Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Partner Influence In Diet And Exercise Behaviors: Testing Behavior Modeling, Social Control, And Normative Body Size, Brea Perry, Gabriele Circiurkaite, Christy Freadreacea Brady, Justin Garcia

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Previous research has documented social contagion in obesity and related health behaviors, but less is known about the social processes underlying these patterns. Focusing on married or cohabitating couples, we simultaneously explore three potential social mechanisms influencing obesity: normative body size, social control, and behavior modeling. We analyze the association between partner characteristics and the obesity-related health behaviors of focal respondents, comparing the effects of partners’ body type, partners’ attempts to manage respondents’ eating behaviors, and partners’ own health behaviors on respondents’ health behaviors (physical activity, fruit and vegetable consumption, and fast food consumption). Data on 215 partners are extracted …

Community To Clinic Navigation To Improve Diabetes Outcomes, Gabriele Circiurkaite, Nancy E. Schoenberg, Mary Kate Greenwood

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Rural residents experience rates of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) that are considerably higher than their urban or suburban counterparts. Two primary modifiable factors, self-management and formal clinical management, have potential to greatly improve diabetes outcomes. “Community to Clinic Navigation to Improve Diabetes Outcomes,” is the first known randomized clinical trial pilot study to test a hybrid model of diabetes self-management education plus clinical navigation among rural residents with T2DM. Forty-one adults with T2DM were recruited from two federally qualified health centers in rural Appalachia from November 2014–January 2015. Community health workers provided navigation, including helping participants understand and implement …

Mountains Of Our Future Earth: Defining Priorities For Mountain Research, Erin H. Gleeson, Susanne Wymann Von Dach, Courtney G. Flint, Gregory B. Greenwood, Martin F. Price, Jörg Balsiger, Anne Nolin, Veerle Vanacker

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

The Perth conferences, held every 5 years in Perth, Scotland, bring together people who identify as mountain researchers and who are interested in issues related to global change in mountain social-ecological systems. These conferences provide an opportunity to evaluate the evolution of research directions within the mountain research community, as well as to identify research priorities. The Future Earth Strategic Research Agenda provides a useful framework for evaluating the mountain research community's progress toward addressing global change and sustainability challenges. Using a process originally set up to analyze contributions to the 2010 conference, the abstracts accepted for the 2015 conference …

Framing The Human Dimensions Of Mountain Systems: Integrating Social Science Paradigms For A Global Network Of Mountain Observatories, Courtney G. Flint

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

The Global Network of Mountain Observatories (GNOMO) is an international initiative seeking to increase communication and collaboration and align methodologies to assess commonalities and differences across the world's mountain landscapes. Oriented toward sustainable mountain development, GNOMO requires the integration of social and natural sciences, as well as a diverse array of stakeholder perspectives. This paper highlights challenges associated with integrating social sciences because of the inherent paradigmatic differences within the social sciences. The value orientations of mountain researchers, as well as the divergent societal and institutional values regarding mountains, create a need for new approaches to observing mountain landscapes. A …

How Do Children Become Workers? Making Sense Of Conflicting Accounts Of Cultural Transmission In Anthropology And Psychology, David F. Lancy, Christopher A.J. Little

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

This article uses children’s work as a lens to examine methodological concerns in the study of cultural transmission and children’s learning of useful domestic and subsistence skills. We begin by providing a review of the relevant literature concerning cultural transmission in the context of the ethnographic record, as well as more recent studies originating largely from psychology. We then offer an ethnographic case study concerning Asabano (PNG [Papua New Guinea]) childhood to make an important methodological contribution in the interdisciplinary study of cultural transmission. The case study centers on the paradox that Asabano parents, in interviews, claim that their children …

Teaching: Natural Or Cultural?, David F. Lancy

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

In this chapter I argue that teaching, as we now understand the term, is historically and cross-culturally very rare. It appears to be unnecessary to transmit culture or to socialize children. Children are, on the other hand, primed by evolution to be avid observers, imitators, players and helpers—roles that reveal the profoundly autonomous and self-directed nature of culture acquisition (Lancy in press a). And yet, teaching is ubiquitous throughout the modern world—at least among the middle to upper class segment of the population. This ubiquity has led numerous scholars to argue for the universality and uniqueness of teaching as a …

Build It, But Will They Come? A Geoscience Cyberinfrastructure Baseline Analsys, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Karen S. Baker, Nicholas Berente, Dorothy R. Carter, Leslie A. Dechurch, Courtney G. Flint, Gabriel Gershenfeld, Michael Haberman, John Leslie King, Christine Kirkpatrick, Eric Knight, Barbara Lawrence, Spenser Lewis, W. Christopher Lenhardt, Pablo Lopez, Matthew S. Mayernik, Charles Mcelroy, Barbara Mittleman, Et Al.

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Understanding the earth as a system requires integrating many forms of data from multiple fields. Builders and funders of the cyberinfrastructure designed to enable open data sharing in the geosciences risk a key failure mode: What if geoscientists do not use the cyberinfrastructure to share, discover and reuse data? In this study, we report a baseline assessment of engagement with the NSF EarthCube initiative, an open cyberinfrastructure effort for the geosciences. We find scientists perceive the need for cross-disciplinary engagement and engage where there is organizational or institutional support. However, we also find a possibly imbalanced involvement between cyber and …

The Socioecology Of Territory Size And A "Work-Around" Hypothesis For The Adoption Of Farming, Jacob Freeman

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

This paper combines theory from ecology and anthropology to investigate variation in the territory sizes of subsistence oriented agricultural societies. The results indicate that population and the dependence of individuals within a society on “wild” foods partly determine the territory sizes of agricultural societies. In contrast, the productivity of an agroecosystem is not an important determinant of territory size. A comparison of the population-territory size scaling dynamics of agricultural societies and human foragers indicates that foragers and farmers face the same constraints on their ability to expand their territory and intensify their use of resources within a territory. However, the …

New Studies Of Children’S Work, Acquisition Of Critical Skills, And Contribution To The Domestic Economy, David F. Lancy

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

In spite of the fact that the very earliest ethnographers who paid any attention to children took note of the “precocity” displayed by children in both learning the household (e.g., caring for a younger sibling) and subsistence (harvesting and processing grain), tasks characteristic of the societies under investigation, the first synthesis and cross-cultural compilation of this large body of descriptive material is quite recent. This first, introductory, article in this collection reviews those efforts to systematize the study of children’s work and leads the reader through a catalog of the major conclusions or generalizations that have emerged from this analysis. …

The Association Between Shared Values And Well-Being Among Married Couples, Travis G. Parry

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The primary objective of this research study was to examine the shared values and marital well-being of married couples and to see if there was a relationship between these variables. A secondary purpose of this study was to examine the marital well-being variables (financial stability, marital happiness, individual well-being) and see if there were relationships between these variables when analyzed simultaneously.

This study found a positive relationship between several shared values and the marital happiness and individual well-being variables of material well-being. However, no shared values were related to financial stability. The study did find positive relationships between all martial …

A Light In The Dark: Luminescence Dating Intermountain Ware Ceramics From Four Archaeological Sites In Northwestern Wyoming, Carlie J. Ideker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The chronology of high-altitude archaeological sites in northwestern Wyoming is poorly understood due to limited reliable age constraints. While temporally diagnostic artifacts provide relative age control, fluctuations in atmospheric radiocarbon produce radiocarbon age results with multiple calibrated age-range intercepts that prove difficult to interpret. Age overestimates associated with the 'old wood' problem can be especially prominent at high-altitude sites where cold and semi-arid environments promote the presence of long-living trees and prolong the preservation of organic material. Moreover, regional droughts coupled with a pine beetle epidemic have resulted in increasing wildfire frequency and intensities that serve both as a benefit …

A Population-Based Analysis Of Increasing Rates Of Suicide Mortality In Japan And South Korea, 1985–2010, Eric N. Reither, Sun Jeon, Ryan K. Masters

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Background: In the past two decades, rates of suicide mortality have declined among most OECD member states. Two notable exceptions are Japan and South Korea, where suicide mortality has increased by 20 % and 280 %, respectively.

Methods: Population and suicide mortality data were collected through national statistics organizations in Japan and South Korea for the period 1985 to 2010. Age, period of observation, and birth cohort membership were divided into five-year increments. We fitted a series of intrinsic estimator age-period-cohort models to estimate the effects of age-related processes, secular changes, and birth cohort dynamics on the rising …

Ideal Elves? Expressing A 3-Dimensional Personality In A 2-Dimensional Space, David Tauber, Joshua Wanner

Student Research Symposium

Published in 2007, the Ideal Elf is a classic article studying character creation in Online Games. It used quantitative methods to address the difference between the idealize self of individuals surveyed, and the online characters they create. In their survey they found the difference between an individuals ideal self and the traits of the character they created was considerably smaller than the difference between the difference between the individual’s ideal self and their actual self. From this they suggested the creation of characters in game is partially a way for individuals to express their ideal selves. Our research attempted to …

Playing With Knives: The Socialization Of Self-Initiated Learners, David F. Lancy

David Lancy

Since Margaret Mead’s field studies in the South Pacific a century ago, there has been the tacit understanding that as culture varies, so too must the socialization of children to become competent culture users and bearers. More recently, the work of anthropologists has been mined to find broader patterns that may be common to childhood across a range of societies. One improbable commonality has been the tolerance, even encouragement, of toddler behavior that is patently risky, such as playing with or attempting to use a sharp-edged tool. This laissez faire approach to socialization follows from a reliance on children as …

Ethnographic Perspectives On Culture Acquisition., David F. Lancy

David Lancy

The study of cultural transmission has been dominated by the view that it occurs largely through a process by which adults—especially parents—transfer what they know to children. However, “instructed learning” or teaching is, in fact, quite rare in the ethnographic record. Rogoff reports of the Highland Maya that “of the 1708 observations of nine-year-olds, native observers could identify only six occasions as teaching situations” (1981:32). Bruner, in viewing hundreds of hours of ethnographic film shot among !Kung and Netsilik foraging bands, was struck by the total absence of teaching episodes. In a very recent study of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) …

Teaching: Natural Or Cultural?, David F. Lancy

David Lancy

This chapter will argue that teaching, as we now understand the term, is historically and cross-culturally very rare. It appears to be unnecessary to transmit culture or to socialize children. Children are, on the other hand, primed by evolution to be avid observers, imitators, players and helpers—roles that reveal the profoundly autonomous and self-directed nature of culture acquisition (Lancy in press a). And yet, teaching is ubiquitous throughout the modern world—at least among the middle to upper class segment of the population. This ubiquity has led numerous scholars to argue for the universality and uniqueness of teaching as a characteristically …

Playing With Knives: The Socialization Of Self-Initiated Learners, David F. Lancy

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Since Margaret Mead’s field studies in the South Pacific a century ago, there has been the tacit understanding that as culture varies, so too must the socialization of children to become competent culture users and bearers. More recently, the work of anthropologists has been mined to find broader patterns that may be common to childhood across a range of societies. One improbable commonality has been the tolerance, even encouragement, of toddler behavior that is patently risky, such as playing with or attempting to use a sharp-edged tool. This laissez faire approach to socialization follows from a reliance on children as …

Teaching: Natural Or Cultural?, David F. Lancy

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

An important part of the common lore of anthropology is that “other people have culture.” That is, most people fail to recognize or appreciate how much of their lives are governed by habits, values, and expectations that are largely the product of history and culture. They fail to acknowledge that their own way of doing things is not necessarily universal or even widely shared. This ethnocentrism can have enormous consequences for the construction of child development theory and education.