Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Oregon's Medicaid Reform And Transition To Global Budgets Were Associated With Reductions In Expenditures, K. John Mcconnell, Stephanie Renfro, Neal T. Wallace, Deborah J. Cohen, Richard C. Lindrooth, Michael E. Chernew

OHSU-PSU School of Public Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

In 2012 Oregon initiated an ambitious delivery system reform, moving the majority of its Medicaid enrollees into sixteen coordinated care organizations, a type of Medicaid accountable care organization. Using claims data, we assessed measures of access, appropriateness of care, utilization, and expenditures for five service areas (evaluation and management, imaging, procedures, tests, and inpatient facility care), comparing Oregon to the neighboring state of Washington. Overall, the transformation into coordinated care organizations was associated with a 7 percent relative reduction in expenditures across the sum of these services, attributable primarily to reductions in inpatient utilization. The change to coordinated care organizations …

Impact Of Bike Facilities On Residential Property Prices, Wei Shi

PSU Transportation Seminars

As many cities are investing in street improvement or transportation infrastructure upgrade projects to provide better bike access or more complete bike networks, the economic value of bike infrastructure and bike facilities remains an area where many practitioners, planners and policy makers are seeking more conclusive evidence. Using residential property values as indicators of consumer preferences for bicycle infrastructure, this study focuses on advanced bike facilities which represent higher levels of bike priority or bike infrastructure investments that have been shown to be more desirable to a larger portion of the population. Estimating ordinary least squares hedonic pricing models and …

Exploring The Positive Utility Of Travel And Mode Choice, Patrick Allen Singleton

PSU Transportation Seminars

Why do people travel? We traditionally assume traveling is a means to an end, travel demand is derived (from the demand for activities), and travel time is to be minimized. Recently, scholars have questioned these axioms, noting that some people may like to travel, use travel time productively, enjoy the experience of traveling, or travel for non-utilitarian reasons. The idea that travel can provide benefits and may be motivated by factors beyond reaching activity destinations is known as “the positive utility of travel” or PUT.

This study presents a conceptual and empirical look at the positive utility of travel and …

Webinar: Integrating Explicit And Implicit Methods In Travel Behavior Research: A Study Of Driver Attitudes And Bias, Tara Goddard

TREC Webinar Series

Car crashes are still a leading cause of death in the United States, with vulnerable road users like bicyclists and pedestrians being injured or killed at rates that outpace their mode share.

Planners, engineers, and advocates are increasingly adopting Vision Zero and Tactical Urbanism approaches and trying to better understand the underlying causes of dangerous roadway interactions. However, existing research into crash causation has focused on instrumental factors (e.g. intersection type, vehicle speed) while little research has probed the role of attitudes or socio-cognitive mechanisms in interactions between roadway users.

Social psychology suggests that attitudes and social cognitions can play …

Precipitation Intensity Trend Detection Using Hourly And Daily Observations In Portland, Oregon, Alexis Cooley, Heejun Chang

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

The intensity of precipitation is expected to increase in response to climate change, but the regions where this may occur are unclear. The lack of certainty from climate models warrants an examination of trends in observational records. However, the temporal resolution of records may affect the success of trend detection. Daily observations are often used, but may be too coarse to detect changes. Sub-daily records may improve detection, but their value is not yet quantified. Using daily and hourly records from 24 rain gages in Portland, Oregon (OR), trends in precipitation intensity and volume are examined for the period of …

Using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps To Model Policy Issues In The Face Of Uncertainty And Limited Data, Brian Gregor

PSU Transportation Seminars

Planners and policymakers are often faced with the need to make decisions about issues for which there is uncertainty and limited data. For example, transportation planners are now faced with the prospect that new transportation technologies such as autonomous vehicles could greatly alter future transportation system needs. Decisions about these types of issues are difficult to reason about and consequently are likely to be ignored or made on the basis of simplistic logic. Although modeling could be helpful, especially for issues involving complex systems, it is rarely used because models usually require large amounts of data and and handle uncertainty …

Oregon’S Looming “Tecc” Challenge: The Imminent Rise Of “Total Employer Costs Of Compensation” For Oregon Local Government, Portland State University. Hatfield School Of Government. Center For Public Service, Phil Keisling

Center for Public Service Publications and Reports

Driven largely by dramatic increases in Oregon Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) costs, Oregon’s local governments face historically unprecedented increases in their “Total Employer Costs of Compensation,” or “TECC costs.” Even with 3% annual growth in general fund revenues under Oregon’s strict, voter‐passed property tax limits, the resulting budget squeeze could force reductions of 10% or more in the number of public employees who provide key public services – from police and fire/emergency medical protection to education, health care, and infrastructure maintenance.

Big Steps Before The Big One: How The Portland Area Can Bounce Back After A Major Earthquake, City Club Of Portland (Portland, Or.)

City Club of Portland

No abstract provided.

Individual Decision Making In Online Public-Participation Transportation Planning, Martin Swobodzinski

PSU Transportation Seminars

The empirical evaluation of complex decision support systems is often limited to the self-reported satisfaction of the systems’ users.

Such an approach is problematic due to the conflation of the user's satisfaction related to the decision support system and the decision making process and its outcomes.

In addition, it bears limitations that are common among most techniques that solicit participant-stated feedback.

In this talk, based on data that was gathered by a web-based participatory system for transportation planning in the Puget Sound region, I present analytical methods for the empirical evaluation of decision support systems based on human-computer interaction. In …

Sherbro Dictionary, George Tucker Childs

The Sherbro Language and Culture of Sierra Leone

Sherbro Dictionary

Ashland School District: Population And Enrollment Forecasts 2017-18 To 2026-27, Portland State University. Population Research Center, Charles Rynerson, Scott Stewart, Nicholas Chun

School District Enrollment Forecast Reports

This report presents two district-wide enrollment forecasts by grade level for the Ashland School District (ASD) for the 10-year period between 2017-18 and 2026-27. The forecasts are based upon two different sets of assumptions. The HIGH SERIES forecast assumes that ASD’s open enrollment policy continues similar to recent years. The LOW SERIES forecast assumes no new open enrollment for the District after 2016-17, and that non-resident enrollment reverts to levels observed before 2012-13. Individual school forecasts consistent with the HIGH SERIES are also presented for the 10-year period.

Risk Assessment In Criminal Justice, Kris R. Henning, Ryan M. Labrecque

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications and Presentations

Presentation focuses on risk assessment in criminal justice

Improving Trip Data For Livable Communities, Kelly Clifton

TREC Project Briefs

NITC researchers work to refine a framework for trip generation that includes people walking, biking and riding transit.

Could E-Bikes Spur A New Wave Of Biking In America?, John Macarthur

TREC Project Briefs

In this NITC study, researchers provided participants with electric bicycles to use for a ten-week trial period and surveyed them about the experience.

Plans And Living Practices For The Green Campus Of Portland State University, Yoon Jung Choi, Minjung Oh, Jihye Kang, Loren Lutzenhiser

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study aims to comprehend Portland State University (PSU)’s green campus strategies, and students’ level of knowledge and living practices relating to green campus. PSU’s sustainable campus plan has been nationally and internationally recognized. A literature review, field investigation, and interviews were conducted to ascertain the PSU green campus strategies. This study also used a survey to understand students’ level of knowledge and practices. The survey results were analyzed by SPSS. Green campus projects at PSU were operated by official organizations and funded according to PSU’s long term plans in 12 multilateral categories: administration, energy, water, climate action, green buildings, …

Cultivating (A) Sustainability Capital: Urban Agriculture, Eco-Gentrification, And The Uneven Valorization Of Social Reproduction, Nathan Mcclintock

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Urban agriculture (UA), for many activists and scholars, plays a prominent role in food justice struggles in cities throughout the Global North, a site of conflict between use and exchange values, and rallying point for progressive claims to the right to the city. Recent critiques, however, warn of its contribution to gentrification and displacement. The use/exchange value binary no longer as useful an analytic as it once was, geographers need to better understand UA’s contradictory relations to capital, particularly in the neoliberal Sustainable City. To this end, I bring together feminist theorizations of social reproduction, Bourdieu’s “species of capital”, and …

When Erm Met Alma: The Intricacies Of Content Management In A Shared Consortia Landscape, Siôn Romaine, Jian Wang

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

In 2013, after nearly two decades of operating in a distributed legacy Integrated Library System (ILS) environment on local servers, the Orbis Cascade Alliance, a consortium of public and private academic libraries in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, began a two-year-long process to migrate its 37 members to a shared implementation of Ex Libris's cloud-based Alma library management system (LMS) and Primo discovery interface. Although much has been written on electronic resource management (ERM) functionality at an institution level, little has been written on serials and ERM functionality and workflows within a shared consortial environment. This article discusses the challenges and …

North Douglas County Community Needs Health Assessment (Phase 2), Callie H. Lambarth, Diane Reid, Beth L. Green

Early Childhood

Beginning in August 2016, Phase 2 of the North Douglas County (NDC) Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) built on work completed in the Phase 1 planning process, and engaged the communities of Drain, Elkton, and Yoncalla, Oregon in the development and administration of a regional health services survey. The purpose of the survey was to learn from families with children ages 0-8 in the NDC region in order to:

• Identify service needs across a range of health service types, e.g., dental care, immunizations, prenatal care, well-child care, primary care, and mental health;
• Identify barriers to access;
• Prioritize the programs and …

A Qualitative Examination Of Pain Centrality Among Veterans Of Iraq And Afghanistan Conflicts, Samantha D. Outcalt, Christina Nicolaidis, Matthew J. Bair, Laura J. Myers, Edward J. Miech, Marianne S. Matthias

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

Objective. Centrality of pain refers to the degree to which a patient views chronic pain as integral to his or her life or identity. The purpose of this study was to gain a richer understanding of pain centrality from the perspective of patients who live with chronic pain.

Methods. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 26 Veterans with chronic and disabling musculoskeletal pain after completing a stepped care intervention within a randomized controlled trial. Qualitative data were analyzed using an immersion/crystallization approach. We evaluated the role centrality plays in Veterans’ lives and examined whether and how their narratives differ when centrality …

Evaluation Of An Electric Bike Pilot Project At Three Employment Campuses In Portland, Oregon, John Macarthur, Nicholas Kobel, Jennifer Dill, Zakari Mumuni

TREC Final Reports

Oregon, and Portland in particular, is internationally known for its love for bikes. Not only does the region have some of the highest bike ridership but the Oregon bike manufacturing industry is quickly growing. Oregon’s electric bike (e-bike) market is also growing but little data are available on the potential market and e-bike user behavior and interest. Only a limited amount of research has explored the potential new market segments for e-bikes and the economic, operational, safety, and transportation issues surrounding e-bikes in the United States. This report examines the results of an electric bike (e-bike) pilot project, which took …

Improving Trip Generation Methods For Livable Communities, Kelly J. Clifton, Nico Larco, Kristina Marie Currans, Jael Wettach-Glosser

TREC Final Reports

Recent efforts to improve trip generation data available for transportation impact analysis of new development include the collection of multimodal trip generation data, development of models that account for the built environment, and new recommendations for practice. Building on a long line of research on transportation and built environment, many studies have identified important features of the surrounding built environment that most impact trip rates and mode shares, building on a long line of research on transportation and the built environment. Despite these improvements in data and methods, less attention is placed on identifying the conditions of the site itself …

Estimating Reliability Indices And Confidence Intervals For Transit And Traffic At The Corridor Level, Travis B. Glick

PSU Transportation Seminars

As congestion worsens, the importance of rigorous methodologies to estimate travel-time reliability increases. Exploiting fine-granularity transit GPS data, this research proposes a novel method to estimate travel-time percentiles and confidence intervals. Novel transit reliability measures based on travel-time percentiles are proposed to identify and rank low-performance hotspots; the proposed reliability measures can be utilized to distinguish peak-hour low performance from whole-day low performance. As a case study, the methodology is applied to a bus transit corridor in Portland, Oregon. Time-space speed profiles, heatmaps, and visualizations are employed to highlight sections and intersections with high travel-time variability and transit low performance. …

Current Efforts To Make Bike Share More Equitable: A Survey Of System Owners And Operators, Steven Howland

PSU Transportation Seminars

The number of public bike share systems has been increasing rapidly across the United States over the past five to ten years. To date most academic research around bike share in the U.S. has focused on the logistics of planning and operationalizing successful systems. Investigations of system users and impacts on the local community are less common, and studies focused on efforts to engage underserved communities in bike share are rarer still. This paper utilizes a survey of representatives from 55 U.S. bike share systems to better understand and document current approaches toward serving low income and minority populations. The …

Webinar: Improving Walkability At Signalized Intersections With Signal Control Strategies, Edward J. Smaglik, Sirisha Murthy Kothuri

TREC Webinar Series

The goal of signal timing at an intersection should be to maximize efficiency for all users. In many jurisdictions, however, traffic signals are timed mostly with the goal of reducing vehicular delay.

Other road users, such as pedestrians, deserve similar focus. In legacy transportation systems, pedestrians experience delays much in excess of those that would be deemed acceptable for a motor vehicle at the same location.

Excessive delay can lead to pedestrian frustration, non-compliance and ultimately decreased safety.

In the North American context, implementation of strategies to address pedestrian service varies greatly across jurisdictions, and there has been limited research …

Measuring Stress Levels For Real-World On-Road Cyclists: Do Bicycle Facilities, Intersections And Traffic Levels Affect Cyclists' Stress?, Álvaro Caviedes

PSU Transportation Seminars

This research effort presents a novel approach to measure cyclists’ stress: real-world, on-road measurements of physiological stress as cyclists travel across different types of bicycle facilities in various traffic volumes. This study addresses the question of how the characteristics of a bicycle trip affect stress levels using physiological data, specifically GSR. As detailed in the next section, GSR-based studies have been successfully employed for many years in the psychological field to recognize and associate emotions and behaviors to physiological responses. The three research questions examined in this study are: i) Does peak traffic impact cyclists’ stress levels? ii) Do intersections …

A Pathway Linking Smart Growth Neighborhoods To Home-Based Pedestrian Travel, Steven R. Gehrke, Kelly J. Clifton

PSU Transportation Seminars

Land development patterns, urban design, and transportation system features are inextricably linked to pedestrian travel. Accordingly, planners and decision-makers have turned to integrated transportation-land use policies and investments to address the pressing need for improvements in physical activity levels via the creation of walkable communities. However, policy questions regarding the identification of smart growth indicators and their connection to walking remain unanswered, because most studies of the built environment determinants of pedestrian travel: (a) represent the built environment with isolated metrics instead of as a multidimensional construct and (b) model this transportation-land use relationship outside of a multidirectional analytic framework. …

Effects Of Spatially Distributed Stream Power On Check Dam Function In Small Upland Watersheds: A Case Study Of The Upper Laja Watershed, Guanajuato, Mexico, Zachary Andrew Herzfeld

Dissertations and Theses

Watershed restoration comes in a variety of forms depending on which set of problems are sought to be remedied. Severe soil erosion, in the form of gullying and/or headcutting, can be mitigated through constructing check dams in well-selected locations. This practice has been used throughout the upland subwatersheds within the Upper Laja River watershed in Guanajuato, México. The present study employed Wolman pebble counts to systematically assess the effectiveness of 21 check dams located near the city of San Miguel de Allende. Particle size distributions taken directly downstream and upstream of each check dam were differentiated, aggregated and compared--with the …

Teacher And Student Perceptions Of World Englishes (We) Pronunciations In Two Us Settings, Marie Arrieta

Dissertations and Theses

The present study investigated the perceptions and attitudes of two groups each of ESL teachers and students in the United States regarding World Englishes (WE) pronunciations before and after watching a video on WE accents. Data gathered via online surveys were analyzed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The results show that the perceptions of the teachers in the study ranged from somewhat negative to mildly positive, both pre- and post-video, which is consistent with Brown's (1993) findings that teachers' perceptions changed little if at all after being briefly exposed to WE stimuli. The education of the teachers …

Avoiding Bus Bunching: From Theory To Practice, Ricardo Giesen

PSU Transportation Seminars

The problem of bus bunching in a high frequency service has been largely studied in the literature.

This phenomenon is produced by three main factors

(i) the variability in travel time between stops; (ii) variations in passenger demand; and (iii) drivers’ heterogeneity.

In order to tackle this phenomenon a wide range of control strategies have been proposed, however, none of them had been successfully implemented on a large transit network with high frequency services.

In this talk, we present a control scheme based on a rolling horizon optimization problem that has been successfully implemented for real-time control of two high …

Out In "The Numbers": Youth And Gang Violence Initiatives And Uneven Development In Portland's Periphery, Dirk Kinsey

Dissertations and Theses

Incidence of youth and gang violence in the Portland, Oregon metro area has increased dramatically over the past five years. This violence has recently become more spatially diffuse, shifting outwards from gentrified, inner city neighborhoods, towards the city's periphery. These incidents exist within the context of a shifting regional political economy, characterized by a process of gentrification associated displacement and growing, and distinctly racialized and spatialized, inequalities. While gang researchers have long argued a corollary between the emergence of gangs and economically and culturally polarized urban landscapes, the ongoing suburbanization of poverty in American cities suggests a new landscape of …