Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How To Ask Questions In Mandarin Chinese, Woan-Jen Liing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis re-examines the four main question-types in Mandarin Chinese, namely, particle questions, háishì questions, A-not-A questions and wh-questions, whose previous accounts are argued to be unsatisfactory due to various faulty assumptions about questions, particularly the stipulation of `Q'. Each of the four Mandarin Chinese question-types is re-accounted based on the view that questions are speech-acts, whose performance are done by way of speakers' subconscious choice of sentence-types that mirror their ignorance-types, as proposed in Fiengo (2007). It is further demonstrated that viewing questions as speech-acts instead of a structurally marked sentence-type allows a simpler and more intuitive account for …

Confucius, Yamaha, Or Mozart? Cultural Capital And Upward Mobility Among Children Of Chinese Immigrants, Wei-Ting Lu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the determinants of upward mobility among children of Chinese immigrants. While most studies emphasize ethnic cultural capital as a primary determinant of Chinese upward mobility, this study proposes three new concepts to illuminate understudied processes promoting mobility. Specifically, this study argues that Chinese immigrants' interactions with classical music schools in the Chinese community help generate globalized cultural capital (resources from immigrants' participation in transnational networks), navigational capital (the ability to connect social networks together to facilitate community navigation through higher-status educational institutions) and aspirational capital (the ability of parents to acknowledge the barriers to upward mobility). These …

The Perceived Religiousness Of The Repertoire Of The Muslim Minority In France, Brian Mawyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

France is a secular society with a deeply rooted Catholic tradition. This environment affects the acceptability of demonstrations of Muslim religious identity. Muslim immigrants to France are often ghettoized into rent controlled housing in suburbs around the cities. Rejected from French society, these immigrants cling to what links them together, which is their religion. By the third generation, fluency in heritage languages declines greatly, yet the youth of the banlieues re-appropriate Arabic words into their French speech, leading to the emergence of a Muslim repertoire that is not always accepted by speakers of standard French. This thesis surveys French people …

Age-Related Aspects Of Mirror-Use By Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops Truncatus), Rachel A. Morrison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bottlenose dolphins are neuroanatomically different and evolutionarily divergent from primates yet they exhibit mirror self-recognition (MSR), a rare cognitive ability in non-human animals. This research investigated the developmental and age-related aspects of MSR in this species. During a longitudinal study, a social group of bottlenose dolphins at the National Aquarium, Baltimore, MD were exposed to a mirror and their behavioral responses were recorded to: 1) further confirm the presence of MSR in this species, 2) determine the age of emergence of MSR and 3) draw comparisons with data documenting the emergence of this ability in humans and great ape species. …

El Bilinguismo Espanol-Ingles Y La Nueva Politica Educativa En Espana: Analisis Ideologico-Linguistico, Vi­Ctor M. Meirino Guede

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global integration of the labor market, in particular integration at the European level, has produced a tendency towards the integration of educational demands for school populations. An important part of this integration is the formation of a space of transnational linguistic communication, based on the establishment of English as a lingua franca. Within this context, linguistic competency in English is seen not only as a cultural resource, but above all as an economic opportunity--or even a prerequisite. This is why many countries have proposed educational policies that attempt to provide a higher level of linguistic competence in English for …

Work-Life Experiences For People With Mobility Disabilities In New York City, Jessica A. Murray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Work-family (or work-life) studies aim to measure interactions between the realms of work and home. It is necessary to examine these interactions within a broad context to understand external sources of tension on the work-life dynamic, including environmental, economic, and political factors. Exploratory interviews were conducted with participants of working age with a mobility disability, and when applicable, their significant others. Questions focused on work, home and transportation environments. Using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, a model of contextual issues was constructed as the basis for an in-depth analysis of work-life issues for people with a mobility disability. Contextual research and …

Mayibuye! Let Us Reclaim! Assessing The Role Of Memorialization In Post-Conflict Rebuilding, Ereshnee Naidu-Silverman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The past decade has seen a global increase in scholarly and practitioner interests in memorialization and social memory studies. While memorialization initially gained social and political significance after the Holocaust, as it served as a symbol of recognition of the millions of victims, it gained increased recognition with the growth of the transitional justice field. Initially subsumed under the banner of symbolic reparations, memorialization has over the past few years become a transitional justice mechanism in its own right. Increasingly, victims turn toward memorialization as a mechanism for recognition, justice and healing, and more truth commissions are recommending memorialization as …

Risk Assessment Of Sexually Abusive Clergy: Utility Of Sex Offender Risk Instruments With A Unique Offender Subgroup, Anthony Perillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sex offender risk instruments provide empirically based outlooks on recidivism risk and often serve as a critical part of sex offender management. If applied to unrepresented offender groups, these instruments may offer inaccurate pictures of risk and hinder efforts to reduce sexual violence. With little research available on sexually abusive clergy prior to the abuse scandal of the early 2000s, sexually abusive clergy are one group not represented in the research used to develop risk measures. An understanding of the validity of current risk assessment practices with sexually abusive clergy is critical and timely, as changes to the handling of …

The Second Generation's Homeland Trips: A Parental Expectation For The U.S.-Born Children Of Mexican Immigrants In The South Bronx, Alexia Raynal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

New deportation policies in the United States are making it harder for undocumented immigrants to return home periodically (Dreby 2013a). This has a direct impact on their children. Because parents can't travel, thousands of foreign-born minors have recently been forced to travel alone in hopes of reunification. Their U.S.-born counterparts face a similar challenge: immigrants' lack of mobility places a new expectation on them to visit relatives that were left behind. Unlike their parents, these children can move freely across borders and maintain family ties. This project explores the second generation's homeland trips as experienced by a small group of …

Implicit Bias About Disabilities: Does It Exist For Forensic Interviewers And Could It Affect Child Credibility Decisions In Child Abuse Investigations: An Exploratory Study, Elizabeth Reiman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research project considered two questions regarding forensic interviewers: Do forensic interviewers hold implicit biases toward people with disabilities? If so, could this influence whether a forensic interviewer finds a child with a disability believable? To examine these questions, a quantitative exploratory study was conducted. Using an online survey, participants were randomly assigned to read a scenario about a child's disclosure of sexual abuse (children with and without a disability), and respond to questions about the believability of the child. Participants then completed an adapted version of the Disability Attitude Implicit Association Test (DA-IAT). The results yielded four significant findings. …

Civilization Of The Living Dead: Canonical Monstrosity, The Romero Zombie, And The Political Subject, Nicholas Walter Robbins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the canonical monsters of Western political theory, including Plato's wolf-man, Hobbes's Leviathan and Tocqueville's mechanical mass. It argues that monster theorists - including horror film director George A. Romero, creator of the zombie and its apocalyptic narrative - utilize the horror genre in order to reveal the hidden dysfunctions and unrealized potentials of self and society. The canon features several prison-like heuristics - including Plato's cave, Hobbes's sate of nature, Tocqueville's prison, and Romero's zombie apocalypse - that bring to light the mass enslavement, intellectual dysfunction, appetitive tyranny, and cannibalism of the political subject. Theorists consistently depict …

Tv Audience Fragmentation: Measurement, Causes, And Economic Consequences, Jaroslaw Marek Schellner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Modern video distribution has increased the quantity and variety of programming available to viewers. Multichannel broadcasters using high-bandwidth distribution mechanisms such as satellite and cable television are able to deliver hundreds of channels to each home. Video on demand (VOD) allows users to select and watch video content at will. Digital video recorders (DVRs) have made it possible to watch any program at any time using an electronic program guide and recording shows onto a hard disk. Yet attention remains limited, as audience members are able to watch only a limited number of programs offered by different networks. As a …

Understanding Doubly Center-Embedded Sentences Through Contrastive Focus, Ashley Caroline Thorne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A production and comprehension-judgment experiment examined the relationship between prosody and comprehensibility in doubly center-embedded relative clause constructions in English. Lexically identical sentences with contrastive emphasis on NP1, NP2, or VP1, and a baseline version for comparison, were read aloud for recording and judged for comprehensibility. Contrast on NP2 and VP1 yielded higher comprehensibility judgments compared to baseline than contrast on NP1 compared to baseline. This was contrary to the prediction that contrast on NP1 would encourage the prosodic pattern NP1 || RC || VP3, which in previous work has been reported to be optimal for comprehension. Several explanations for …

Millennial Libertarians: The Rebirth Of A Movement And The Transformation Of U.S. Political Culture, Kaja Tretjak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the contemporary resurgence of libertarianism in the U.S., exploring a rapidly expanding, transnational network of hundreds of thousands liberty movement participants connected through student groups, community organizations, and established institutions, as well as through social media and a vast array of online forums. Grounded in 32 months of ethnographic fieldwork and over 200 interviews, it documents the rise of a profound disenchantment, particularly among millennials, with state-based solutions to pressing contemporary problems and, more broadly, with the nation-state project itself. Drawing on first-hand accounts ranging from elite boardrooms and think tank conference rooms, to political demonstrations and …

Clothing And Social Movements: The Politics Of Dressing In Colonized Tibet, Dicky Yangzom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the relationship between clothing and social movements. Taking the case of Lhakar in the Tibetan Freedom Movement, it explores how Tibetans in Tibet and those in exile imagine national belonging. Second, it delineates how the multiple uses of clothing, both by the colonizing state and the colonial movement articulates its importance in serving as a symbolic boundary in nationalist identity formation. Lastly, using methods of visual analysis, the research explains how the convergence between clothing, social movements, and social media creates a non-violent transnational social movement.

Depressives And The Scenes Of Queer Writing, Allen Durgin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation attempts to answer the question: What exactly does a reparative reading look like? The question refers to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's provocative essay on paranoid and reparative reading practices, in which Sedgwick describes how the hermeneutics of suspicion has become central to a whole range of intellectual projects across the humanities and social sciences. Criticizing this dominant critical mode for its political blindness and unintended replication of repressive social structures, Sedgwick looks for an alternative in what she calls reparative reading . Past attempts to expand on Sedgwick's brief yet suggestive remarks regarding reparative reading have foundered due to …

When Less Can Be More: Dual Task Effects In Stuttering And Fluent Adults, Naomi Nechama Eichorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study tested the counterintuitive hypothesis that engaging cognitive resources in a secondary task while speaking could benefit aspects of speech production. Effects of dual task conditions on speech fluency, rate, and error patterns were examined in stuttering and fluent speakers based on specific predictions derived from three related theoretical frameworks. Twenty fluent adults and 19 adults with confirmed diagnoses of stuttering participated in the study. All participants completed two baseline tasks: (1) a continuous speaking task in which spontaneous speech was produced in response to given prompts; and (2) a working memory (WM) task involving manipulations of WM …

Conflict And Playmaking: The Impact Of A Recess Enhancement Program On Elementary School Playgrounds In New York City, Elizabeth Lake

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As time demands for schooling increase and children's freedom to play is under threat, the question of how play during school recess can best be designed to serve children has grown in importance. This research examines whether a peer-training program can influence children's activity choices and social behaviors and reduce conflict on elementary school playgrounds during recess and what aspects of such a peer-training program are important to this goal. Three general recess issues are considered: conflict, activity level and choice, and gender inclusion. The data was collected as part of a Recess Enhancement Program in a select group of …

Public Space--Urban Spaces Of Multiple And Diverse Publics, Antti Moelsae

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shopping centers, hotel lobbies and - as was recently reported - McDonald's restaurants have been appropriated as social and political spaces by the public, but then encounter resistance by the owners of those spaces. Shopping centers, which have come to replace urban public space around the world, are notorious for limiting the modes of use and actively prohibiting forms of political expression. The legal status of commercial spaces that substitute for traditional public spaces is still unclear. Much of the critique of privatization of public space has been directed towards these enclosed spaces, the ownership of which is unambiguously private. …

Moral Inscriptions: Politics And The Rhetoric Of Responsibility, Steven Pludwin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation advances two interrelated claims. First, I examine the concept of responsibility and show how it operates as a rhetorical form that mediates a large segment of political life. Framing responsibility as a distinctly political problem, I argue that it functions to produce, discipline and govern subjects as well as legislate forms of identity, difference and community. Second, I argue that the definitional space of responsibility is not sacred, but contested. It is within this contested space that political battles regarding how we ought to understand the world and what it means to live in common with others plays …

"My People Is A People On Its Knees": Mexican Labor Migration From The Montana Region And The Formation Of A Working Class In New York City, Rodolfo Hernandez-Corchado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the contemporary proletarianization via migration of the indigenous and mestizo people from the Montaña region, in the Mexican southern state of Guerrero, to New York City. The dissertation demonstrates how the region was transformed since the 1980s into a migrant labor supplier and how its inhabitants became proletarians, and a major pool of labor supplying the North American transnational migrant labor market.

Far from being homogenous, the people of the Montaña region are ethnically and class diverse. Based on the oral narratives of an indigenous Mixteco, and a mestizo teenager dweller of the city of Tlapa, the …

The Effects Of School Autonomy On Students' Reading Achievement In Early Grades: A Dose-Response Treatment Approach, Esther Ferreira Dos Santos Carvalhaes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

School autonomy is at the core of influential educational policies aimed at improving school effectiveness and students' academic performance both in the United States and abroad. Initiatives that promote a transfer of authority from higher levels of the school system to local schools, such as the charter school movement and School-Based Management (SBM), have become increasingly popular in the last two decades. These initiatives operate under the premise that local stakeholders (principals, teachers, and parents) understand their students' needs better than higher-level administrators, which enables them to make better educational decisions regarding students' academic success. However, despite the prominence of …

The Influence Of An Appetitive Conditioned Stimulus On Interval Timing Behavior, Joseph Daniel Jacobs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pavlovian incentive motivation provides a theoretical framework on the basis of which experiments can be designed to examine the effects of motivational variables on timing behavior. The Pavlovian-Instrumental transfer (PIT) paradigm is a prototype for studying Pavlovian incentive motivation. The current study examined the effect of a Pavlovian appetitive conditioned stimulus (CS) on timing performance, based on the PIT paradigm. Nine pigeons were exposed to pairings of a 120-s conditioned stimulus (flashing or steady houselight) and unconditioned stimulus (food). The pigeons were then trained on the peak procedure (FI 30 s). In a subsequent testing phase, the effect of the …

Exploring The Illusion Of Transparency When Lying And Truth-Telling: The Impact Of Age, Self-Consciousness, And Framing, Jason Mandelbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Individuals often overestimate the ability of others to accurately determine their internal states. This illusion of transparency has been shown to manifest itself in everyday scenarios, including when people are asked to estimate if others can tell when they are lying. Yet it has not been observed when truth-telling, nor investigated developmentally. The current experiments tested for an illusion of transparency when individuals were truth-telling and lying and investigated how a participant's age, dispositional self-consciousness, situational self-awareness and how questions were framed impacted the strength and prevalence of the illusion of transparency.

In Experiments 1 and 2, children and adolescents …

The Effect Of Income On Health After Hurricane Katrina, Jang Wook Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a large literature that documents a positive correlation between income and a variety of measures of good health. This correlation may reflect causality in both directions and may also reflect omitted "third variables" that are positively related to income and health. In my dissertation, I employ an exogenous negative shock to income due to a natural disaster to estimate the true causal impact of income on health. The shock I will use is Hurricane Katrina, which severely damaged counties in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana in August 2005. I use these treatment counties and a variety of alternative sets …

Religion Is Not The Answer: How To Turn Restlessness Into Meaningful Change - The Egyptian Conundrum, Alain C. Seckler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The situation in Egypt and elsewhere in parts of the Arab world is to some extent reminiscent of the situation that prevailed before 1914 in Europe, where a motley array of unharnessed popular micronationalisms (today, instrumentalized religious fervor) combined with big power politics and interests and led to the cataclysm of war. With regard to Egypt, there is also a huge generational gap, with 2/3 of Egypt's population below the age of 35 years. The so-called "solutions" of the past, whether religious or secular, will no longer work if the voice of the young people is not heard by their …

The Historic Inability Of The Haitian Education System To Create Human Development And Its Consequences, Patrick Michael Rea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study aims to evaluate the role that a lack of literacy and education has played in Haiti's historic and presently low level of human development. The pedagogical philosophies of two educationists, Paolo Friere and Maurice Dartigue, are used throughout the study as lenses from which to read and interpret the history of Haitian education -its many failed attempts, and recurrent challenges- in creating a literate and educated population. The author concludes that mass literacy is prerequisite if the Haitian people are to achieve self-realization and actualization, which essentially equates to what the United Nations Development Program calls "Human Development". …

Essays On Savings Behavior Of Low-Income Households In Colombia, Luz M. Salas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I designed and implemented a Randomized Controlled Trial to study whether relatively simple modifications to how a commitment savings product was framed and labeled could affect savings accumulations and other outcomes of low-income individuals in newly formed Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) in Colombia. Motivated by hypotheses from behavioral economics, the experiment tests hypotheses that behavioral responses should vary depending on whether subjects are led to label and create `mental savings accounts' in private or public ways. Individuals in the private-labeling treatment groups were led to label their savings as earmarked for a particular purpose and to state savings …

Planetary Improvement: Discourses And Practices Of Green Capitalism In The Cleantech Space, Jesse Adam Goldstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is money to be made in saving the planet. A whole host of actors, such as investors, entrepreneurs, engineers, and policy makers have mobilized around our ecological problems, seeking to innovate new `green' and `clean' technologies that can serve a rapidly changing environment. The presumption that such technologies are both necessary and necessarily profitable anchors visions of a `green' capitalism that can and must be brought into existence.

However, just as free markets have never been all that free, why should we presume that green capitalism would be all that green? Instead of attempting to arbit whether or not …

China's Search For "Peaceful Internationalism" Vis-À-Vis A Liberal World Order: Interests, National Identity And Foreign Policy, Bo Ma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I employ the concept of national identity to explain China's foreign policy behavior during the history of the People's Republic of China. Specifically, I propose the concept of "peaceful internationalism" to characterize the behavioral orientation of China in the post-Mao era. Peaceful internationalism as both an idea and a policy, aims at a cross-national framework for cooperation and co-existence through non-conflictual, non-hegemonic and non-unilateral mechanisms of dispute resolution. This study argues that China pursues peaceful internationalism in a liberal international order, which is consistent with its contemporary national identity, which I term the "phoenix rising" identity. This …