Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Ecodistricts In San Francisco: The Implementation Of Neighborhood Regional Planning And Its Potential Effects On Environmental Resilience, Elizabeth M. Juvera

Master's Projects and Capstones

Ecodistricts, or neighborhood-scale, community-driven areas of sustainable development, have emerged internationally and within the U.S. to create models of adaptive environmental design and advanced urban infrastructure. Central SoMa is the first ecodistrict to be planned and implemented in San Francisco, with the intention of revitalizing and greening this urbanized region of the city. At this time, the Central SoMa area has very low biodiversity levels, inefficient infrastructure, and poor water management capabilities. Through the implementation of ecodistricts in San Francisco, the city can integrate physical and behavioral sustainability measures from existing ecodistricts such as permeable surfaces, green roofs, stormwater management, …

An Analysis Of The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority’S Ability To Achieve Sustainability As Defined By The Transportation Index For Sustainable Places, Vanessa Trafas

Master's Projects and Capstones

This paper analysis the ability of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority to adhere to sustainability under the Transportation Index for Sustainable Places (TISP). Analysis focuses solely on the environmental domain of the TISP and the criteria included within that domain. Three pieces are analyzed: the Los Angeles Sustainable Implementation Plan, the Sustainable Rail Plan, and the Regional Connector Transit Project. These pieces are found to adhere to the sustainability criteria under the environmental domain of the TISP.

Privatization & Fdi: Examining Growth In Vietnam's Provinces, William T. Clark

Master's Theses

Over the past three decades many developing countries have looked toward privatizing investment markets and relying more on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to supply needed capital investment for their emerging private sectors. In their pursuit of foreign capital, developing countries have enacted several changes in economic policy and regulation in hopes of transforming formerly rural and undeveloped countries into highly urbanized centers of global production. This is particularly true for a transitioning economy such as Vietnam, which has seen increasing privatization of industry and investment since the reforms of 1986 known as “Doi Moi.” In this study I …

Does Poverty Really Impede Cognitive Function? Experimental Evidence From Tanzanian Fishers, Virginia Graves

Master's Theses

Does the feeling of scarcity really impede cognitive function? Using experimental evidence from Tanzanian fishers, this study examines the connection between poverty and cognitive function. Fishers in the experiment are tested on how exposure to a ‘scarcity trigger’ impacts cognition and productivity through measuring performance on problem solving tasks. The study also creates an index of distractions to test how existing problems in an individual’s life, which contribute to limited attention, relates to cognitive function and productivity. Experimental results do not find that mental and financial scarcities significantly impact test performance. Although the study finds no significant causal evidence, this …

The Impact Of Borehole Wells And A Hygiene And Sanitation Program On Diarrhea: Evidence From Rural Southwest Uganda, Morgan Adams

Master's Theses

Diarrheal disease is the second leading cause of death for children under age five, killing approximately 2,089 children a day (WHO, 2013). Clean water access, sanitation facilities, and good hygiene behavior are solutions to decreasing child mortality and morbidity caused by fecal contamination. I estimate the impact of borehole wells and a hygiene and sanitation program on diarrhea by creating a retrospective panel. I ask mothers to rank children from the most to least diarrhea when under the age of two and use this ranking to compare siblings, where at least one had been exposed to the program. The methodology …

The Relevance Of Economic, Institutional And Cultural Determinants For Venture Capital Investments. A Us-Europe Comparison., Nadja Benes

Master's Theses

This study analyzes the determinants of early-stage VC investments by identifying characteristics in the economic, institutional, as well as cultural framework that could explain the diverging levels of early-stage VC investments across countries. Data was assembled for 16 countries during the period from 1995 until 2013. The results indicate that countries that are more open to trade are associated with higher levels in early-stage venture capital. A higher unemployment rate negatively affects a country’s level of early-stage VC funds. Higher R&D expenditures as a proxy for the technological and innovation capacity in a country as well as a higher value …

Chutes And Ladders: Climate Variability And The Decision To Enter Sex Work In India, Kate Pennington

Master's Theses

There is widespread consensus that climate change will drive large-scale changes in poverty distributions, migration, and participation in risky informal labor markets, especially for poor households in developing countries which are both more likely to depend on the environment for their livelihood and less able to insulate against climate shocks. Within poor households, gender inequality means that women and children will bear a disproportional amount of welfare losses. I examine the impact of climate variability on migration and participation in risky informal labor markets for a particularly vulnerable population: female sex workers in India. Using a unique survey of 5,498 …

The Impact Of Offcial Development Assistance On Foreign Direct Investment: Evidence From Vietnam, Hang Pham

Master's Theses

The relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Official Development Assistance (ODA) has not been fully established, nor has its directionality, as evidenced the disagreement among economists. Using existing literature as starting point, I extend its base by examining key causal variables for ODA and FDI within 64 Vietnamese provinces, covering the span from 1998 to 2012. With the most extensive and newest dataset available, I find that ODA attracts more FDI inflows in intermediate term (5year average) and long term (all year average), but not in the short-term. An important policy implication of these results for developing countries, and …

Making Ice Cream In Tehran: A Field Experiment On The Impact Of Attendance Incentives For Street Working Children, Elnaz Safarha

Master's Theses

A substantial body of literature has focused on educational attainment and children’s performance to foster human capital. Despite the common goal, there is a debate on how to best approach it (Duflo et al. 2013). While in some studies incentives are effective in changing people’s behavior, by inducing more effort and higher performance, other works point to crowding out of intrinsic motivations and other externalities. This study reports the results of an experiment conducted with children usually working in the streets of Tehran (Iran) on the effectiveness of non-monetary incentives on school attendance and related behaviors. My within-subject design (dictated …

The Curious Case Of Greece: The Impact Of Fiscal Policy Shocks On Key Macroeconomic Variables. A Var Based Approach., Manny Kaliontzakis

Master's Theses

For years, the Vector Autoregressive approach has been the main tool for monetary economics and macroeconomic researchers around the world. Leading central banking figures, academics, and modern economic think tanks have used the approach to determine the effects of interest rate shocks on basic macroeconomic variables such as GDP, industrial production and unemployment rate. Shocking policy variables, such as interest rates or long term bond rates have given economists the ability to run reliable forecasts. The last 20 years have seen a turn in the use of the VAR approach on fiscal policy as well. Even though, in general, previous …

The Impact Of Migration And Remittances On Children's Education In El Salvador, Philip H. Jakob

Master's Theses

The effect that migrant remittances have on school enrollment is a challenging relationship to empirically define, requiring both an analysis of the circumstances that lead a household member to emigrate from their home and equally, but not always independently, how the family makes investment decisions in the education of one or more of their children. This study presents a new strategy to determine the nature of this relationship for households in El Salvador, using a 2SLS estimation with a wealth-stratified panel constructed from household survey data over a nine-year period. Employing this methodology to estimate the combined effects of both …

A Test Of The Household Separation Hypothesis In Rwanda, James E. Anderson

Master's Theses

How does a farm household in rural Africa react when the government decides crop selection? In developing countries, agricultural households strive to optimize a risk mitigating utility function rather than a traditional agricultural production function. These households are termed “non-separated” as their farming efforts are directed towards family food security rather than maximizing agricultural profits. The lack of integration with labor and commodity markets makes these non-separated households difficult to influence with policy initiatives. Various tests for household separation have been developed.

We use a unique dataset from Rwanda to evaluate these separation tests. The data include households forced into …

Unintended Consequences Of Enforcement In A Fisheries Institution: Results From An Artefactual Experiment In Tanzania, Spencer Maccoll

Master's Theses

Overfishing and the destruction of fishing commons in developing countries is a growing problem. Policymakers and local community leaders are looking for solutions to keep their fishing commons sustainable. Fines and enforcement mechanisms are commonly suggested to help preserve the commons. This paper discusses a novel artefactual experiment conducted throughout several fishing communities in Tanzania to determine the effect of enforcing a ban on illegal fishing gear on fishing behavior. Results indicate that the fishers in the enforcement treatment group depleted the fish stock significantly faster than the unenforced control group. One possible explanation for this result is that the …

Consumption Smoothing And Labor Supply Allocation Decisions: Evidence From Tanzania, Dustin Davis

Master's Theses

This paper tests the hypothesis that agricultural households engage in intermittent wage labor as a way to smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic shocks to agricultural income. Using data on agricultural households from the Tanzanian LSMS-ISA National Panel Survey and global commodity price data as a source of plausibly exogenous variation, the sensitivity of wage labor to farm income shocks is estimated. The idiosyncratic shock to post-harvest income is estimated by incorporating pre-harvest information, including local farm-gate prices as instrumented by global commodity prices. The results show that households are more likely to select into wage labor and work …

Research Brief: "Mental Health Outreach And Screening Among Returning Veterans: Are We Asking The Right Questions?", Institute For Veterans And Military Families At Syracuse University

Institute for Veterans and Military Families

This brief summarizes a scholarly article of the same name. It reviews research which assesses how healthcare providers can do more for veterans towards mental health and outreach.

Workplace Aggression: A Multi-Study Examination Of Work And Nonwork Consequences, Caitlin Ann Demsky

Dissertations and Theses

Workplace aggression has been associated with a number of detrimental employee and organizational outcomes, both at work and away from work. This dissertation includes three studies that expand our knowledge of the implications of workplace aggression in the work and nonwork domains. Further, this research illuminates the processes through which this relationship occurs by utilizing various sources of data from employees in a variety of contexts including universities, long term health care, and the USDA Forest Service. In Study 1, which was published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, multi-source data are utilized to identify the indirect effects of …

New Fhwa Vmt Forecasts Implications For Local Planning, Andrew Mortensen

PSU Transportation Seminars

A summary of FHWA’s new national traffic trends assessment will be presented, including discussion of varied factors influencing forward-thinking forecasts. Examples of Oregon statewide vehicle miles travelled (VMT) and historic traffic trends from ATR stations in the Portland urban region and greater Willamette Valley will be highlighted. VMT, population and income data will be noted with implications on local transportation planning.

Auditory Reaction Time And Behavioral Working Memory Differences Between Musicians And Non-Musicians, Benjamin Richardson, Zach Felke, Marisha Medrano, Grace Whorley, Hannah Williams

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

Previous research investigating working memory functioning between musicians and non-musicians has demonstrated differences related to music experience in auditory reaction tasks. This body of research suggests music experience may be related to faster reaction times to auditory stimuli. In addition to reaction times recorded by clicking a mouse while listening to a tonal oddball, participants in the current study performed six subtests of the TOMAL-2, a standardized measure of working memory ability, documenting participants visual, auditory, and executive functioning modules of working memory. Our hypotheses are that means of performance on all three subtests of the TOMAL-2 will be higher …

Electrophysiological And Behavioral Working Memory Differences Between Musicians And Non-Musicians, Benjamin Richardson, Zach Felke, Grace Whorley, Marisha Medrano, Hannah Williams

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

The current study is an examination of P300 differences between musicians and non-musician groups during a visual oddball task, in addition to behavioral subtests of the TOMAL-2 measuring visual and auditory working memory. Previous research has demonstrated higher amplitude P300 waveforms with shorter latencies of P300 onset in musician groups, indicating a more sensitive and accurate stimulus detection system. Fluctuations of P300 amplitude and latency activity near parietal areas have been used to quantify differences in updating processes of working memory possibly associated with differences in amounts of music experience. The current study is designed to partially replicate a method …

The Relationship Between Gender And Perceived Stress Levels In College Students, Meghan Gilbert

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

Previous research on stress in adults demonstrates that stress, even perceived stress, can take a toll on an individual’s health. Research also indicates that the severity of stress in college students has been rapidly increasing, which indicates a need for more investigation in this area. The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a difference between the stress levels of male and female college students and, if so, whether there is another factor involved that can account for this difference. The participants consisted of students attending Brigham Young University who were also active members of The Church …

The Influence Of Family Upbringing On The Facial Inference Process, Kara Pellegrini, Christopher Benner-Kenagy, Meghan Gilbert, Jacqueline Licea, Jonathan Ojeda, Jordan Segura-Mitchell

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

This study examined personality trait inferences on the basis of facial expressions by showing participants multiple photographs of either one young female face or one young male face, exhibiting three distinct facial expressions. Participants from two parent homes were asked to indicate which parent was more nurturing, and which parent enacted more disciplinary measures. Results demonstrated that responses to these two questions influenced participant trait responses to the angry and sad facial expressions. Results were discussed in terms of overall environmental influence on the inference causal attribution process.

The Medieval Screen: A Work In Progress, Julie Carmen

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

The purpose is to design a medieval screen to answer the question: "Will people be inspired to study history and fiber art when presented with colorful embroidered patches displayed on a screen?" The screen project is a work in progress I am creating to display images from a thirteenth century manuscript in a different art medium to induce inspiration and curiosity about this period of time. The poster will describe the work in progress, the different materials used to create a medieval screen, and how the screen has developed over fifteen years. It will discuss the importance of the codices, …

Student Usage And Perceptions Of Digital Devices In The Classroom And While Driving, Elena Larrabee, Hannah Williams

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

The purpose of this study is to examine Central Washington University students’ use of electronic devices for non-class related purposes and while driving. For the purposes of the study, electronic devices are defined as cellphones, tablets, laptops, and any other devices that are non-essential to the classroom environment, and non-classroom purposes are defined as any non-course specific activities performed on an electronic device during lecture. The survey has two parts, the first focusing on electronic device usage in the classroom, and the second focusing on electronic device usage while operating a vehicle. The survey is administered online, and focuses on …

The Effects Of Marijuana Decriminalization On Youth, Nancy Ramirez Hernandez

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

Research suggests that physical and psychological health problems, as well as the inability to perform well academically and professionally, can be attributed to marijuana use, especially when individuals start smoking or consuming at an early age. Cannabis is not a federally legal substance, thus no regulatory agency exists that assures marijuana and marijuana-laced products are efficient and safe for the public. The lack of this substance’s control has lead to the accidental consumption of marijuana edibles by children, which are a population of particular concern along with adolescents due to the drug’s greater negative effect on their developing brain. Opponents …

A Cost Analysis Of The 1-2-3 Pap Intervention, Kristina M. Rabarison, Rui Li, Connie L. Bish, Robin C. Vanderpool, Richard A. Crosby, Mehran S. Massoudi

Frontiers in Public Health Services and Systems Research

Background: Cervical cancer places a substantial economic burden on our healthcare system. The three-dose human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine series is a cost-effective intervention to prevent HPV infection and resultant cervical cancer. Despite its efficacy, completion rates are low in young women aged 18 through 26 years. 1-2-3 Pap is a video intervention tested and proven to increase HPV vaccination completion rates.

Purpose: To provide the full scope of available evidence for 1-2-3 Pap, this study adds economic evidence to the intervention’s efficacy. This study tested the economies of scale hypothesis that the cost of 1-2-3 Pap intervention per number of …

New Thinking About Urban Growth: Liujiang County, Lihua Li

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

The New Road to Urbanization with Chinese Characteristics that was put forward by the eighteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is being implemented in Liujiang County of Luizhou city through a series of plans and policies. This is an analysis of the process of urbanization under those plans: The Twelfth Five-year Economic Plan for Liujiang County and The Research Report on Liujiang Urbanization. The poster depicts three of the major components: (1) background material on the urbanization of Liujiang County and the opportunities that both external and internal factors present; (2) the new thinking about urban growth and the …

Eastern Washington Wildfires: Tracking Land Recovery In The Colockum Tarps Wildfire Area, Michael Balda, Allison Shinn

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

Eastern Washington State has seen an increase in wildfire activity because of policies of fire suppression and changing climate. The Colockum Tarps wildfire started on July 27, 2013, in Malaga, Washington, due to a water pump malfunction. After ignition, the fire quickly moved south-southwest and burned a total area of 80,408 acres of grasslands and forest. We combined fieldwork and geospatial analysis of aerial photography and satellite imagery to examine vegetative recovery within the fire area. Using ArcGIS and PCI Geomatica, we analyzed 2013 National Agricultural Imaging Program (NAIP) images and a wildfire perimeter shapefile from the Bureau of Land …

Hydropolicy In Ethiopia, Matthew Baldwin

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

The Ethiopian Growth and Transformation Plan was a five-year plan put forward by the Ethiopian Government to modernize, stabilize, and drastically improve the quality of life for everyone in Ethiopia. The plan was centrally focused on encouraging foreign investment opportunities, and undertook many large scale development projects. To accomplish this plan, Addis Ababa attempted to pursue grand power-generating abilities and to become a hydropower juggernaut in the region, as well as secure energy resources with membership in the East African Power Pool. This presentation evaluates how Ethiopia’s developmental and intergovernmental efforts have helped in achieving the desired growth and transformation

Vietnamese Migration Patterns And Public Policy, Johnny Nguyen, Binh Vo, Jennifer Treadway

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

At the end of the Vietnamese War in 1975, South Vietnam natives sought to escape Vietnam from the communist reign of its North counterpart. Fueled by the former Communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh’s dream of uniting Vietnam under one communist ideal, the north cemented their occupation in the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and the retreat of all American soldiers. Along with the retreat of thousands of American troops, came the many waves of Vietnamese immigrants to steadily make their way to various parts of the world including the United States, Canada, Australia, and France. The research will also …

Political Science Nobel Laureates, Matthew Prpich, Jeremiah Hodgins, Tommy Mccullough, Eric Galvan

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

Four political scientists and one fellow traveler have won Nobel Prizes since the founding of the discipline in 1880. This study examines their personal achievements and works, as well as the Nobel Laureates collective contributions influencing the field of political science, the United States, and the world. The poster uses a timeline to highlight their achievements and show how they are still relevant in the field today.