Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Future Looks Precarious For New Breed Of Long-Term Renters, Lorcan Sirr

Media

It is becoming increasingly evident across Europe and Ireland that there may be a generation of people who will never own their own home. This is not necessarily down to direct housing issues such as affordability or supply—there are broader forces at work here. These people have no predictability in their lives and no security. They are a large and growing social class. Yet they are relatively powerless and are at the mercy of forces way beyond our shores, so even national governments may find it difficult to help them. They are known as the precariat.

Planning And The Future Of The Academic Library: An Annotated Bibliography, Gregory Smith

Faculty Publications and Presentations

Academic libraries have changed significantly in recent years. At least to some extent, their evolution has been the product of planning rather than passive acceptance of, or reactive response to, environmental conditions. This document introduces readers to nearly 20 sources—representing the fields of business, higher education, and library/information science—that convey important insights into library planning. Academic library planning increasingly reflects a context in which educational and other institutions are held accountable for the outcomes of their decisions. Planning presumes the existence of useful data streams. Successful implementation of a strategic plan entails attention to organizational development and budget planning. Library …

Planning And The Future Of The Academic Library: An Annotated Bibliography, Gregory A. Smith

Faculty Publications and Presentations

Academic libraries have changed significantly in recent years. At least to some extent, their evolution has been the product of planning rather than passive acceptance of, or reactive response to, environmental conditions. This document introduces readers to nearly 20 sources—representing the fields of business, higher education, and library/information science—that convey important insights into library planning. Academic library planning increasingly reflects a context in which educational and other institutions are held accountable for the outcomes of their decisions. Planning presumes the existence of useful data streams. Successful implementation of a strategic plan entails attention to organizational development and budget planning. Library …

Designing Prenatal M-Health Interventions Through Transmigrants Reflection On Their Pregnancy Ecology, Hana Aljaberi

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation presents the findings from three participatory focus group and co-design sessions with Caribbean transmigrant women in the United States. Informed by their focus group discussions regarding their pregnancy experiences in the United States, the participants produced design ideas that reflected on physical, emotional, informational and social gap themes. The purpose of this study was to understand the challenges affecting the women’s prenatal wellbeing practices, and to conceive a set of recommendations and opportunities for mHealth technology design to assist with prenatal preventative care and management. The study uses the theoretical concept of pregnancy ecology to identify gaps in …

Commonwealth Compact: Using Research To Promote Diversity, Robert Turner

New England Journal of Public Policy

Commonwealth Compact is a statewide initiative of the University of Massachusetts Boston launched in 2008 with a primary focus of promoting diversity—especially racial and ethnic diversity—in the workplace. In addition to conducting workshops, sponsoring forums, and creating job placement tools, Commonwealth Compact has conducted research, which is the central focus of this article.

Three rounds of Benchmarks reports, using data from 2007, 2008, and 2011, showed that the reporting Massachusetts employers generally weathered the recession fairly well but that efforts to improve racial diversity lagged far behind those for gender diversity.

Data from two national surveys, produced for Commonwealth Compact …

Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership: An Economic Impact Analysis, Emma Willingham, Mike Paruszkiewicz

Northwest Economic Research Center Publications and Reports

The Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), founded in 1988, is a network of non-profit agencies staffed by industry professionals and consultants. Historically, MEP has sought to increase the competitiveness of small to mid-size enterprises (which as a group comprise 99% of all U.S. manufacturing firms) by providing expert guidance and access to resources. In recent years, the severe economic recession sparked increased interest in the strength of the manufacturing sector, due to its longtime status as one of the major drivers of the domestic economy. Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership (OMEP), the Oregon branch of MEP, works to provide data-driven analysis …

Ellsberg Paradox: Ambiguity And Complexity Aversions Compared, J. Kovářík, D. Levin, Tao Wang

Economics Faculty Works

We present a simple model where preferences with complexity aversion, rather than ambiguity aversion, resolve the Ellsberg paradox. We test our theory using laboratory experiments where subjects choose among lotteries that “range” from a simple risky lottery, through risky but more complex lotteries, to one similar to Ellsberg’s ambiguity urn. Our model ranks lotteries according to their complexity and makes different—at times contrasting—predictions than most models of ambiguity in response to manipulations of prizes. The results support that complexity aversion preferences play an important and separate role from beliefs with ambiguity aversion in explaining behavior under uncertainty.

Repetition: A Study In Visual Form Using Selected Artworks By Edward Hopper, Lauren Irwin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An attempt was made to study the form, function and patterns of repetition as expressed in visual form. A selected series of paintings by the artist Edward Hopper spanning a period of over thirty years served as the data set and was examined using an integrative approach combining both psychoanalytic theory and art criticism. The paper explored firstly, how unconscious fantasies shaped the content of Hopper's selected works, the function of the repetitive form of visual expression, and the possible psychic determinants. It was suggested that early childhood issues remained ongoing areas of conflict that continued to find repeated symbolic …

A Meaning Hypothesis To Explain Speaker's Choice Of The Sign Look, Nadav Ayal Sabar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A meaning hypothesis to explain speakers' choice of the sign look

by

Nadav Sabar

Adviser: Professor Ricardo Otheguy

The purpose of the meaning hypotheses advanced in this dissertation is to explain why speakers and writers choose the forms that they do in the course of documented acts of speaking or writing. The choice of interest is the decision to use look (or /lÊ?k/), particularly in situations where see, seem, and appear would at first glance seem to be just as appropriate. The answer to the question of why language users make the choices they do is cast in theoretical terms …

Ways Of Thinking About Illness Representations Of Cancer, Ian Zachary Pervil

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For people who have illnesses with vague or diffuse symptoms, such as systemic cancers that lack solid masses or tumors (e.g. leukemia), the process of adjustment appears more difficult than for those with clearly-defined symptoms. Dual systems theory attempts to understand this phenomenon by contending that individuals rely upon two modes of cognitive processing when conceptualizing illnesses: implicit, System 1 processes and explicit, System 2 processes. Those with illnesses whose symptoms lack specificity may rely more heavily on System 1 processing and have greater difficulty adjusting.

This study tested whether illness representations mediate the relationship between cancer patients' tumor status …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Neurophysiological Correlates Of English Vowels /I/ And /E/ In Monolingual And Bilingual 4 And 5-Year-Old Children, Nancy Vidal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Second language (L2) input in the infant and toddler years clearly affects speech processing, particularly for L2 vowels (Cheour, Shestakovab, Ceponieneb, Näätänen 2002), Moreno, Rodriguez-Fornells, Matti, 2008); Rinker, Paavo, Brosch, Kiefer 2010). However, few studies have closely examined how amount of L1 versus L2 input impacts automaticity of speech processing in young children. Greater language use of one than the other language promotes improved speech perception and production in the language of greater use (Flege & Munro 1994; Flege & MacKay 2004). Investigations have used a variety of custom-designed questionnaires to quantify amount of language use, but most have not …

Predictability Of Bond Risk Premia With An Affine Term Structure Model, Sibel Korkmaz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis focuses on zero-coupon bond risk premia. In chapter 1 first I summarize the literature that defines expectation hypothesis, time variation in bond risk premia, well known macroeconomic and variety of technical indicators which predict bond return forecasts. Then, I continue with introducing a high dimensional affine dynamic term structure model and unscented Kalman filtering as its estimation technique.In chapter 2, I explore predictive capacity of the estimated latent states of this term structure model. I constructed a single return forecasting factor by using these states. I report comparison of well known excess bond return forecasting factors' predictive performance …

Exploring The Uses Of Cultural Funds Of Knowledge Among Ethnic Minority Immigrant College Students In Their Constructions Of Learning Identities Within A Collaborative Photovoice Project, Stacey Jennell Cooper

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Today’s college classrooms are distinguished by an increase in ethnic minority and immigrant student populations, yet there is little reflection of such diversity in the curriculum and teacher preparation and practice. Ethnic minority immigrant students bring with them into learning spaces much valuable cultural knowledge. If validated, this knowledge can become an essential resource from which these students can draw in creating their learning identities and goals.

This study explored how a group of ethnic minority immigrant community college students created potential identities in relation to learning by drawing on their culturally and historically informed funds of knowledge, including values, …

Computerized Cognitive Intervention In Cognitively Normal Very Elderly Individuals, Rebecca K. West

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: The elderly population, and especially the oldest-old (those aged 85 and older) and old-old (those aged 75 and older), are the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population, increasing the need for disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other age-related forms of cognitive decline. There is significant evidence that modifiable, nonpharmaceutical factors and interventions like cognitive activity and cognitive training may slow the course of AD and cognitive decline. However, little is understood about how cognitive training may translate into improved cognitive functioning, as a potential strategy for preventing decline. To the best our knowledge, this has never …

The Conflicts Of Coexistence: Contested Meanings Of Carnivore Management And Conservation In The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Hannah F. Jaicks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) encompasses urbanizing areas adjacent to essential conservation habitat with an inimitable capacity to support carnivore populations, including grizzly bears, wolves, and cougars. This geography has resulted in divisive social conflicts about these animals’ management as well as physical conflicts when they come into contact with people over the course of daily life in the region. Employing a qualitative methodology with semi-structured interviews, participant observation, wilderness treks, and archival work, this study examines the context, social processes, and decision-making processes that underlie the predator conflicts and produce management challenges in the GYE. This approach integrates theory …

The Impact Of Affect On Neural Mechanisms Underlying Orientation Perception, Michelle L. Fowler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The underlying mechanisms used to process 2D visual information to form a unified 3D percept of the world remain largely unknown. Previous work in our lab has shown that accurate 3D perception of textured surfaces depends on the presence of specific patterns of orientation flows in the retinal image. Recent research has shown that affective state may influence the visual perception of oriented patterns. Relative to neutral face stimuli, fearful face stimuli have been shown to increase sensitivity to orientation of low spatial frequency patterns and decrease sensitivity to orientation of high spatial frequency patterns. How affective state influences the …

Lucumi And The Children Of Cotton: Gender, Race, And Ethnicity In The Mapping Of A Black Atlantic Politics Of Religion, Akissi M. Britton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I have examined claims to religious authenticity, purity, legitimacy and authority through the lens of a Black and African American Orisa community in Brooklyn, New York. Through these claims, made both internally and to a broader Orisa community within the United States and throughout different locales in the Black Atlantic, I have articulated how they are more often than not linked to very non-religious aspects of social life. Members of this community, and the broader Orisa Atlantic of which they are a part, do not practice this tradition in a social, cultural, or political vacuum. In fact, …

From Coercion To Consent?: Governing The Formerly Incarcerated In The 21st Century United States, Karen G. Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With over 650,000 incarcerated people returning to their home communities each year, prisoner reentry reform has recently become as an important strand of penal policy innovation intended to address the barriers that former offenders face. Through ethnographic research in four correctional institutions in the Midwest, I trace the use of evidence-based practices and policies as they relate to prisoner reentry and risk reduction. This dissertation intervenes in the debates on mass incarceration and prisoner reentry and offers insights on how evidence-based practices and policies are being mobilized to mitigate the costs of mass incarceration. I show how the scientization of …

The Impact Of Foster Care On Depression: An Examination Of Placement Type And Mental Health Service Utilization Among Children And Adolescents, Kisha Cummings

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Children and adolescents in foster care with a history of complex trauma such as neglect, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse have a greater odds of being clinically diagnosed with depression in adulthood compared to children and adolescents without such a history. The current study examines the prevalence of depression in a national sample of children and adolescents aged 7 to 17 years. This study asks whether a) foster care is associated with a greater prevalence of depression among children and adolescents in foster care compared to children and adolescents not in foster care; b) there is an association between …

Richard A. Posner: A Study In Judicial Entrepreneurship, Sean J. Shannon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the role of Richard Posner, one of the most prolific and innovative legal thinkers over the past forty years, as a judicial entrepreneur in his efforts to persuade the legal academy and judiciary to incorporate economic principles into the judicial decision making process in market and non-market areas of the law and legal discourse and thereby to re-examine the role of the judge. Though political scientists have explored the entrepreneurial activities of policy makers and political actors, they have given little attention to the role of judges as judicial entrepreneurs. This dissertation develops a comprehensive theoretical understanding …

Ecological Transitions Of U.S. Elementary School Students: Their Short– And Long–Term Educational Outlooks, Anthony Buttaro Jr.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I identify different types of U.S. elementary school students experiencing ecological transitions and examine their characteristics. Then, I investigate the short-term and long-term educational outlooks of these ecological transition groups from birth through their 5^th-grade. The main research questions are: Which are the characteristics of students experiencing each type of ecological transition? What short–term associations exist between different types of ecological transitions and students’ academic achievement during the elementary school grades? What long–term associations exist between students’ ecological transition histories and their academic achievement growth?

To address these questions I used data from the public …

The Effect Of Cognitive Load On Liars And Truth Tellers: Exploring The Moderating Impact Of Working Memory Capacity, Sarah Jordan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two studies are presented. The purpose of the first study is to examine the moderating impact of working memory capacity (WMC) on the cognitive load produced by both the type of statement a person is making and the manner in which the person is interviewed in a mock crime scenario. The moderating impact of suspects’ WMC (measured using the automated operation span task) on this process was also assessed. Suspects were instructed to tell the truth, a relatively easy lie, or a more difficult lie. Suspects were then interviewed in a relatively easy manner, a moderately more difficult manner, or …

When Human-Leopard Conflict Turns Deadly: A Cross-Country Situational Analysis, Julie S. Viollaz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Habitat destruction and pollution are two of the main causes for the decline of the planet’s biodiversity. Yet environmentalists are now recognizing that illegal wildlife killings, both poaching and retaliatory killings due to human-wildlife conflict, are perhaps the next major threat. Biologists have researched illegal killings and their effect on species conservation, but few researchers have applied criminological principles of crime reduction to them. This research will explore the situational factors that drive retaliatory leopard killings in parts of South Africa, Kenya, and India. These factors, human and environmental, include local expectations from wildlife, sensitivity to environmental issues, communication between …

Through The Gateway: Marijuana Production, Governance, And The Drug War Détente, Michael Polson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the 1996 voter approval of medical marijuana laws in California, marijuana policy has become increasingly liberalized. Producers, however, have remained in the greyest of grey market zones. Federal anti-drug laws and supply-side tactics have intensively targeted them even as marijuana has become more licit. In this legally unstable environment, marijuana patient-cultivators and underground producers have articulated and asserted themselves politically and economically, particularly as the likelihood of full legalization has increased. This dissertation explores how producers navigated the nebulous zone between underground and medical markets. I argue that even as producers supplied marijuana to a formalizing, regulated medical industry …

Problem And Adaptive Behavior Levels In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders As Predictors Of Sibling Adjustment, Hallie Solarsh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships among adaptive and problem behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and stress, personal adjustment and behavior of typically developing siblings. The participants were 53 sets of parents and typically developing siblings of children with ASDs, recruited from the tri-state New York area. The siblings were between the ages of 8-18 years. Parent participants completed three questionnaires including: 1) The Nisonger Parent Behavior Rating Form, 2) The Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale-Second Edition, and 3) The Behavior Assessment System for Children-Second Edition, Parent Report. Typically developing siblings completed 1) The …

Psychological Perspectives On The Under-Representation Of African Americans And Females In Entrepreneurship: The Relationship Between Perceptions Of Fit And Intentions To Leave, Rachel Pascall-Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Advisor: Professor Charles Scherbaum

Entrepreneurship is widely recognized as a vehicle for economic growth (Ireland & Webb, 2007), and recent years have shown growing multi-disciplinary interest among entrepreneurship scholars. The primary focus of this study was to identify psychological and contextual variables that explain African American and females’ intent to quit entrepreneurship. Specifically, using Heilman’s (1983) lack-of-fit model as a theoretical lens, it tested the proposal that the intent to quit entrepreneurship could be explained by the extent of African American and females’ perceptions of fit and identification with the role. Data were collected via survey methodology from a sample …

Stress And Suicidal Behavior: A Cognitive, Behavioral, And Biological Integrative Approach, Jorge Valderrama

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in young adults in the United States. Previous research has established distal and proximal life stress as a strong risk factor for suicidal behavior. However, how stress impacts suicidal behavior via interactive cognitive and biological mechanisms has not been thoroughly examined. The present research sought to better understand the relationship between stress and suicidal behavior via altered neurobiological functioning, maladaptive cognitions, and deficits in executive functioning. The first study found a relationship between the brooding subtype of rumination and trait impulsivity in the forms of negative urgency, lack of premeditation, and …

Let Fall: Hysteria And The Psychoanalytic Act, Matthew W. Oyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This text proposes to examine the contemporary crisis of psychoanalysis by taking seriously feminist critiques of the theory’s phallocentrism, but arguing that the phallus cannot be metaphorically or metonymically replaced by any substitutive term, as most revisionist theories of psychoanalysis have sought to do. Castration is the central psychoanalytic concept, though the theory always seeks to cover it over. In order to develop a psychoanalysis that can confront this castration that is always repressed and yet, in its persistent return, continuously disrupts the continuity of psychoanalytic theory, a detour is proposed, returning to the origins of psychoanalysis and taking hysteria …

An Exploration Of Target Event Encoding In A Predictive Learning Task With Humans: Integrated Or Separable Processing?, Natasha B. Nadler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A major theme in the study of Pavlovian learning explores how attributes of a predicted event are represented and encoded. In Pavlovian conditioning, the conditioned stimulus (CS) is frequently assumed to associate with one or more of the various attributes of a motivationally significant unconditioned stimulus (US, e.g. it’s hedonic, motivational, and/or sensory features). The present research asks whether humans learn to predict and encode different aspects of motivationally neutral target events, namely, their specific sensory and temporal features in a separable or integrated manner. This question of how target events are encoded has implications for associative and timing models …