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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Ethnicity And Education: College Attendance Patterns Among Early 20th-Century Maine's Immigrant Community, Jacob M. Nash Jan 2021

Ethnicity And Education: College Attendance Patterns Among Early 20th-Century Maine's Immigrant Community, Jacob M. Nash

Honors Theses

I examine the college attendance patterns of second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrants in Maine in the early 20th century relative to other ethnic groups using individual-level Census records. I employ the Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson (ABE) algorithm to track second-generation Jewish, Italian, French Canadian, English Canadian and European immigrants from the 1910 Census to the 1940 Census. My logistic regression analysis indicates that second-generation Jewish immigrants in Maine attended college at significantly higher rates than their peers of similar background in every other ethnic group. While I cannot evaluate them, I also discuss potential explanations for the disparity in college attendance …


Protecting Privacy In Covid-19 Digital Contact Tracing, Nicolas M. Turner Jan 2021

Protecting Privacy In Covid-19 Digital Contact Tracing, Nicolas M. Turner

Honors Theses

Digital contact tracing applications are a necessary and potentially dangerous tool used to combat the spread of COVID-19. Due to the potentially sensitive nature of personal information gathered by contact tracing applications, there is high potential for privacy issues to arise. This thesis explores the dangers of digital contact tracing or contact tracing via a mobile application. Focusing on the United States, this paper studies how contact tracing works and how a contact tracing application might collect different types of data. The paper then studies the effects of giving up location data and health data and what potential ramifications that …


‘The Robinhood Effect’ - Digital Technology In Global Financial Markets And Its Effects On Investor Decision Making, Ben Steib Jan 2021

‘The Robinhood Effect’ - Digital Technology In Global Financial Markets And Its Effects On Investor Decision Making, Ben Steib

Honors Theses

We are currently experiencing a revolution that is larger, arguably, than the industrial revolution, it’s the Internet, also known as the World Wide Web. The Internet has transformed how we live — how we talk, how we work, how we go about our daily business, and how we manage our finances on a global and individual level. In the late 1990s, an investor would search the World Wide Web and, within seconds, find 3,372 websites with the term "investment,” today, the same search for “investment” yields 1,860,000,000 results. Today, as proven with GameStop and other popular ‘meme stocks,’ social media, …


Sailors’ Perceptions Of Offshore Wind Energy In The Northeastern United States, Henry Harris Jan 2021

Sailors’ Perceptions Of Offshore Wind Energy In The Northeastern United States, Henry Harris

Honors Theses

Offshore wind is an expanding form of renewable energy in the United States that will continue to grow through state and federal mandates. Offshore wind has often been met with criticism from a variety of ocean user groups and the academic literature has attempted to include the opinions of all user groups in order to improve policy making decisions. One of the biggest ocean user groups has been left out of the research, sailors. We investigated sailors’ perceptions of offshore wind in the Northeastern United States through a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews to provide context, hoping to answer the …


Us And Them: Populism In The United States, Julia E. Pfau Jan 2021

Us And Them: Populism In The United States, Julia E. Pfau

Honors Theses

The term “populism” has been thrown around recently—heedless of any cohesive meaning—to describe a wide variety of politics. But can we define populism with sufficient clarity and precision as to make it a useful term with which to analyze political rhetoric? This thesis weaves together the fragmented literature on populism to invent a unique definition: populism in the United States is a mode of political persuasion characterized by an effort to promote the interests of “the people,” understood to be a monolithic and moral group of ordinary Americans, against a “corrupt” elite or establishment which obstructs these interests. Using this …


"Nice, Quiet Hand": The Creation And Navigation Of Feeling Rules In A Second Grade Classroom, Avery Munns Jan 2021

"Nice, Quiet Hand": The Creation And Navigation Of Feeling Rules In A Second Grade Classroom, Avery Munns

Honors Theses

Emotions are largely viewed as individual and internal, but in reality, emotions are socially situated. This project aims to use a sociology of emotions framework in order to explore how emotional expectations are created, maintained, and navigated within a classroom environment. Through a series of observations over the course of a month, I set out to answer questions surrounding which emotions were encouraged, which emotions were discouraged, and how both teachers and students created and navigated these feeling rules. Overall, I found that emotions were largely discouraged, especially through the overarching feeling rules of “be quiet” and “control your body.” …


Identity-Making And Spatialization Among Colby College's International Students, John G.G. Shamgochian Jan 2021

Identity-Making And Spatialization Among Colby College's International Students, John G.G. Shamgochian

Honors Theses

This thesis presents the research that I have done for the award of Honors in Anthropology. The following text begins with a vignette that highlights identity-making and spatialization among international students in a moment of precarity and visibility. The “Introduction” records the development of my research from its initial topics to its current form, my methodology, my positionality, and the ethics of my research. Following this, in the chapter titled “Internationality,” I lay out the interwoven social, institutional, and political processes which shape the experiences of academic migrants. Because the purpose of this chapter is to fully contextualize my argument, …


Should We Pool Or Should We Nationalize? A Quantitative Assessment Of The Role Of Sovereignty In Brexit, Alexa K. Urmaza Jan 2021

Should We Pool Or Should We Nationalize? A Quantitative Assessment Of The Role Of Sovereignty In Brexit, Alexa K. Urmaza

Honors Theses

The announcement of Brexit on June 23, 2016 shocked Europe as well as the greater global community. Political scientists continue to debate the causes of Brexit, but this paper argues that the debate over sovereignty, particularly the tension between national and pooled sovereignties, played a substantial role in the outcome of the referendum. This paper evaluates the extent to which the Brexit referendum was a rejection of pooled sovereignty and a reprioritization of national sovereignty. This paper conducts a discourse analysis on 4109 sources from the Leave and Remain campaigns, which were all assessed for the use of nineteen terms …


Gold Mining Districts And Path Dependence, Jason T. Dunn Jan 2021

Gold Mining Districts And Path Dependence, Jason T. Dunn

Honors Theses

This paper applies quantitative spatial analysis to the long-term impact of Western gold rushes, studying the effect of 19th century US mineral districts on modern (2010) population density, as a proxy for long-term economic growth. OLS regression estimates show positive effects for areas adjacent to historic mining districts. Census tracts within 15 miles of a mineral district but not containing one are 29.8% more dense than other tracts. Additionally, capital-intensive/large-scale mining was more persistent than labor-intensive/small-scale methods, and path dependence is achieved mainly through agglomeration. This research corroborates historical arguments focusing on the development of Western infrastructure for long term …


Increasing Police Accountability To The Citizens It Serves: The Production Of High-Quality Public Services Through Bottom-Up Governance, Esther B. Kim Jan 2021

Increasing Police Accountability To The Citizens It Serves: The Production Of High-Quality Public Services Through Bottom-Up Governance, Esther B. Kim

Honors Theses

In light of the recent protests against police brutality, we have witnessed overall patterns of dissatisfaction in public opinion with the current state of policing, exacerbated by an inability to produce widespread and substantial police reform. This perplexing issue is the result of increased reliance on top-down regulation, which relies upon the assumption that the users of police services do not directly contribute to the quality of the service produced. As a consequence, there is a general lack of avenues for citizen participation, or bottom-up governance, to effectively channel public opinion towards creating substantive changes within police departments. Constructing a …


College Application Fee Effects On Applicant Volume, Diversity, And Academic Quality, Benjamin J. Smith Jan 2021

College Application Fee Effects On Applicant Volume, Diversity, And Academic Quality, Benjamin J. Smith

Honors Theses

I use U.S. News data spanning 2002-2019 on 200 U.S. liberal arts colleges to examine the effect of the application fee on four outcome variables: applications, nonwhite undergraduates, mean undergraduate SAT scores, and number of first- years from the top ten percent of their high school class. I find strong evidence that schools enroll more nonwhite students and have lower mean SAT scores in years when they do not charge an application fee, although there is no effect of the fee on first-years from the top ten percent of their high school class. Notably, I find that removing the application …


Neo-Colonial Actors?: Analyzing French Ngos In Francophone West Africa, Katharine R. Kilcoyne Jan 2021

Neo-Colonial Actors?: Analyzing French Ngos In Francophone West Africa, Katharine R. Kilcoyne

Honors Theses

Non-governmental organizations (NGO) have the reputation for being benevolent organizations that help populations in need. Globally, these organizations promote this particular image to the public, but international NGOs also often work in tandem with other neo-colonial structure systems to maintain Western domination over poor and underdeveloped countries in Africa and elsewhere. This thesis looks at this phenomenon through the lens of French neo-colonialism and the Françafrique regime to study the extent to which French NGOs participate in this neo-colonial system in Francophone West Africa. Using interview data and data collected from the European Commission’s ECHO, this thesis looks at the …


Social Capital Unmasced: The Role Of Social Capital In State-Level Economic Growth, Meredith H. Allen Jan 2021

Social Capital Unmasced: The Role Of Social Capital In State-Level Economic Growth, Meredith H. Allen

Honors Theses

While the examination of social capital in social science research has expanded since the 1990s, little is known about its development over time or contributions to economic growth, particularly at the community level. I create a state-level index of social capital from 2008 to 2019 to analyze its evolution across the United States since the Great Recession. After analyzing the different rates of social capital improvement across the country, I then integrate the index in the production function and a growth accounting framework alongside capital and labor. I find that social capital is not only significant as a factor of …


The Predictive Power Of The Term Structure Under Unconventional Monetary Policies, Luying Yang Jan 2021

The Predictive Power Of The Term Structure Under Unconventional Monetary Policies, Luying Yang

Honors Theses

Previous research has confirmed a positive relationship between the slope of the yield spread and future economic growth. Since the start of the Great Recession, a number of developed economies have hit the zero lower bound and adopted unconventional monetary policies such as large-scale bond/asset purchase programs and negative interest rate policies. This paper finds that the yield spread’s predictive power generally deteriorates after the central bank adopts its first bond purchase program. However, there is no general pattern of how these unconventional monetary policies impact the yield spread’s forecasting ability across countries.