends, personal priorities, stress, and religion for unmarried and …

"Accounting" For Last Names: The Effect Of Surname Initial On Success In Academia, Natalie Wolford, Mason Snow

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

- Academic journals typically follow conventions of ordering authors by surname initial in both the title page as well as the bibliography section.

- Einav and Yariv (2006) find significant effects from the alphabetical placement of an Economics professor’s last name on their likelihood of gaining tenure.

- While the majority of accounting journals follow alphabetical conventions, some order the authors strictly on reported contribution.

Second Generation Immigrants: Their Self-Esteem And Educational Aspirations, Anika Price

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Immigrants experience unique stresses & discrimination, which leads to lower levels of self-esteem. (Stets & Burke, 2003; Kao, 1999; Gee et al., 2010). Do Second-Generation Immigrants experience the same thing? If so, will that affect their educational expectations for the future?

Collision Or Cohesion? Hmong Shamanism And Ontological Holism In France, Madison Harmer, Telisha Pantelakis

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

The Hmong are an ethnic group from Southeast Asia who’ve lived as forced migrants and political refugees for the past several hundred years. Current U.S. literature has attributed Hmong difficulties adapting to Western culture, specifically health care from shamanic practices. They claim that traditional and western healing practices are incompatible. (Franzen-Castle & Smith 2013, Fadiman 1997). While living in a small town in central France, we conducted an ethnographic study observing Hmong refugees and their interactions and beliefs between traditional healing practices and Western medicine to explore this claim.

The Benefits Of Culturally Adapted Mental Health Treatments: A Meta-Analysis, Juan Valladares, Madeleine Coenen, Niyeli Herrera, Yoojin Kim

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Cultural values, ideas, beliefs and word views may affect the way a mental intervention is received and therefore how effective it is. Historically, research has not focused on cultural minorities and these groups tend to have poorer success rates in treatments (Gonzalez et al., 2010). The purpose of this meta-analysis is to establish the aggregate effect of those mental health interventions that have been adapted to clients' cultural or ethnic backgrounds.

Family Educational Backgrounds Variations In Student Attitudes And Experiences Using The Sharps Utah Data, 2015, Mandy Chidester

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

This research analyzed 150 variables within the SHARPS 2015 data to find the majority of differences that are coming between those grade school students who live with adults who have an education level of high school or less compared to the those who live with an adult who has completed college. The analyzed variables showed three main themes of major differences: monitoring of the student’s actions, neighborhood the student lives in, and student’s perception of drug risk. Also included is those variables who showed significant differences, but did not fall into any particular category. This categories show us areas of …

Will We Let A Language Die?, Joseph Heath, William Eggington

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My project examined efforts to maintain the Rusyn language (also known as Ruthenian ). Rusyn is spoken by 50,000 people living primarily in Slovakia and Ukraine. Unless protected, this language may go extinct within several generations. It is one of over 100 languages in Central and Eastern Europe that have received “threatened” or “endangered” status. Globalization threatens the existence of cultures lacking nationstates, and my professional aim is to assist in the preservation of some of these cultures and their languages.

Domain Adaptation In Machine Translation, Joshua Mathias, Deryle Lonsdale

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This study uses an open source statistical machine translation system (Moses) to perform machine translation for specific domains, or text types. A machine translation system can be adapted to a specific domain by using training data from the same domain. In this work we show significant improvements for machine translation by training for specific domains and compare the effectiveness of using training data in each of these domains. We also evaluate the effectiveness of different amounts of training data and combining data from different domains.

Time For A Change: Continuous And Discontinuous Transformation In Highly Religious Families, Ashley Tuft

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

While change is a natural occurrence in marital and family relationships, there is an inadequate amount of literature that discusses how this “spontaneous” change occurs within families independent of professional intervention (Fincham, Stanley, & Beach, 2007). Religion is one instrument through which these changes are facilitated in families. We use life course, as explained in Elder (1994), as the theoretical framework for understanding religiously related transformation, focusing especially on the principles of timing, transitions, and turning points. While some research has used life course to understand religion, most of it does not discuss family-level change (Petts, 2009, 2014). The purpose …

Has Party Identification Changed In Utah?, Devin Johanson

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Three weeks before the 2016 election, Utah was labeled as a swing state by most main-stream media outlets. The offensive rhetoric from both the Trump and Clinton campaigns and the rise of a popular independent candidate increased the potential for changes in the party identity of the Utah electorate. My research question is as follows: How has party identification changed in the state of Utah between the 2012 and 2016 elections?

It's No Accident: Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Vehicle Safety Inspections, Alex Hoagland, Trevor Woolley

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Traffic fatalities have fallen steadily over the past two decades, particularly those due to car failure. Many have attributed this fall to safer vehicle technology. This trend has led many states to reevaluate mandatory vehicle safety inspection programs. This study sought to answer the question, does the elimination of vehicle safety inspections have an effect on traffic fatalities?

Cerebral Lateralization Of Second Language, Emily Peterson, Gregory A. Thompson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

It has been generally accepted that language shows left-hemisphere dominance in right-handed monolinguals. In contrast, current models of L2 lateralization reveal no such consensus. Some studies (Galloway and Scarcella 1982; Gordon and Zatorre 1981; Paradis 1992) have either found no evidence supporting increased right hemisphere involvement in L2 processing or indicated that bilinguals’ L2 is not any more bilaterally organized than their L1. Other studies (Ke 1992; Hoosain and Shiu 1989; Jia et. al. 2013) have shown the opposite, finding that the L2 is significantly less left-lateralized. Still other studies have suggested that there is simply too much inter-individual variation …