Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Data Collection For Understanding The Dynamics And Characteristics Of Forced Child Begging In Mexico City, Nicole Gallego

SMU Human Trafficking Data Conference

No abstract provided.

Bridging The Gaps: Leveraging Grassroots Data And Ai To Combat Human Trafficking In The Global South, Jarrett Davis

SMU Human Trafficking Data Conference

No abstract provided.

Leveraging Aggregate Data For The Anti-Trafficking Movement: A National Strategy For Curating, Analyzing, And Visualizing Multiple Data Sources For The Field, John Nehme

SMU Human Trafficking Data Conference

No abstract provided.

Scale Of Harm: Estimating The Prevalence Of Online Sexual Exploitation Of Children In The Philippines, Ben Brewster

SMU Human Trafficking Data Conference

No abstract provided.

Creating Pathways For Measuring Impact, Chris Lim

SMU Human Trafficking Data Conference

No abstract provided.

Baseball Decision-Making: Optimizing At-Bat Simulations, Varun Gopal, Krithika Kondakindi, Nibhrat Lohia, Morgan Williams

SMU Data Science Review

Pitch selection in baseball plays a crucial role, involving pitchers, catchers, and batters working together. This practice, dating back to early baseball, has seen teams try various methods to gain an advantage. This research aims to use reinforcement learning and pitch-by-pitch Statcast data to improve batting strategies. It also builds on previous statistical work (sabermetrics) to make better choices in pitch selection and plate discipline. The dataset used, including over 700,000 pitches for each full season and 200,000 pitches for the COVID-shortened 2020 season, encompasses a wealth of crucial metrics including pitch release point, velocity, and launch angle. This study …

Essays On The Application And Improvement Of The Geographical Economics Models To Policy Analysis: The Case Of Road Infrastructure In Central America, Ignacio Penagos

Economics Theses and Dissertations

The novel models of Geographical Economy have analyzed the effects on the distribution of economic activity over the area of a given region, generated by different socio-economic shocks. For example, the costs of migrating from one place to another, as shown in Desmet et al. (2018). A key advantage of such models is that, given the structural definition of the market interactions, they can first create counterfactual scenarios based on the economic fundamentals. And second, a broad set of variables can account for that impact. These dynamic spatial general equilibrium models embody features such as measures for amenities, trade and …

Unified In Christ, David Morris

Doctor of Ministry Projects and Theses

Statement of the Question/Problem

The United Methodist Church is facing a season of incredible struggle. The modern American United Methodist Church is facing a crisis of Division during this season of disaffiliation and restructuring. Division within church is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it is not new in the Methodist tradition. This repeating cycle of denominational fracture begs the question, “why does division in the church happen, and how can we avoid it in the future?” Currently the United Methodist Church is dividing supposedly over the issue of human sexuality. I would argue these divisions do not solely rely …

Queerform/Ing, Matthew Solon-Lee Weimer

Art Theses and Dissertations

My artwork is situated within and around vessels and the Queer Homoerotic World and explores sexuality as a Demisexual within them. This is accomplished through the two processes of my creation, Minivague and Queerform/ing: balancing sexual tension and explicit expression, while subverting traditional norms and stereotypes with queerness to distance oneself from stereotypical Gay Art. Altering/emphasizing makes the artwork more romantic, lighter, whimsical, softer, and tender than the figure/s and the situations actually are. The process is also emphasizing what one sees or wants to be seen. The Pink Boy becomes a celebration of intimacy of any form. I discuss …

Accounting For The Gift: Theology And Ethics In Accounting, Daniel Sebastian

Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations

Accounting is often assumed to be a neutral presentation of the facts of economic activities and actions. Its double-entry system means that it is always in balance and comports to the rigor of mathematical formulas, and it is taken to be a matter of empirical counting that lends it certainty as well. The dissertation argues that this description of accounting is inadequate. Accounting is better seen as a political tool and technology for producing trust that can help resolve social conflicts. As such, accounting is not value-neutral but carries within it a particular sociality that has moral implications. These moral …

Thriving In College: International, First-Generation, And Transfer Students, Hannah Webb, Nikita Kulkarni, Dustin Grabsch

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research

Underrepresented-student groups experience unique challenges throughout their college experience, the impacts of which can be assessed by measuring students’ levels of thriving. The purpose of this study was to understand the thriving of underrepresented college students—first-generation, international, and transfer students, specifically. To understand this, we sought to measure students’ thriving levels and determine the experiences contributing to or detracting from their perception of thriving. This study utilized a sequential exploratory design using the established 72-item thriving quotient survey to measure students’ overall thriving levels. In addition, the study utilized a qualitative content analysis on an open-ended question asking participants to …

Identifying Barriers To Mental Health Services Utilization For Black Youth In The United States: A Qualitative Study, Emily Stein, Matthew Hutnyan, Neely Myers

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research

Mental health in Black communities and racial/ethnic disparities in mental health service utilization remain growing concerns. Evidence suggests that psychotic disorders may be more prevalent among Black individuals than white individuals and the Black community faces barriers to care that can negatively influence outcomes. To better understand these barriers, we interviewed mental healthcare providers (n = 11) and Black young adults with first-person experience of psychosis (n = 13) about the experiences of minority young adults with mental health treatment. We analyzed interview transcripts and, consistent with constructivist grounded theory methods, identified iterative patterns across individuals about barriers to care. …

Stress-Induced Oxytocin Reactivity As A Predictor Of Daily Support Seeking After Stress, Cecile Sunahara

Psychology Theses and Dissertations

The current study examined whether stress-induced peripheral oxytocin (OT) was associated with support-seeking behaviors after stress in daily life. Healthy male and female participants (N=94) performed a standardized laboratory stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), and then completed two weeks of daily assessments of support seeking after stress. In line with preregistered hypotheses, plasma OT reactivity to the TSST (indexed as the area under the curve with respect to increase; AUCi) was associated with more frequent support seeking behaviors following stress in daily life. Moreover, this association was stronger for individuals with higher levels of attachment anxiety, relative to …

Daily Stress And Negative Affect As Predictors Of Orthorexia Nervosa Symptoms Among College Students: Testing Direct And Moderated Associations Using Daily Diary Methodology, Sharyl Wee

Psychology Theses and Dissertations

Orthorexia Nervosa (ON) is a condition involving a pathological obsession with healthy or “clean” eating (Bratman, 1997). Prevalence estimates of ON range from 35.4% to 83% in the U.S. population (Niedzielski & Kaźmierczak-Wojtás, 2021). Starting out innocuously as a habit of eating healthier foods, ON becomes socially and physically impairing when individuals spend a large amount of time and effort planning and preparing healthy meals, eventually turning into an obsession that interferes with other domains of life (Oberle et al., 2017). Although ON is not in the DSM-5, preliminary investigation has shown that it may fall on the eating disorder …

Ohio Recovery Housing: Resident Risk And Outcomes Assessment, Elyjiah Potter, Bivin Sadler

SMU Data Science Review

Addiction and substance abuse disorder is a significant problem in the United States. Over the past two decades, the United States has faced a boom in substance abuse, which has resulted in an increase in death and disruption of families across the nation. The State of Ohio has been particularly hard hit by the crisis, with overdose rates nearly doubling the national average. Established in the mid 1970’s Sober Living Housing is an alcohol and substance use recovery model emphasizing personal responsibility, sober living, and community support. This model has been adopted by the Ohio Recovery Housing organization, which seeks …

Using Geographic Information To Explore Player-Specific Movement And Its Effects On Play Success In The Nfl, Hayley Horn, Eric Laigaie, Alexander Lopez, Shravan Reddy

SMU Data Science Review

American Football is a billion-dollar industry in the United States. The analytical aspect of the sport is an ever-growing domain, with open-source competitions like the NFL Big Data Bowl accelerating this growth. With the amount of player movement during each play, tracking data can prove valuable in many areas of football analytics. While concussion detection, catch recognition, and completion percentage prediction are all existing use cases for this data, player-specific movement attributes, such as speed and agility, may be helpful in predicting play success. This research calculates player-specific speed and agility attributes from tracking data and supplements them with descriptive …

A Longitudinal Investigation Of Positive Biases And Psychological Functioning During Thecoronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic, Tricia Gower

Psychology Theses and Dissertations

Since the onset of COVID-19, many individuals have experienced a multitude of pervasive, chronic stressors and diminished psychological functioning. The current study examined whether cognitive biases towards positive social media or autobiographical memories augmented psychological functioning during COVID-19. Participants were 797 adults (Mage = 47.73; 58% female) recruited from CloudResearch/Turk Prime. Participants reported on their positively biased social media consumption and autobiographical recall, positive and negative affect, and dysphoria symptoms. Results indicated racial group differences in relations between positively biased social media consumption and negative affect and dysphoria symptoms and between positively biased autobiographical recall and positive affect. Positively biased …

Trans-Formation: Establishing Interdisciplinary Support For The Transgender Experience Through Historical, Biological, And Religious Lenses, Gaymarie Vaughan

Graduate Liberal Studies Theses and Dissertations

Quite frankly, nothing could be more relevant to a modern discussion about what it means to be human than the emergence of discourse on transgender identity. By looking at the long history of human evolution, the impact that the progressing fields of science and medicine have had on human development, and the human need for bodily autonomy, it should be taken for granted that transgender issues belong in public discourse and that transgender people deserve to enjoy the same rights and freedoms all other humans share. This research advocates for best and most inclusive societal practices for transgender individuals by …

Essays On Political Economy And Behavior, Seth Emblem

Economics Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays which focus on the intersection of political economy and behavioral economics. I am interested in understanding how people behave in politically adjacent areas so that we can find the policy interventions that can best address the issues that arise from these areas. To do so, I utilize incentivized survey instruments and laboratory experiments to study how people behave in these settings. In Chapter 1, I examine the question of how people respond to standard political surveys and whether these surveys reflect people’s genuine beliefs regarding factual political questions. Responses to standard political surveys suggest …

A Feminist Approach To Solutions In Urban Development, Lourdes Yessenia Gracia Cantu

Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering: Sustainability and Development Capstone Projects

Are there ways of occupying space and producing places that somehow contest, challenge, and problematize the dominant modalities of organization, of space and place?

A Feminist Approach to Solutions in Urban Development presents an exploration and proposal of a more equitable and diverse urban design that guarantees the use of public space as a place for economic development. With a focus on the recent theory and social movement concerning the impact of the built environment on women, children and older adults, urban feminist, comes across as a participatory planning process that ensures the involvement of multilevel agendas, to react and …

Eco-Interoception: What Plants, Fungi And Protista Have Taught My Body, Sara Riley Dotterer

Art Theses and Dissertations

To me, ecology is the relational, full-body awareness that I am made up of and deeply connected to everything around me; and for better or worse, this is reciprocal. I form ecotones, an ecological transitional zone between two ecosystems, with the world around me. I use this ecotonal lens to blur binaries and dissolve boundaries between me and the world “outside my body.” During my Masters of Fine Arts at Southern Methodist University, I have continuously explored and represented the lives of various more-than-human species outside of my body, including plants, fungi and protista through an ecotonal lens. Although these …

Investigating The Relationship Between Ses And Fear Of Covid-19 In A Sample Of Adults With And Without Asthma, Margot Salsman

Psychology Theses and Dissertations

While health challenges introduced by the coronavirus-19 disease (COVID-19) pandemic impacted the general population, individuals living with both asthma and low socioeconomic status (SES) may have been particularly vulnerable to health-related stress. For example, the CDC announced that a diagnosis of asthma increased one's risk of severe COVID- 19, emergency room closures restricted access to reliable disease management resources, and many lost health insurance after losing employment. Further, many essential or blue-collar workers could not protect themselves from disease by isolating themselves or quarantining at home. For these individuals, the pandemic may have introduced or exacerbated feelings of being "out …

Three Essays In The Economics Of Child Development And Health Inequities, Travis Whitacre

Economics Theses and Dissertations

In chapter 1, I assess the long-term education and labor market effects of missed ADHD diagnoses. Doing so is challenging for two reasons. First, a person's true ADHD status is unobserved; only their diagnosed status is known. Second, even if diagnostic errors are observed, they are likely akin to non-classical misclassification errors and therefore endogenous. To overcome these empirical challenges, I use and extend on a partial observability model with genetic data from Add Health. Through the lens of the partial observability model. I recover an estimate of true ADHD status, and the probability of underdiagnosis. Then, I estimate their …

Bridging The Chasm Between Fundamental, Momentum, And Quantitative Investing, Allen Hoskins, Jeff Reed, Robert Slater

SMU Data Science Review

A chasm exists between the active public equity investment management industry's fundamental, momentum, and quantitative styles. In this study, the researchers explore ways to bridge this gap by leveraging domain knowledge, fundamental analysis, momentum, crowdsourcing, and data science methods. This research also seeks to test the developed tools and strategies during the volatile time period of 2020 and 2021.

Comparison Of Sampling Methods For Predicting Wine Quality Based On Physicochemical Properties, Robert Burigo, Scott Frazier, Eli Kravez, Nibhrat Lohia

SMU Data Science Review

Using the physicochemical properties of wine to predict quality has been done in numerous studies. Given the nature of these properties, the data is inherently skewed. Previous works have focused on handful of sampling techniques to balance the data. This research compares multiple sampling techniques in predicting the target with limited data. For this purpose, an ensemble model is used to evaluate the different techniques. There was no evidence found in this research to conclude that there are specific oversampling methods that improve random forest classifier for a multi-class problem.

Content-Based Unsupervised Fake News Detection On Ukraine-Russia War, Yucheol Shin, Yvan Sojdehei, Limin Zheng, Brad Blanchard

SMU Data Science Review

The Ukrainian-Russian war has garnered significant attention worldwide, with fake news obstructing the formation of public opinion and disseminating false information. This scholarly paper explores the use of unsupervised learning methods and the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to detect fake news in news articles from various sources. BERT topic modeling is applied to cluster news articles by their respective topics, followed by summarization to measure the similarity scores. The hypothesis posits that topics with larger variances are more likely to contain fake news. The proposed method was evaluated using a dataset of approximately 1000 labeled news articles related …

How Texas Migration Patterns Changed During The Pandemic, Pia M. Orrenius, Madeline Zavodny

Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Research

The Covid-19 pandemic led to changes in where Americans work and live. The pandemic also affected international migration as borders were closed to nonessential travel and consulates shut down, slowing visa processing. These changes had implications for Texas, a state that has traditionally experienced large-scale domestic and international migration. This project also talks about the factors that positioned Texas to benefit from pandemic-induced changes in domestic migration patterns.

Examining The Mediating Role Of Co2 In Symptom Change During Capnometry-Assisted Respiratory Training (Cart) Using A Transdiagnostic Sample, Anni Hasratian

Psychology Theses and Dissertations

Much research supports the relation between respiration and mood, and more particularly, between hypocapnia and negative affect. A review of breathing trainings has demonstrated that traditional breathing trainings do not target CO2 directly, which maintains or worsens chronic hypocapnia. Capnometry-Assisted Respiratory Training (CART) was developed to directly target increasing CO2 with patients with panic disorder through the use of a biofeedback device. It is less known whether the positive effects of CART generalize to other negative mood states, such as non-panic anxiety, since hyperventilation is a well-known response to stress and anxiety. Further, the relation between CO2 and depression has …

Noted With Honor: Intersections Between Theology, Music Therapy, Psychotherapy, And Original Music Compositions For Hospice Patients, Stanton Nelson

Doctor of Pastoral Music Projects and Theses

This thesis investigates the intersections between theology, music therapy, and psychotherapy when creating a music composition that honors a hospice patient’s walk of faith. A pioneer organization inspiring this thesis is Swan Songs in Austin, Texas, where musical moments are created for the patient and family. However, its model is primarily based on collating previously composed pieces for recitals without a personalized honoring of the patient’s witness of faith. Noted with Honor is an emerging non-profit organization that creates an original work that reflects upon the testimony of the patient and forms a new narrative towards the end of one’s …

Patriarchy’S Link To Intimate Partner Violence: Applications To Survivors’ Asylum Claims, Daniel G. Saunders, Tina Jiwatram-Negrón, Natalie Nanasi, Iris Cardenas

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Eligibility for asylum for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) has recently been contested. We summarize social science evidence to show how such survivors generally meet asylum criteria. Studies consistently show a relationship between patriarchal factors and IPV, thereby establishing a key asylum criterion that women are being persecuted because of their status as women. Empirical support is also provided for other asylum criteria, specifically: patriarchal norms contribute to state actors’ unwillingness to protect survivors, and survivors’ political opinions are linked to an escalation of perpetrators’ violence. The findings have implications for policy reform and supporting individual asylum-seekers.