Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Relocation Of Homeless People From Odot Rights-Of-Way, Ellen M. Bassett, Andrée Tremoulet, Allison Moe

TREC Final Reports

This research project consists of an investigation of responses to homeless encampments on rights-of-way owned by Departments of Transportation (DOTs). While DOTs are not housing or social service agencies, their role as major public landowners involves them in dealing with the consequences of homelessness. The research goals included analyzing the prevalence of the problem, documenting how DOTs are responding, and culling from this data information that could be used as a basis for creating a best practices guide. The research included a single mixed-methods, in-depth case study, electronic surveys of practitioners and follow-up interviews. Products consist of two reports (included …

Putting Regulatory Data To Work At The Service Of Public Health: Utilizing Data Collected Under The Clean Water Act, Jyotsna S. Jagai, Barbara J. Rosenbaum, Suzanne M. Pierson, Lynne C. Messer, Kristen M. Rappazzo, Elena N. Naumova, Danelle T. Lobdell

Community Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

Under the Clean Water Act, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) collects information from states on intended use and impairment of each water body. We explore the feasibility of using these data, collected for regulatory purposes, for public health analyses. Combining EPA impairment data and stream hydrology information we estimated the percent of stream length impaired for any use, recreational use, or drinking water use per county in the US as exposure variables. For health outcomes we abstracted county-level hospitalization rates of gastrointestinal infections, GI (ICD-9CM 001-009 excluding 008.45) and gastrointestinal symptoms, GS (ICD-9CM 558.9, 787) among US adults aged …

Community Breeders: Animal Husbandry In Portlandia, Kurt Spickerman

Metroscape

A brief exploration of animal husbandry within the city limits of Portland, Oregon, covering residents' experiences with raising chickens, goats, bees and other farm animals. Touches on new concerns relating to local sources for food, community building, and drawbacks faced by some residents.

On The Edge Of Agriculture: An Interview With Narendra Varma And Gianna Banducci Of Our Table Cooperative, Mike Simpson

Metroscape

One mile outside Portland’s urban growth boundary near Sherwood OR, a new farm business is modeling innovative practices that could become the future of Oregon agriculture. The Our Table Cooperative brings stakeholders from all levels of the food system together as member-owners within the same organizational structure. By sharing costs and infrastructure, the cooperative seeks to show that small and medium scale agricultural production can be economically viable. The farm also emphasizes diversity of crops over industrial efficiency, and its management is based on dynamic governance.. Recently, Metroscape sat down with two members of the cooperative to discuss their vision, …

Focal Point, Volume 27, Portland State University. Regional Research Institute

Research and Training Center - Focal Point

This special issue of Focal Point focuses on best practices for helping youth and young adults with mental health challenges reach their educational and employment goals, by highlighting preliminary results from some of our research at Pathways to Positive Futures as well as some of the work being done at the Transitions RTC at the University of Massachusetts.

A Hidden History: The Stories And Struggles Of Oregon's African American Communities, Walidah Imarisha

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

A Conversation Project program reveals the stories and struggles of Oregon's African American communities. Walidah Imarisha led this Oregon Humanities sponsored Conversation Project program entitled, “Why Aren't There More Black People in Oregon? A Hidden History.” This article describes her efforts in organizing and leading the program, and includes details of Oregon's history, how the state was "was created as a white utopian homeland," subsequent policies such as the "lash law," and hundreds of years of activism that is ushering change. The Hidden History Timeline embedded in this article starts with the Lewis and Clark Expedition, covers the founding of …

Poultry And The Press: Urban Chickens And The National Stage, Nicole Iroz-Elardo

Metroscape

After a 2010 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) conference bus erupted into chatter from a tour guide’s passing comment about a new ordinance allowing chickens into Minneapolis backyards, I wondered about the magnitude of the urban chicken movement. Legalizing urban chickens is, in fact, occurring more often. A Lexus-Nexus Power Search of the term ‘chicken ordinance’ does not even register a hit in 2000. Yet in 2010, 141 articles discussed potential changes to urban chicken ordinances. Such an explosion of national news coverage suggests urban chicken keeping reaches beyond Portland’s borders.

What is driving this interest in urban …

Book Review Of, Human Rights, Revolution, And Reform In The Muslim World, Tugrul Keskin

International & Global Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reviews the book "Human Rights, Revolution, and Reform in the Muslim World" by Anthony Tirado Chase

Evaluating Community Analyst For Use In School Demography Studies, Richard Lycan, Charles Rynerson

Publications, Reports and Presentations

This presentation is a case study based on the North Clackamas School District in the Portland metro area showing how CA might be used and which identifies benefits and issues.

Stafford Triangle, Jeremy R. Young

Metroscape

This year, the Portland metro area recognizes the 40th anniversary of Senate Bill 100’s signing into law by the late Governor Tom McCall. This landmark legislation paved the way for Oregon’s renowned land use planning system and pioneering urban growth boundaries. Since the implementation of the state’s first urban growth boundary (UGB) in the 1970s, the UGB has become a model for anti-urban sprawl efforts nationwide and has helped to preserve vast areas of agricultural and forest lands statewide. Since its inception, however, the UGB has excited controversy, especially in the state’s most populous area: Portland metro. This year, as …

The Landscape Of Food Production, Nathan Mcclintock, Jeremy R. Young, Taren Evans, Mike Simpson, Jacinto Santos

Metroscape

The celebration of the 40th anniversary of Senate Bill 100 provides us with an excellent opportunity to reflect on metropolitan Portland’s agricultural landscape. The landmark legislation passed in 1973 has helped to protect countless acres of the region’s precious agricultural soils—some of the richest known in the world—from development. Perhaps most importantly, however, the legislation has helped to preserve the important bond between the region’s urban areas and their hinterland, and to secure the region’s local food system. A renewed interest in growing food in one’s own backyard, however, has shown in recent years that urban dwellers need not rely …

Indicators Of The Metroscape: Low And Very Low Birthweight Babies, Elizabeth Morehead

Metroscape

A brief look at the incidence of low and very low birthweight babies in the Portland Metropoltan region, probable causes, and emerging trends.

Oregon City School District Enrollment Forecasts 2013-14 To 2022-23, Portland State University. Population Research Center, Charles Rynerson, Vivian Siu, Ryan Dann

School District Enrollment Forecast Reports

This report presents a range of three scenarios of district‐wide enrollment forecasts by grade level for the Oregon City School District (OCSD) for the 10 year period between 2013‐14 and 2022‐23. Each enrollment forecast scenario is related to population forecasts that incorporate different assumptions about growth within the District, with the primary differences being the contribution of net migration to the District’s population and age distribution. Individual school forecasts consistent with the middle range forecast scenario are also presented for the 10 year period.

Mining For Gold: Identifying The Librarians' Toolkit For Managing Hybrid Open Access: Based On A Paper Presented At The 36th Uksg Annual Conference, Bournemouth, April 2013, Jill Emery

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

In 2012, the author and colleagues surveyed eight publishers that had been involved with the Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project to learn about the state of hybrid journal publishing. At the same time, one of the key questions asked to a panel of librarians at the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers May 2012 Meeting was what role librarians would play if scholarly publishing shortly went open access (OA) across the board? From the survey of the market, and the rapid OA developments in the UK and EU that include hybrid OA, a picture …

Defining And Characterizing Open Peer Review: A Review Of The Literature, Emily Ford

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

Changes in scholarly publishing have resulted in a move toward openness. To this end, new, open models of peer review are emerging. While the scholarly literature has examined and discussed open peer review, no established definition of it exists, nor are there uniform implementations of open peer review processes. This article examines the literature discussing open peer review, identifies common open peer review definitions, and describes eight common characteristics of open peer review: signed review, disclosed review, editor-mediated review, transparent review, crowdsourced review, prepublication review, synchronous review, and post-publication review. This article further discusses benefits and challenges to the scholarly …

Economics Of Redd+ And Community Forestry, Randall Bluffstone

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is a payment for ecosystem services (PES) system created under the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) that tries to reduce deforestation and degradation in countries not subject to requirements under the convention (non-Annex 1 countries) and, therefore, release less and sequester more carbon. Other cobenefits have been added, such as biodiversity protection, poverty reduction and afforestation, which make up the '+' in REDD+. The '+', therefore, attempts to address potentially negative, unintended effects on non-carbon ecosystem services and take account of effects on those who currently have claims to forests. Many …

Is Supported Employment Effective For Youth And Young Adults?, L. Kris Gowen

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

Supported Employment (SE) is an evidence-based practice to assist people with disabilities in finding and maintaining employment. The types of services provided by SE include job coaching and training, resume development, and transportation. More recently, proof of the effectiveness of this approach for those with mental health challenges has been documented.1 The purpose of this research was to determine whether SE proved to be effective among persons with mental health challenges across different age groups.

Faq: Defining, Supporting, And Sustaining The Peer Support Specialist Role, Research And Training Center For Pathways To Positive Futures

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

Pathways RTC, together with staff from the Technical Assistance Partnership and the Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health, decided to interview agencies that were developing peer support specialist (PSS) roles. The goal was to find out what these agencies were learning about defining, supporting, and sustaining the PSS role. This FAQ summarizes some of the main things that were learned.

Education & Employment, L. Kris Gowen

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

The author provides an introduction to this issue of Focal Point, which focuses on the problems faced by youth with mental health challenges when attempting to choose a career. She also provides brief overviews of the articles contained in this issue, and recounts her own experiences as she embarked on her career.

Evaluation Of The Effect Of Supportive Services On The Success Of Apprentices In A Highway Trade, Maura Kelly

Sociology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This project evaluates the impact of a Bureau of Labor and Industry (BOLI) and Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) initiative that provides supportive services (i.e. child care subsidies; fuel assistance; support for overnight travel; tools, clothing, and protective equipment) to promote retention of apprentices in the highway trades, with particular concern for increasing the retention of women and people of color. This research project specifically focuses on the Knife River apprentice program. This is a useful case study as all apprentices in the program are employed by the same employer (most apprentice programs have multiple employers) and because approximately half …

The Wicked Problem Of Chemicals Policy: Opportunities For Innovation, Jennifer H. Allen

Institute for Sustainable Solutions Publications and Presentations

Many environmental challenges facing society today, such as climate change and integrated water management, have been described as “wicked problems” due to their biological, physical, and social complexity. Wicked problems extend across media such as air, land, and water; across political jurisdictions and landscape boundaries; and across traditional policy arenas. Traditional policy approaches that are media-specific, rely on single agencies for implementation, and that do not effectively engage stakeholders and partners outside of government are generally ineffective in addressing these issues. The management of toxic chemicals is a classic “wicked problem.” Existing toxics policies often exacerbate the “wicked” nature of …

Returning To Learn: Research And The Prodigal Student, Emily Ford, Meredith G. Farkas, Molly Blalock-Koral

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

Returning students - those with a significant lapse in time during their formal education - make up a large and growing percentage of the student population at Portland State University (PSU). Over 40% of PSU undergraduates are over 26 years of age and 21% of graduate students over 39. Given returning students’ experiences in the work force, motivations for learning, and the lapse of time since conducting academic research, returning students may approach research differently than traditional students. Despite the size of this student population at PSU and the growth of the returning student demographic in higher education, very little …

Understanding Travel Modes To Non-Work Destinations: Analysis Of An Establishment Survey In Portland, Oregon, Christopher D. Muhs

Dissertations and Theses

During the past three decades, research in travel behavior has generally proceeded from broad-level, aggregate analysis of mode share--the proportions of walking, bicycling, transit, and vehicle travel occurring in traffic analysis zones, census tracts, neighborhood, or other geographical units--to fine-grained, disaggregate analysis of mode choices and other trip-making attributes at the individual level. One potential issue is whether there are differences in the types of conclusions drawn from results of analyses performed at these different levels, as these results directly inform transportation planning and policy.

This thesis aims in part to confirm whether the types of conclusions drawn from different …

The Role Of Expectations On Nonnative English Speaking Students' Wrtiting, Sara Marie Van Dan Acker

Dissertations and Theses

This study centered on the expectations of a non-native English-speaking undergraduate student and her teacher in a general education course at Portland State University during winter term 2012. This was a qualitative case study, where I collected data throughout the duration of the course by means of interviews, classroom observations, and written assignment sheet data. I triangulated verbal data from interview transcripts from the two participants, along with data from the observation notes and the assignment sheets in order to gain a better understanding of the expectations each participant had about writing assignments.

Data from four sources were collected and …

Queer! Narratives Of Gendered Sexuality: A Journey In Identity, Kym Bradley

Dissertations and Theses

My project looks at current conceptualizations of identity relating to gender and sexuality in order to understand how queer individuals enact gender as connected to their non-normative sexuality. I will use the notion of "desire" through Butler's (1990) notion of performativity as a part of iterability that reproduces an opposition between what is intended and how it is perceived. This approach creates space to problematize the status of identities that posits the conception of fluidity and dialectic as attached to notions of gendered sexualities - the understanding that sexuality interacts with gender and that these two notions are not compartmentalized. …

Understory Diversity And Succession On Coarse Woody Debris In A Coastal, Old-Growth Forest, Oregon, Shannon Lee Mcdonald

Dissertations and Theses

This research examines the relationship between understory plant diversity and logs in a Pacific Northwest (PNW) Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis)-western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) old-growth, coastal forest. These forests are renowned for their high forest productivity, frequent wind storms, and slow log decomposition rates that produce unmatched accumulations of coarse woody debris (CWD) yet few studies have examined the relationship between CWD and understory vegetation ecology. My research addressed this topic by comparing understory plant census data between paired fallen log and forest floor sites (n=20 pairs). My objectives were to: 1) determine the influence of substrate type on community composition …

The Use Of Music As A Pedagogical Tool In Higher Education Sociology Courses: Faculty Member Perspectives And Potential Barriers, Jerry C.L. Loveless

Dissertations and Theses

Previous research has identified student engagement as an important antecedent to student learning in higher education. Although student engagement is viewed as important for learning, a significant number of college students still report frequently feeling bored in their courses. The use of music as a pedagogical tool is believed to be beneficial for promoting student engagement and student learning in higher education sociology courses, yet it has been suggested that sociology faculty members do not commonly incorporate the technique into their courses. The purpose of this comparative interview study is to explore higher education sociology faculty members' understandings of the …

The Spatial Distribution Of Tobacco Pipe Fragments At The Hudson's Bay Company Fort Vancouver Village Site: Smoking As A Shared And Social Practice, Katie Ann Wynia

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis represents one of the first systematic, detailed spatial analyses of artifacts at the mid-19th century Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Vancouver Village site, and of clay tobacco pipe fragments in general. Historical documents emphasize the multi-cultural nature of the Village, but archaeologically there appears to be little evidence of ethnicity (Kardas 1971; Chance and Chance 1976; Thomas and Hibbs 1984:723). Following recent approaches to cultural interaction in which researchers examined the nuanced uses of material culture (Lightfoot et al 1998; Martindale 2009; Voss 2008); this study analyzed the spatial distribution of tobacco pipe fragments for behavioral information through a …

Omsi - Clinton: A Corridor For Invention And Innovation, Todd Borkowitz, Katherine Dahlin, Gena Gastaldi, Kyle Goodman, Lisa Harrison, Szilvia Hosser-Cox, Irene Kim, Shihui Liu, Qi Liu, Lindsey Menard, Julia Metz, Corrie Minor, Eve Nilenders, John Tomasini, John Verssue, Kate Washington

Urban Design Workshop

This project focuses on developing a vision for the corridor between two new MAX light rail transit stations at OMSI and Clinton Street, which are part of the Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail (PMLR) project, connecting downtown Portland with north Clackamas County via southeast Portland.

This vision must be created with respect to the industrial sanctuary that flanks this stretch of light rail corridor to the west and the residential and light industry to the east.

This document is the product of a 2013 urban design workshop at Portland State University. The project builds upon three previous urban design workshops that focused …

Peak Of The Day Or The Daily Grind: Commuting And Subjective Well-Being, Oliver Blair Smith

Dissertations and Theses

To understand the impact of daily travel on personal and societal well-being, researchers are developing measurement techniques that go beyond satisfaction-based measures of travel. Metrics related Subjective Well-Being (SWB), defined as an evaluation of one's happiness or life satisfaction, are increasingly important for evaluating transportation and land-use policies. This dissertation examines commute well-being, a multi-item measure of how one feels about the commute to work, and how it is shaped. Data are from a web-based survey of workers (n=828) in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., with three roughly equally sized groups based on mode: bike, transit and car users. Descriptive analysis shows …