Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Understanding The Uninsured: A Descriptive Study Of The U.S. Uninsured Population, Michael Barnett, Dr. Eric Eide

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My initial research topic was to determine whether individuals who needed longterm care dispersed their assets in order to qualify for Medicaid coverage. In doing this, I hoped to identify the existence of a relationship between asset dispersion and longterm Medicare claims and then quantify the affect of this relationship. However, as is often the case with research, my mentor and I ran into problems. The main problem was that we did not gain access to the newly released data set that linked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data. Because …

Stability And Change In Women's Personality Across The Life Course, Carly D. Lebaron

Theses and Dissertations

The current study sought to examine change and stability of personality in a sample of women over the course of 35 years. Existing research is mixed regarding whether or not personality changes over time or whether it remains stable. Using a sample of 187 women tracked over four time points (approximately 10 years between each time point), change and stability in openness to experience, extraversion, and neuroticism was tested using a stacked multilevel growth curve analysis. Four life course events (transition to parenthood, change in marital status, wife entering or leaving the workforce, and husband retiring) were added as predictors …

The Gender Gap: Analyzing Utah’S Election Outcomes And Policy Preferences, Josephine Borich, Dr. Jeremy Pope

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My project focused on finding policy differences between male and female candidates in Utah’s 2010 Republican Convention. I hypothesized that there would be policy differences between the genders and that these differences in opinion had the possibility to swing elections.

Family Matters: Operationalization Of Intergenerational Educational Background, Elizabeth Warnick

Theses and Dissertations

This study seeks to replicate and extend Roksa and Potter's (2011) analysis of the association between intergenerational family background and academic outcomes by utilizing the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to examine alternative methods for operationalizing maternal educational background. Results indicate a positive association between maternal upward mobility and adolescent academic achievement. Measures of mobility affect adolescent achievement even when controlling for both mother's and maternal grandmother's educational attainment. Future research should examine the differential impact of extreme mobility, specifically downward mobility, on adolescent academic outcomes.

Links Between High Economic Distress And School Engagement As Mediated Through Negative Marital Interaction And Parental Involvement, Lauren Alyssa Bone Barnes

Theses and Dissertations

A review of research on family economic distress and its association with teen well-being shows a clear need to expand our knowledge about the connections between economic distress and key teen outcomes. Economic distress can act as an unexpected negative shock to the family system and can influence parent relationship quality, functioning, and involvement in children's lives. In turn, changes in systemic quality, functioning, and involvement can impact adolescents positively or negatively. Using observational coding and questionnaire self-report, this study examined the relationship between economic distress and negative marital interaction and the impact this has on parental involvement as a …

Client Experiencing In Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment For Eating Disorders, James William Vandyke

Theses and Dissertations

Depth of client experiencing has been associated with positive therapeutic outcomes across theoretical orientations. Experiencing describes a particular mode of cognitive-affective processing in which clients use internal felt experience as the basis for self-examination and the resolution of personally significant issues. Given evidence that eating disorders are associated with particular disruptions of cognitive-affective processing, it is likely that experiencing plays a role in the successful treatment of eating pathology. However, no study to date has examined the relationship between experiencing and outcome in eating disorder treatment. The purposes of the current study were to examine depth of client experiencing during …

Assisting Novice Raters In Addressing The In-Between Scores When Rating Writing, Brittney Greer

Theses and Dissertations

In the research regarding rating ESL writing assessments, borderline writing samples are mentioned, but a solution has yet to be addressed. Borderline samples are writing samples that do not perfectly fit a set level within the rubric, but instead have characteristics from multiple levels. The aim of this thesis is to provide an improved training module in the setting of an Intensive English Program by exposing new raters to borderline samples and rating rationale from experienced raters. The purpose of this training is to increase the confidence, consistency, and accuracy of novice raters when rating borderline samples of writing. The …

Brain Structures Associated With Temperament And Social Behavior In Rhesus Monkeys: An Mri Study, Andrew C. Chaffin

Theses and Dissertations

Temperament is thought to be the foundation for normative personality and subsequent behaviors later in life. To assess the relationship of early temperament with variation in structural brain development, this study examined rhesus macaque mother-infant behavior, and then three years later, used MRI to assess neurostructural differences. Individual differences in mother-infant interactions and emotionality were then linked to brain differences. Extensive behavioral data obtained over the first year of life under both resting and stressful conditions was used to assess the quality of mother-infant interactions and emotionality. The MRI focused on brain volume in areas thought to be related to …

Emotional Involvement With Grandparents As A Key Component Of Prosocial Development: Testing Empathic Concern As A Mediator, Kathryn Leigh Bunnell Gustafson

Theses and Dissertations

Current research shows that grandparents have made significant contributions to at-risk families. However, few studies have examined the benefits of grandparenting in non-at-risk populations. This study considered whether emotional involvement with a grandparent is associated with prosocial behavior in adolescent grandchildren and examines the mediating role of empathy and perspective taking. A longitudinal sample of 500 participants were taken from waves two thru five of the Flourishing Families Project (FFP) and used to construct a latent growth curve model. Results indicate that emotional involvement with a grandparent was positively linked with initial levels of prosocial behavior in grandchildren. Furthermore, results …

Languages Without Borders: Creating An Enhanced Teacher’S Guide For Romanian 101, Sarah Holden, Dr. Michael Bush

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Brigham Young University’s Romanian orphanage internship has been a popular and well-attended program since its inception, attracting mainly students majoring in childhood development, nursing, psychology, and health sciences. The volunteer work these interns perform during their semester abroad is of utmost importance–both to the orphans receiving care and to the students providing it. The orphanage caretakers greatly value BYU interns, but have often expressed frustration in their inability to adequately communicate in the Romanian language. Although a beginning Romanian course has been offered at BYU for several years, it was clear that its curriculum needed to be altered and an …

Judeo-Spanish In Thessaloniki: A Survey Of The Speakers Of The Dialect Today, Randall Craig Meister, Dr. David Eddington

Journal of Undergraduate Research

“Pero Salonik no kanta mas¹,” said an elderly speaker of Judeo-­‐Spanish in Thessaloniki, as she reflected with me during a discussion concerning her life as a Sephardic Jew after World War II. This expression embodies the historical and cultural awareness of the dwindling Judeo-­‐Spanish speaking Sephardic community in Thessaloniki, Greece². After 500 years of prevalence in Thessaloniki, Greece, the Spanish-­‐ peaking Sephardic Jews have endured centuries of Muslim rule, Greek cultural assimilation, a horrific Holocaust, and starkly diversified linguistic exposure. This plethora of diversity and circumstances has created a dwindling community of speakers, but a community, …

Marshallese Corpus Project: The Marshallese Language Resource, Marco Mora Huizar, Dr. Heather Willson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of the Marshallese Corpus Project (MCP) is to create an extensive online corpus of Marshallese language texts to be used for research and other applications. Currently, there is a severe lack of resources for the study of the Marshallese language, and it is difficult to gain access to many Marshallese texts. Further, there is little by way of available naturalistic language data in Marshallese. Therefore, the ability of both researchers and language learners to study the language is severely inhibited. This project involves collecting both printed and online text samples, standardizing the spelling of these texts and creating …

Don’T Judge A Voice By Its Color: The Influence Of Visual And Linguistic Cues On Racial Profiling, Alex Jennings, Dr. Wendy Baker-Smemoe

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Linguistic profiling¹ has emerged as an area of research only within the last decade. Several researchers have shown that people who speak non-standard, ethnically-tied dialects are treated less favorably than their Standard American English (SAE)-speaking counterparts. However, no known studies have shown the relative importance of visual versus linguistic cues in profiling. The purpose of my project was to experimentally this by answering this question: Does one’s dialect have a greater bearing on racial judgments than skin color? Sadly, because this type of research has never really been done, we had to synthesize a new methodology. We did this …

Noun-Preposition Collocations: The 2010 Chicago Manual Of Style (Cms) Compared To The Corpus Of Contemporary American English (Coca), Christina Champenois, Doris Dant

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines collocation as “a noticeable arrangement or conjoining of linguistic elements” (s.v. “collocation”). Collocational constructions may present difficulties to editors, translators, and second-language learners. Malgorzata Martyńska explains that collocations tend to be “one of the most problematic and error-generating area [sic] of vocabulary, especially for second language learners” (5) and that “collocations pose enormous problems, even for the most proficient in English” (10). My research focuses specifically on noun-preposition collocations.

Rugby: A Mechanism For Global Diversification Through Player Migration And The Displacement Of Resources, Heather Williams, Dr. Mikaela Dufur

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of our research was to discover the ethnic and racial patterns of migration in the professional levels of rugby.

Credibility And Accountability: The Effect Of Publication On Ngo Willingness To Be Evaluated, Megan Spencer, Dr. Michael Findley

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In today’s NGO environment, evaluations are frequent, but NGOs rarely have outsider expectations on which to base their assessments. Thus, NGOs have strong incentives to make their evaluations strictly contextual. Consequently, NGO stakeholders—donors, beneficiaries, and local government officials—have little information as to the quality of a given organization (Barr et al 2004). This leads to a large spectrum of evaluation techniques and environments in which information asymmetries on both sides of the market are detrimental to NGO improvement (Edwards and Hulme 1998). We believe that a standardized evaluation mechanism for NGOs can help to alleviate some of these obstacles. However, …

Role Of Gap Junctions In Seizures, Samuel Shin, Dr. Scott Steffensen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Seizures are a disease that inflict millions with no reliable treatment or cure. One of the main difficulties behind treating seizures is the uncertainty behind the cause. In previous studies we performed we found that connexin-36 (Cx36) knockout (KO) mice may respond differently to stimuli that illicit seizures. From this we hoped to find evidence that gap junctions, specifically Cx36 in the hippocampus, played a role in seizures.

Understanding The Nature Of Anxiety In Autism, Sarah White, Dr. Mickle South

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Anxiety is extremely prevalent in autism, with estimates of the co-occurrence ranging up to 84%. Surprisingly, even though anxiety in autism is implicated in behavioral symptoms ranging from avoiding eye contact with others to always insisting on the same menu for lunch, the majority of research has ignored anxiety as a major contributor to the core symptoms associated with autism. Most research has focused on symptoms of social impairment, but it is now realized that anxiety may be a critical factor in the development of such symptoms.

Adolescents’ And Parents’ Perceptions Of Religious Pre- And Proscriptions, Ryan Woodbury, Dr. Sam Hardy

Journal of Undergraduate Research

As mentioned in my proposal, we sought to understand adolescents’ and parents’ perceptions of religious norms and how those norms predicted adolescents’ positive and negative behaviors. We asked six questions to help guide our research:

Memory Processes In Pregnant Women, Quentin Smith, Dr. Brock Kirwan

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Pregnancy is a complicated biological process that is often accompanied by reported cognitive changes among pregnant women. Pregnant women commonly report diminished cognitive functioning during pregnancy, with “forgetfulness” and “a poor memory” as the most common complaints (Brett & Baxendale, 2001; Crawley, 2002). However, despite these anecdotally reported deficits, the evidence suggesting memory impairments in pregnancy are equivocal. In a recent meta-analysis of 14 studies of memory in pregnancy, it was concluded that pregnancy disrupts some, but not all, memory processes (J. D. Henry & Rendell, 2007). In particular, memory tasks that place high demands on executive cognitive control seem …

Detection Of Social Threat In Autism Spectrum Disorders (Asd), Whitney Worsham, Dr. Michael Larson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this research project was to investigate underlying difficulties with social interaction in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Previous research has demonstrated that children with ASD are inhibited in processing social cues, including social threat (Krysko & Rutherford, 2009). We hypothesized that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) would demonstrate decreased reaction times and error rates relative to typically-developing children when viewing social threat-related stimuli. We also hypothesized that, when viewing non-social threat-related stimuli with no social context, children with ASD would display intact performance relative to typically developing children. We tested these hypotheses through comparing the …

Millenniums And Messiahs: Literature Review In Messianic Religions In Context Of The Hmong Diaspora, John Whitton, Dr. Joacob Hickman

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Initially, the research proposed consisted of two sections constituting the last two semesters of my undergraduate education. The first included collecting published sources regarding millenarianism and messianism within the larger global context and organizing them into a database. The second included systematically cataloging each source in the database for future analysis, not only for Dr. Hickman’s personal use but also for the larger academic and professional community. These circles will encompass the study of nationalism, religion, globalization, and in Dr. Hickman’s specific use, the Hmong diaspora and generational views of morality.

Division Of Labor And Marital Satisfaction In China And Taiwan, Bryan C. Kubricht

Theses and Dissertations

There is evidence that household division of labor is associated with marital satisfaction among Chinese populations. However, little research has compared different Chinese societies, as well as non-rural and rural regions. This study compared the division of household labor, and its association with marital satisfaction, between China and Taiwan, between non-rural and rural regions, and between males and females using data from a large, multinational study of countries in East Asia. The moderating effect of gender role ideology was examined as a potential moderating variable, as well. Overall, division of household labor was significantly associated with marital satisfaction. However, gender …

Authority Control For Digital Collections, Jeremy Myntti, Nate Cothran

Faculty Publications

Mountain West Digital Library: Utah Academic Library Consortium

Digital Tech Topics Webinar

Federalism Dataset, Nicole Taylor, Dr. Joel Selway

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Comparative politics, the study of government structures around the world, is a relatively new field, and the study of federalism is even more recent. Studies are typically conducted by selecting two or three countries and comparing their government structures using qualitative measures or by studying a large sample using statistical analysis. Authors who study federalism have been limited to qualitative analysis by the lack of a dataset of federal systems.

How Performative Are Ideophones In Pastaza Quechua?, Roseanna Hopper, Dr. Janis Nuckolls

Journal of Undergraduate Research

With my ORCA grant, I set out to investigate the performance qualities of ideophones, a category of words marked by a specific speaking style in Ecuadorean Pastaza Quechua. I planned to use software to determine phonetic properties of the words and compare to the rest of speech. I also wanted to look at gesture as a part of the performance involved in using ideophones. I planned to gather data from acquaintances in Ecuador by recording stories, conversations and definitions of the words, which was a strategy used by Dingemanse while working with Siwu (2011). I used audio recordings for the …

Dissociating The Influence Of Associations From That Of Interference In The Human Hippocampus, Rick Stone, Dr. Brock Kirwan

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This project has been worked on for nearly a year and a half. It began because research done by others indicated that there was greater hippocampal activity for an associative memory task than for a non-associative memory task. We believe that the greater hippocampal activity they observed may have been a result of higher interference, rather than higher associativity, so we tried to design an experiment to distinguish between the two.

Growth And Government Transfers, Benjamin Tengelsen, Dr. Richard Evans

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Government transfers to households take many forms, including unemployment benefits, food stamps, social security, and cash handouts to households to stimulate consumption. Generally, these transfer programs act as “automatic stabilizers” due to the way they naturally increase (decrease) when economies are weak (strong). Often policy-makers suggest increasing these programs beyond their natural expansion during economic down-turns to bolster consumption. For example, Australia spent around 80% of its stimulus funds in the form of government checks to eligible citizens (Kennedy, 2009). Borrowing the methodology of Alesina and Ardagna(2009), we show that although many assume a positive correlation between government transfers and …

The Effect Of Prenatal And Postnatal Care On Childhood Obesity, Michael M. O. Seipel, Kevin Shafer

Faculty Publications

Childhood obesity continues to be a major public health problem in the United States. If this problem is unresolved, some children will be at risk for disorders such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer and will become a high economic and social burden for society. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Child and Young Adult sample (N = 6,643), this study examined the relationship between the effect of pre- and postnatal characteristics and obesity. The findings of this study show that the probability of childhood obesity can be lessened if pregnant women do not smoke and …

Effects Of The Integrated Symple Readers Curriculum On Expressive Vocabulary Acquisition In Elementary Students With Developmental Disabilities, Loralene Edvalson

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the emphasis society places on literacy, most students with developmental disabilities remain illiterate. One cause for this illiteracy may be that these students lack foundational language skills that contribute to being able to read. Research has shown that, among other contributions, multiple exposures across time increase students' abilities to acquire knowledge. The Symple Readers integrated curriculum plans for multiple exposures to novel picture vocabulary words by building them into all activities across the students' day and week. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of the Symple Readers integrated curriculum on expressive vocabulary development. During the …