Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

More Is Not Always Better : Examining The Influence Of Group Qualities On Need Satisfaction And The Social Cure Effect, Tina Christine Demarco

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

A large body of recent literature suggests that social identification leads to better well-being, a relationship that has been coined the “social cure” effect. This positive relationship has been attributed to the satisfaction of global psychological needs, including the needs for self-esteem, belongingness, perceived personal control, and a meaningful existence (Greenaway et al., 2016). However, this line of research has yet to fully to understand what and how group qualities may undermine or bolster this effect, and whether certain group qualities satisfy these needs differentially. Three studies were conducted to examine the influence of group qualities (i.e., group esteem, identity …

For Better Or Worse? : Exploring How Decentralization Shapes Local Expenditures And Health Service Utilizations In Indonesia, Adenantera Dwicaksono

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Decentralization has become one of the most important public-sector reform programs globally since the 1990s with mixed results. In this four-paper dissertation, I explored how decentralization reforms affect public goods and services delivery, by analyzing how post-decentralization institutional changes shape local expenditure decisions and health service utilizations in Indonesia. The main goal of this dissertation was to improve understanding on a better approach to studying public goods and services delivery under a decentralized governance. I used primarily quantitative methods in this dissertation. I started with a systematic review of quantitative studies on the impacts of decentralization reforms and health system …

Patronage As A System Of Insiders And Outsiders : Lessons From The Commonwealth Of Puerto Rico, Elizabeth H. Perez-Chiques

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Although in place for more than 100 years, Puerto Rico’s merit-based civil-service system still does not function to uphold merit as officially intended. Patronage—the disbursement of public resources or benefits in exchange for political support—is a normal and routine part of governing in Puerto Rico. How does a patronage system work within a formal merit-based system? And, what are the mechanisms that keep patronage in place? Through a mixed-method strategy—including in-depth interviews with public employees, limited participant observation, and analysis of political discrimination and public corruption cases—this research aimed to understand: how patronage works, how patronage relates to the formal …

Help-Seeking Attitudes Of Black College Students : The Effects Of Racism, Cultural Mistrust, And Campus Racial Climate, Megan Cusick Brix

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Black college students utilize mental health services less often than other racial groups, despite experiencing psychological distress (Kearney, Draper, & Baron, 2005; Sontag-Padilla et al., 2016). Black students face a number of unique barriers including experiences with racism, poorer adjustment, and cultural mistrust, which have been linked to poor retention outcomes (Iacovino & James, 2016), particularly at predominantly White institutions (PWIs). While there is a need for mental health service utilization among this population, a number of factors impact students' willingness to seek services. The current study examined the role of race-related stress, cultural mistrust, and campus racial climate in …

Fusing Satellite Data To Monitor The Urban Area's Effect On Plant Phenology, Norman Gervais

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation centrally focuses on developing and validating the use of fused satellite imagery to monitor the effects of the urban area on plant phenology, specifically the timing of the start and end of the growing season (SOS and EOS, respectively). In the first paper, Chapter 2, data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Landsat were fused together using the Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Reflectance Fusion Model (STARFM) to produce a time series of a high spatial and high temporal resolution vegetation index. From this time series, the SOS and EOS were extracted and compared between the urban …

Satisfaction Of Search (Sos) Impacts Proofreading Performance : Evidence From Eye Movements, Eliza Barach

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In multiple-target visual search tasks, the discovery of one target can hinder the detection of another target (i.e., “subsequent search misses”, SSMs; Cain, Adamo, & Mitroff, 2013, which are also known as “satisfaction of search” misses, SOS; Tuddenham, 1962). SSMs errors generalize to both medical and non-medical tasks (Fleck, Samei, & Mitroff, 2010) and using eye tracking methods, and a proofreading paradigm where targets are misspelled words and distractors are correctly spelled words, we document eye movement evidence of an SSM effect. Specifically, typo detection accuracy was reduced in trials containing two typos compared to trials containing a single typo. …

The Unpersuadables : How Pro-Social Advocacy Promotes Engagement Disparities, Roger Gans

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract

Beyond Litigation : The Behavior Of Cause Lawyering Organizations In The Lgbtq Movement, David Lawrence Trowbridge

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Scholarship tells us that cause lawyers, including those in the LGBTQ movement, are likely to avoid non-litigation tactics in favor of court-centered strategies (Klarman 2005; Rosenberg 2008; Scheingold 1974). Other research suggests that lawyers are likely to steer the LGBTQ movement’s agenda away from both grassroots interests and its more radical agenda (Leachman 2014; Levitsky 2006). However, more recent scholarship shows an increased reliance on non-litigation tactics in the LGBTQ movement and publicly available evidence indicates cause lawyers are working on diverse sets of issues within the movement (Cummings and NeJaime 2010; Marshall 2006).

The Impact Of Adverse Childhood Experiences On Mental Health, Executive Functioning, And Emotion Regulation Across Childhood : Which Family And Community Factors Mitigate Risk?, Atara Siegel

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

It is well established that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) increase risk of developing mental health disorders later in life. It is unclear how early in childhood these effects can be seen. Executive functioning (EF) and emotion regulation (ER) have been proposed as potential mechanisms which mediate the effect of ACEs on mental health. Individual ACEs have been associated with poor EF and ER. It is unclear whether ACE scores impact EF and ER in a graded, dose-response manner. It is also unclear how early in childhood these effects can be seen. Finally, more research is needed to identify family and …

Segregation, Turnover, And Neighborhood Connections : Assessing The Role Of Family Structure, Colleen Elizabeth Wynn

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The main objective of this dissertation is to examine patterns of residential segregation,

Ways Of Thanking In American-English, Chinese-Mandarin, South Korean, And Thai : An Intercultural And Cross-Linguistic Approach, Pilaiporn Phetcherdchin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Language can define people by the way they use it. This thesis investigates how four different languages – American-English, Chinese-Mandarin, South Korean, and Thai – use thanking expressions to one another. The content of this thesis is mainly collected from survey data and movie scripts. This study identifies how American-English, Chinese-Mandarin, South Korean, and Thai use formal and informal thanking expressions in various situations, e.g. people in different social status, and polite endings in thanking expressions. The author also focuses on cultural similarities and differences among the four languages in order to express thank to one another, e.g. Western and …

Integrating Information Literacy And Evidence-Based Medicine Content Within A New School Of Medicine Curriculum: Process And Outcome, Joanne M. Muellenbach, Kathryn M. Houk, Dana E. Thimons, Bredny Rodriguez

Jay Sexter Library Publications and Research

This column describes a process for integrating information literacy (IL) and evidence-based medicine (EBM) content within a new school of medicine curriculum. The project was a collaborative effort among health sciences librarians, curriculum deans, directors, and faculty. The health sciences librarians became members of the curriculum committees, developed a successful proposal for IL and EBM content within the curriculum, and were invited to become course instructors for Analytics in Medicine. As course instructors, the librarians worked with the other faculty instructors to design and deliver active learning class sessions based on a flipped classroom approach using a proprietary Information Mastery …

Occupational Health Psychology, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Publications and Research

Occupational health psychology (OHP) is a cross-disciplinary subspecialty within psychology. OHP derives from two disciplines within applied psychology, health psychology and industrial/organizational psychology. OHP is also linked to disciplines outside of psychology, such as occupational medicine and public health. The discipline has roots in eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century thinkers, including Adam Smith, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. These thinkers were concerned with the impact of the organization of work and the business cycle on human life. Later research by Elton Mayo, Marie Jahoda, Walter B. Cannon, Hans Selye, and investigators at the University of Michigan’s …

Occupational Health Psychology, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Publications and Research

Occupational health psychology (OHP) is a cross-disciplinary subspecialty within psychology. OHP derives from two disciplines within applied psychology, health psychology and industrial/organizational psychology. OHP is also linked to disciplines outside of psychology, such as occupational medicine and public health. The discipline has roots in 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century thinkers, including Adam Smith, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. These thinkers were concerned with the impact of the organization of work and the business cycle on human life. Later research by Elton Mayo, Marie Jahoda, Walter B. Cannon, Hans Selye, and investigators at the University of Michigan’s Institute …

Lowering Consumer Search Costs Can Lead To Higher Prices, M. Nishida, Marc Remer

Economics Faculty Works

We demonstrate that regulations that lower consumer search costs and make them less heterogeneous across consumers can lead to higher prices charged by firms. We estimate the distribution of consumer search costs for 366 isolated retail gasoline markets, and find that reducing the mean and standard deviation by 20% and 48%, respectively, leads to price increases in 32% of markets and an average price increase of 5.2 cents per gallon across all markets. Thus, price transparency regulation that results in higher prices may not stem from collusion, but from an equilibrium with less consumer search.

Implications Of Regional Banking Industry On Regional Business Dynamics, Rowland Filbert

Mark A. Israel '91 Endowed Summer Research Fund in Economics

Entrepreneurship and its job creation capacity play an important social function and this study analyzes how the health of a regional banking industry affects these regional business dynamics. Using a panel dataset covering all 50 states and Washington, DC for the period 1977-2014, several key outcome variables were estimated using a fixed effects and instrumental variable regressions. These included net business formation, net job creation, net job creation among continuers, the job creation rate, and employment growth. These were explained by banking variables like return-on-assets and capital-to-assets as well as regional macroeconomic variables like real personal income and housing price …

Colleen Connelly: Taking The First Step Towards Improving Food Accessibility, Michelle Rekowski '19

Outstanding Ethnographic Research Projects

Colleen Connelly is nineteen years old and already in her third year running the Sunnyside Community Garden in West Bloomington. She co-founded the nonprofit to provide fresh produce to the West Bloomington community as part of an entrepreneurship program at Normal Community High School. She wants to provide a space for the community to actively learn about the food they are growing, as a way to work towards economic and environmental sustainability. Describing the garden as a food forest is part of sustainability planning, as food forests are designed to efficiently utilize existing natural landscapes. In other words, food forests …

The Value Of Green Certification On Single-Family Houses In The Chicagoland Area, Raymond Bolton

Honors Projects

In the United States, residential buildings alone account for 33% of energy consumption. Rising concerns about environmental impacts due to human consumption, as well as health concerns related to pollution have caused a higher demand for environmentally conscious houses. Homebuilders have responded by providing green certifications for houses, attesting to a building’s efficiency in various aspects, such as site design and energy and water consumption. Using Multiple Listing Services real estate data on zero- to five-year-old houses sold between 2010 and 2017 in the Chicagoland area, this study examines whether there is a price premium associated with qualifying for green …

Understanding Haitian Women’S Health Care In Immokalee, Florida, Usa, Michele Leigh Flippo Bolduc

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This social science research project takes a critical approach to understanding the health of a population by using the health care system as an entry point through which we can see how large-scale social processes produce a particular health care landscape in the rural, im/migrant farmworker community of Immokalee, Florida, USA. Using a multi-scalar analysis of health care, I investigate how anti-immigrant legislation and neoliberal economics influence the experience of health care for health care providers and Haitian im/migrant women navigating these processes. First, I argue that anti-immigrant and pro-market discourses have been successful in limiting the accessibility to health …

Indigenous Adolescent Girls’ Empowerment Network (Imagen): Adapting The Girl Roster™ For Lakota Communities, Kelly Hallman, Stephanie Martinez

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

This brief reports on a first-of-a-kind meeting between the Population Council’s GIRLCenter and organizations such as the White Buffalo Calf Woman Society (WBCWS) that work locally with Native American communities to understand the specific needs of adolescent girls in Indian Country. This followed an inaugural meeting of the Indigenous Adolescent Girls’ Empowerment Network (IMAGEN) with its wealth of insight concerning the needs of the Native communities they serve, and the GIRL Center’s myriad programmatic tools and resources that have been tried and tested in global settings for several decades. The IMAGEN Approach is an adaptable process that links these two …

Girlsread! Girls’ Rights: An Empowerment Curriculum, Natalie Jackson Hachonda, Nicole Haberland, Barbara Mensch, Pamela Nyirenda, Diana Bulanda-Shalala

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

This curriculum guide is designed to help female mentors in the GirlsRead! program in Zambia to directly engage girls in critical thinking about gender inequalities and discrimination, and help them build the assets and confidence needed to act on their own behalf and as progressive voices in their communities. GirlsRead! participants are girls in grade 7—the last year of primary school—when they are at high risk of leaving school. The curriculum includes 19 sessions that cover a range of topics from gender equality to sexuality to rights, in meetings that provide a space and opportunity for girls to regularly interact …

Producing Tradition: International Standards And Development In Jordanian Olive Oil, Brittany Eleanor Cook

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation project examines how value is changed and created through organic certification and the universalizing ideas of capacity building within the olive oil industry in Jordan and how these shifts affect the social and material processes of production. I approach organic olive oil production in Jordan as one method that producers use in accessing markets and capacity building. By shifting from looking strictly at organic certified farms to examining the larger context of capacity building and international standards, I identify how organic is just one strategy in a larger effort to diversify Jordanian agricultural production and to access global …

Accounting For Spatial Autocorrelation In Modeling The Distribution Of Water Quality Variables, Lorrayne Miralha

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Several studies in hydrology have reported differences in outcomes between models in which spatial autocorrelation (SAC) is accounted for and those in which SAC is not. However, the capacity to predict the magnitude of such differences is still ambiguous. In this thesis, I hypothesized that SAC, inherently possessed by a response variable, influences spatial modeling outcomes. I selected ten watersheds in the USA and analyzed them to determine whether water quality variables with higher Moran’s I values undergo greater increases in the coefficient of determination (R²) and greater decreases in residual SAC (rSAC) after spatial modeling. I compared non-spatial ordinary …

Is More Money The Answer? The Effect Of Educational Funding On High Stakes Exams In New York City, Megan L. Brodzik

Theses - Graduate Programs in Economic Theory and Policy

In the cases which make up the Campaign for Fiscal Equity et al. (CFE) v. The State of New York et al. the court system found that the state of New York was not fulfilling its obligation to provide all students with the opportunity to obtain a sound basic education. The state was ordered to increase funding to New York City schools by $1.93 billion. It is crucial to evaluate the effectiveness of education finance reform, especially court-order reform, as a tool for policy. This paper examines the effects of New York City primary school spending on student’s educational achievement …

The Effect Of Oil Crises On Economies Of Comecon/Cmea Member Countries, A Five-Country Study: Cssr, Gdr, Hungary, Poland, And Ussr, Cosku Mihci

Theses - Graduate Programs in Economic Theory and Policy

Economic problems in COMECON/CMEA member countries started to grow in the second half of the 1970s, which lead to radical economic and political reforms in the second half of the 1980s and resulted in demise of the economic and political system in these countries. The main aim of this thesis is to investigate whether growing economic problems in East European planned economies, or in CMEA member countries, were initially triggered by oil crises, through international trade and level of indebtedness channels, or not. Countries examined in this thesis were the CSSR, the GDR, Hungary, Poland, and the USSR; the time …

Residents' Views On Lapd And Its Policies, Fernando J. Guerra, Brianne Gilbert, Alex Kempler, Mariya Vizireanu

StudyLA Data Briefs

METHODOLOGIES

Reported protocols include the methodologies employed by the most recent iterations of the Public Opinion Survey, Exit Poll, and the Riots Survey. Methods for the previous versions of these instruments have been similar and included minimal variations. Details for each year’s methodologies are available upon request.

LOS ANGELES PUBLIC OPINION SURVEY

As part of Forecast LA’s unique approach to forecasting in the Los Angeles region, the Center for the Study of Los Angeles (StudyLA) conducted an outlook survey. The Los Angeles Public Opinion Survey involved 20-minute telephone sessions and online surveys with more than 2,400 adults (1,800 phone and …

2018 La Votes For Sheriff - Certified, Fernando J. Guerra, Brianne Gilbert, Mariya Vizireanu, Alex Kempler, Alejandra Alarcon

StudyLA Data Briefs

2018 GUBERNATORIAL GENERAL ELECTION EXIT POLL

METHODOLOGY

As Los Angeles continues to change and grow, accurate exit polling becomes a vital tool for understanding, developing theory on, and improving voter experience, behavior, preferences, and opinions. Los Angeles Votes is a series of exit polls and polling place studies in Los Angeles known for the use of a breakthrough sampling methodology – the racially stratified homogenous precinct approach – and becoming the largest per-capita exit poll in the nation.

Since 2005, StudyLA has conducted fifteen projects, resulting in some of the most accurate exit polling results of every major election in …

Fp-18-19 Living With A Sibling Or Roommate In Older Adulthood, 1990 & 2016, Huijing Wu

National Center for Family and Marriage Research Family Profiles

No abstract provided.

Exploring Barriers And Opportunities For Pre-Eclampsia And Eclampsia Prevention And Management In Ethiopia, Pooja Sripad, Hussein Ismail, Amy Dempsey, Karen Kirk, Charlotte E. Warren

Reproductive Health

The Ending Eclampsia Project is a five-year cooperative agreement between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Population Council, in partnership with the Federal Ministry of Health Ethiopia, which seeks to expand access to quality underutilized interventions and commodities for the prevention and treatment of pre-eclampsia/eclampsia (PE/E). This report presents qualitative findings from formative research conducted to: 1) assess the policy and health systems environment related to PE/E prevention and management, 2) identify potential bottlenecks in the supply chain, 3) investigate PE/E knowledge, attitudes, and practices at policy, health system, and community levels, 4) describe the barriers …

The United States, Mexico, And The War On Drugs In The Trump Administration, James M. Cooper

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the war on drugs as persecuted by the United States and how it has been exported to Mexico. It also explores the increased efforts in the drugs war that the Trump administration, through the U.S. Department of Justice, is pursuing at a domestic level. Part I of this Article provides an outline of the dynamics in the quickly evolving and highly tense relationship between the United States and Mexico. Part II of this Article details the historical background of the U.S.-Mexico border region and demonstrates that the border has long been a contested site. Part III provides …