Social Statistics Commons^™

Redlining, Neighborhood Decline, And Violence: How Discriminatory Government Policies Created Violent American Inner Cities, Richard Powell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background – The practice of redlining involved the US government categorizing certain communities, often those inhabited by people of color, as too risky for private investment. Because of the resulting disinvestment, many of those neighborhoods deteriorated throughout the latter half of the 20^th Century. It also fostered conditions in redlined neighborhoods, such as high concentrations of poverty, joblessness, and racial segregation that the criminological theory of Social Disorganization identifies as correlates of violent crime.

Research Objectives – This study sought to determine whether redlining influenced levels of social disorganization operationalized as high levels of poverty, unemployment, family disruption, and …

Shooting Surge Continuing To Slow Across New York City, Jeffrey A. Butts, Richard A. Espinobarros

Publications and Research

This report looks at quarter-specific comparisons of police reported shooting incidents across New York City. Shooting incidents increased between the first and second quarters of both 2020 and 2021. However, shooting incident increases slowed between quarters 1 (January-March) and 2 (April-June) in 2021, compared to the same quarters of 2020. Quarter-specific comparisons are one way to address seasonal fluctuations in gun violence.

Measuring Influence On Twitter, Daniela B. Martinez

Publications and Research

A survey took in MAT 1372 about students' opinions on Twitter showed that most of them assumed that if a Twitter account has more followers, it will receive more likes or replies. However, accounts can buy followers, and followers do not necessarily mean engagement. In this paper, we used Twitter because it is a significant player in social media, but we can measure influence without using Twitter's follower count. We took a reference from Meeyoung Cha's article "The Million Follower Fallacy," which has demonstrated that the Twitter follower count is a meaningless metric in determining influence. To measure influence, a …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Psy 2100 (Statistics For Social Science), Adam Shavit

Open Educational Resources

You will learn to summarize, make sense of, and base decisions on real life data. You will learn to read and create verbal and graphical summaries from measurements, for example from randomized experiments and correlational surveys. You will also learn to estimate your confidence in a pattern of results. This will be applied to inferring from limited observations to more general phenomenon, and to compare differences between groups. We will also learn to describe and quantify co-variation between measurements. In addition, you will get experience in conducting statistical analyses using software, working on real datasets from psychological experiments.

Analysis Of Newspaper Coverage Of Psilocybin From January 1, 1989 To December 31, 2019, Dax Oliver

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psilocybin is a chemical compound that has received a lot of attention from medical researchers in recent years. However, this research is not merely a medical issue but a social and political one as well. In the 1960s, psilocybin and other psychedelic compounds were widely ingested outside of clinical settings. This alarmed some of the American public, resulting in severe legal restrictions on psilocybin use and research.

Today, many psilocybin advocates hope that it will avoid the negative public sentiment of the 1960s. To help gauge public sentiment about other psychoactive compounds, some studies have examined newspaper coverage, but there …

We All Feel Feelings, Ben Ohene

Theses and Dissertations

Consisting of three illustrated books, We All Feel Feelings is designed as a vehicle for the discussion of emotional and mental health with young boys. These books will help foster a mindset of openness and acceptance through different methods of displaying and understanding emotions.

Brave New World - Future Of Work And Automation, Rhonda S. Binda

Open Educational Resources

The trifecta of globalization, urbanization and digitization have created new opportunities and challenges across our nation, cities, boroughs and urban centers. Cities are in a unique position at the center of commerce and technology becoming hubs for innovation and practical application of emerging technology. In this rapidly changing 24/7 digitized world, city governments worldwide are leveraging innovation and technology to become more effective, efficient, transparent and to be able to better plan for and anticipate the needs of its citizens, businesses and community organizations. This class will provide the framework for how cities and communities can become smarter and more …

Reducing Gun Violence In New York City, Jeffrey A. Butts, Sheyla A. Delgado

Publications and Research

Most large American cities experienced falling client crime rates in recent decades, with New York City only being second to San Diego is the scale of its decline. This databit looks at the array of initiatives the city implemented to address gun violence as a possible contribution to the decline.

An Analysis Of The Parental Structure And Involvement On Subsequent Delinquency, Bosco Villavicencio Jr

Student Theses

This thesis examines how parental involvement and family structure relate to the prevalence of juvenile delinquency. To answer the research question, the current study used a large sample of 12^th grade youth (n=1,272) from the Monitoring the Future project which includes measures on parental involvement, household structure, academic abilities, and risky behavior and delinquent behavior. The results of this secondary analysis showed a significant association between parental-child involvement measures and the delinquent outcomes examined; drinking, suspension, and skipping school. This study emphasizes the need to consider that the impact of household structure as well as that of a supportive …

Asians Applying For Postsecondary Success: Students, Schools, And Socioeconomic Status, Avery M.D. Davis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Higher education recruitment rates are rapidly declining as schools are stymied by dynamic demographic shifts and a competitive ecosystem. Despite the constant realities of this challenge for tertiary institutions, the complexities of the interplay for demographics, student motivation, parental influences, and school environments during the postsecondary education application process is often overlooked. This thesis analyses how these four domains impact Asian American students within the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) in terms of the number of postsecondary schools to which they apply? This study examines a sample (N = 662) of the ELS by employing multivariate regression analysis on the number …

Aging Intimately, Niamh Mcdonnell, Giulia Hjort

Capstones

We’re both familiar with grief after the loss of family members over 75. This project is our way of giving back in a small way by listening, but also as a way of remembering the people we unexpectedly lost. Each person we’ve met on this journey has inspired us in their own way, with their stories of resilience through grief and aging. All of our collaborators on this project are constantly learning, taking risks, and moving forward through loss and pain. They aren’t defined by their age. Rather, they embrace it with a willingness to reinvent their approach to romance …

Class Matters: School Affluence And Other Predictors Of Attainment For Wealthy And Poor Students, Alison Brockhouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Public schools in the United States are becoming increasingly segregated by socioeconomic status. Though the educational consequences of socioeconomic segregation are well researched, segregation is often ignored or exacerbated by education reform. To learn more about the wider implications of socioeconomic segregation, this study utilizes theoretical frameworks derived from Max Weber’s theory of social stratification to analyze over 10,000 students’ experiences from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) 2002, 2004, and 2012 waves of data collection. More specifically, this research explores the impact of attending an affluent high school on long-term educational attainment. It finds …

Cs + Sociology: Using Big Data To Identify And Understand Educational Inequality In America (1), Joseph Cleary, Elin Waring

Open Educational Resources

This is the first of two lessons/labs for teaching and learning of computer science and sociology. Either and be used on their own or they can be used in sequence, in which case this should be used first.

Students will develop CS skills and behaviors including but not limited to: learning what an API is, learning how to access and utilize data on an API, and developing their R coding skills and knowledge. Students will also learn basic, but important, sociological principles such as how poverty is related to educational opportunities in America. Although prior knowledge of CS and sociology …

Cs+Sociology: Global Inequality Lab 1, Elin Waring, Janet Michello

Open Educational Resources

These materials include background for the instructor and a lab that engages student in an analysis of global inequality while learning and using the R language (a programming language for statistics). Students obtain data on the US and two other countries (one more developed and one less developed).

Cs+Sociology: Global Inequality Lab 2, Elin Waring, Janet Michello

Open Educational Resources

These materials include background for the instructor and a lab that engages student in an analysis of global inequality while learning and using the R language (a programming language for statistics). Students ultimately write a function to access country level data from the CIA World Factbook.

Sweeping Exposures: Lead Poisonings And Black Working Poor Populations In The United States, Shirley Reid

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The focus of my thesis is to explore some of the realities that the impoverished urban black poor populations face in America today. The goal of my thesis is to illustrate how poverty is reproduced within impoverished neighborhoods through the idea and mechanism of lead exposure, by recognizing how specific exposure to the element lead and its by-products is both a symbol and a material cause of black urban poor illness and disability. There is no mistake that people living in the U.S. are aware of the social injustices against black populations in the form of racial injustice. However, …

Spa 2201hs Spanish For Heritage Speakers (Syllabus_Fall 2019), David Sánchez-Jiménez

Open Educational Resources

SPA 2201HS Spanish for Heritage Speakers is an intermediate course intended for students who were immersed in or exposed to the language while growing up, but who have received little or no formal instruction in Spanish. Strengthens students’ competence in the oral and written standard varieties of Spanish by building on their previous knowledge to expand their vocabulary, strengthen their command of grammar, and achieve more confidence and fluency in speaking and writing while learning about the diversity of the Hispanic cultures. The skills acquired in this course will help reinforce students’ bilingual abilities and cultural competence.

An Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling Bi-Factor Analytic Approach To Uncovering What Burnout, Depression, And Anxiety Scales Measure, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Jay Verkuilen, Renzo Bianchi

Publications and Research

In this study, we addressed the ongoing debate about what burnout and depression scales measure by conducting an exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) bifactor analysis. A sample of 734 U.S. teachers completed a survey that included the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (CES-D-10), the depression module of the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), the Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7), and the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), which contains emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP), and (diminished) personal accomplishment (PA) subscales. Job adversity and workplace support were additionally measured for the purpose of a nomological network analysis. EE, burnout’s core, was more highly …

Inquiry Into The Correlation Between Burnout And Depression, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Jay Verkuilen, Renzo Bianchi

Publications and Research

The extent to which burnout refers to anything other than a depressive condition remains an object of controversy among occupational health specialists. In three studies conducted in two different countries and two different languages, we investigated the discriminant validity of burnout scales by evaluating the magnitude of the correlation between (latent) burnout and (latent) depression. In Study 1 (N = 911), burnout was assessed with the Maslach Burnout Inventory–General Survey’s Exhaustion subscale and depression with the depression module of the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ). In Study 2 (N = 1,386), the Shirom–Melamed Burnout Measure was used to assess burnout and …

Stereotype Threat As An Explanation For Sexual Risk Taking Behavior In Gay Men: A Multi-Study Exploration Of Mechanisms, Inna Saboshchuk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Stereotype threat is a hindrance in performance that occurs when an individual’s awareness of negative stereotypes associated with his/her group results in inadvertent conforming to that stereotype. Stereotype threat research has been conducted on myriad group and domain identifications but gay men are strikingly absent from the stereotype threat literature. One of the most prevalent stereotypes about gay men indicates they are sexually promiscuous and that this promiscuity is linked to HIV infection. In a series of three research projects, a theoretical model proposing stereotype threat as a mechanism for sexual risk taking behavior in gay men is tested. In …

Islamic Terrorism In The United States – The Association Of Religious Fundamentalism With Social Isolation & Paths Leading To Extreme Violence Through Processes Of Radicalization., Shay Shiran

Student Theses

This exploratory study focuses on identifying motivations for religious terrorism and Islamic terrorism in the United States in particular. Terrorism is a crime of extreme violence with the end purpose of political influence. This crime is challenging to encounter for its multi-faced characteristics, the unusual motivations of its actors, and their semi-militant conduct. The hypothesis of this study asserts that religious terrorists are radicalized by passing from fundamental to extreme devout agendas, caused by isolation from the dominant society, and resulted in high potential to impose those agendas by extreme violence. Under the theoretical framework of subculture in criminology, this …

Does Mental Illness Affect Societal Perception Of Sex Offenders?, Keely A. Bartram

Student Theses

Although mental illness is common in the sex offender population, it has never been examined how evidence of such may influence societal perception. In comparison to the non-sex offender population, it was hypothesized that participants would consider mental illness less mitigating for sex offenders, would be less likely to support the mental health treatment of sex offenders while incarcerated, and would consider certain mental illnesses (schizophrenia and substance abuse disorders) as particularly aggravating for this group of offenders. Respondents were asked to read a short vignette and then respond to a series of questions about culpability, sentencing decisions, and mental …

Hierarchical Meta-Analysis: A Simulation Study Comparing Classical Random Effects And Fully Bayesian Methods, Nancy R. Andiloro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Meta-analytic data have a natural hierarchical structure to them, where individuals are nested within studies, and have both within-and between-study variation to model. A random-effects hierarchical linear model is useful to conduct a meta-analysis because it allows one to appropriately parse out the two components of variation that exist within and across studies to determine an observed effect. Empirical Bayes estimation considers the reliability of variance estimates; when the reliability of the effect size estimate for a study is high, substantial weight is placed on that estimate. However, problems with estimation arise when the number of studies and their sample …

Assessing The Ordinality Of Response Bias With Item Response Models: A Case Study Using The Phq-9, Venessa N. Singhroy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Improper scale usage in psychological and clinical assessment is an important problem. If respondents do not use the scales in a consistent manner, the reliability of a composite is likely to be attenuated. This is particularly problematic when particular items are singled out for special treatment or when subscales are of interest, not just a total score. This study used both non-parametric and parametric item response theory (IRT) methods to gain further insight into the validity of the PHQ-9, a dual purpose instrument that assesses the severity of depressive symptoms using nine Likert-scale items and allows the investigator to establish …

The New American Slavery: Capitalism And The Ghettoization Of American Prisons As A Profitable Corporate Business, David A. Liburd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The labor of enslaved Africans and Black Americans played a large part in the history of colonial America, with the American plantation being the epicenter for all that was to be produced. While the two have never been completely tied together, capitalism and modern day slavery have been linked with one another. Some analysis sees slavery as a remote form of capitalism, a substitute, to an antiquated form of labor in the modern world.

Slave plantations adopted a new concentration in size and management, referred to by W.E. DuBois as a change "from a family institution to an industrial system."1 …

The Politics Of Shorter Hours And Corporate-Centered Society: A History Of Work-Time Regulation In The United States And Japan, Keisuke Jinno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shorter working hours drew much attention as a means of fighting unemployment and crisis in capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, shorter work-time is rarely considered a policy option to fix economic or social issues in the United States and Japan. This dissertation presents a history of work-time regulation in the United States and Japan to examine how and why its developments and stalemate took place.

In the big picture, developments of work-time regulation during the first half of the twentieth century were a part of concessional modifications of class relations, a common phenomenon in many …

Introduction To Gis Using Open Source Software, 8th Ed, Frank Donnelly

Open Educational Resources

This tutorial was created to accompany the GIS Practicum, a day-long workshop offered by the Newman Library at Baruch College CUNY that introduces participants to geographic information systems (GIS) using the open source software QGIS. The practicum introduces GIS as a concept for envisioning information and as a tool for conducting geographic analyses and creating maps. Participants learn how to navigate a GIS interface, how to prepare layers and conduct a basic geographic analysis, and how to create thematic maps. This tutorial was written using QGIS version 2.18 "Las Palmas", a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) desktop GIS software package.

The Value Of Value-Added: Science, Technology, And Policy In Educational Evaluation, Daniel Douglas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the first decade of the 21^st century, researchers and policymakers in K-12 education began to focus on evaluating teacher and school performance based on students’ standardized test scores. One evaluative technique, value-added assessment (VAA), has been given particular attention. This research presents a comprehensive study of the theoretical, technical, historical and political dimensions VAA. Theoretically, the assumptions that underlie value-added diverge significantly from the observed operations of the schools and classrooms these models are supposed to evaluate. Technically, even if the theoretical assumptions are accepted, teachers’ actual value-added rankings are shown to be unstable across time periods and …

Wsq: Queer Methods Editor's Note, Cynthia Chris

Publications and Research

This Editor's Note introduces the WSQ issue "Queer Methods," co-edited by Matt Brim and Amin Ghaziani, which asks, how is the work of queer scholarship, in an array of disciplines, done?

Introduction To Gis Using Open Source Software, 7th Ed, Frank Donnelly

Open Educational Resources

This tutorial was created to accompany the GIS Practicum, a day-long workshop offered by the Newman Library at Baruch College CUNY that introduces participants to geographic information systems (GIS) using the open source software QGIS. The practicum introduces GIS as a concept for envisioning information and as a tool for conducting geographic analyses and creating maps. Participants learn how to navigate a GIS interface, how to prepare layers and conduct a basic geographic analysis, and how to create thematic maps. This tutorial was written using QGIS version 2.14 "Essen", a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) desktop GIS software package.