Sociology Commons^™

Eighteen Blind Library Users’ Experiences With Library Websites And Search Tools In U.S. Academic Libraries: A Qualitative Study, Adina Mulliken

Publications and Research

Telephone interviews were conducted with 18 blind academic library users around the U.S. about their experiences using their library and its website. The study uses the perspective that blind users’ insights are fundamental. A common theme was that navigating a webpage is time consuming on the first visit. Issues identified include the need for “databases” to be defined on the homepage, accessibly coded search boxes, logical heading structure, and several problems to be resolved on result pages. Variations in needs depending on users’ screen reader expertise were also raised. Suggestions for libraries to address these issues are offered.

Adult Attachment And Testosterone Reactivity: Fathers' Avoidance Predicts Changes In Testosterone During The Strange Situation Procedure, Robin S. Edelstein, Kristi Chin, Ekjyot K. Saini, Patty X. Kuo, Oliver C. Schultheiss, Brenda L. Volling

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

We assessed parents' testosterone reactivity to the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP), a moderately stressful parent-infant interaction task that pulls for parental nurturance and caregiving behavior. Parents (146 mothers, 154 fathers) interacted with their 1-year-old infants, and saliva samples were obtained pre- and post-task to assess changes in testosterone. We examined whether testosterone reactivity differed between mothers and fathers, the extent to which parents' characteristic approaches to closeness (i.e., adult attachment orientation) contributed to testosterone changes, and whether any influences of adult attachment orientation were independent of more general personality characteristics (i.e., the Big Five personality dimensions). Results revealed that mothers …

Aging In The Town Of Weston: A Community Needs Assessment, Sue Berger, Caitlin Coyle, Jan Mutchler, Nidya Velasco

Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging Publications

This report describes research undertaken by the Center for Social & Demographic Research on Aging within the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, on behalf of the Weston Council on Aging, to investigate the needs, interests, preferences, and opinions of Weston’s population of residents who are age 55 and older. The contents of this report are meant to inform the Weston Council on Aging, and organizations that work with and on behalf of older residents of Weston, for the purposes of planning and coordination of services, but also to build awareness about issues facing the Town of Weston. …

Mandatory Minimum Penalties: An Analysis Of Four State’S Penal Codes And Federal Court Policies, Cassie Geiken

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

In Nebraska, variations of bills attempting to amend mandatory minimum laws in the state have been introduced. The harshness of the mandatory sentences, as well as the looming state of emergency caused by prison overcrowding, have sustained the debate over sentencing laws. This essay identifies the core issues of mandatory minimum sentencing laws and analyzes the states of Nebraska, Texas, Alabama, California, and the federal system’s use of mandatory minimums for felony charges to identify potential solutions. Statute review found that Nebraska’s current sentencing codes are misaligned with the rest of the nation; not even Alabama with one of the …

The Impact Of Sexual Assault Training And Gender On Rape Attitudes, Monica Krolnik Campos

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Sexual assault is a growing concern across college campuses in the United States. According to the Sexual Victimization of College Women study, the victimization rate is 27.7 rapes per 1,000 ­­­­women students (Fisher, Cullen, & Turner, 2000). In response to the high prevalence of sexual assault, college campuses are now mandated to implement various forms of sexual assault prevention programming. Sexual assault prevention programming is intended to promote awareness of sexual assault and reduce the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses. Numerous studies have examined the short term effectiveness of sexual assault prevention programs (e.g., Anderson & Whiston, 2005). …

Gender & Sexuality Services Newsletter, March 2019, University Of Northern Iowa. Gender & Sexuality Services.

Gender & Sexuality Services Newsletter

In This Issue:
--LGBT(ea) Time
--LGBTQ+ Art Student Panel
--LGBT Q & A
--UNI Edits Wikipedia: Women and LGBT+
--FYI In Our Community

How Much Does Physical Attractiveness Matter For Blacks? Linking Skin Color, Physical Attractiveness, And Black Status Attainment, Igor Ryabov

Sociology Faculty Publications

The accumulated evidence suggests that lighter-complected blacks are more successful in our society than their darker-complected counterparts. Prior research also documents a correlation between physical attractiveness and socio-economic status attainment. The current study bridges the literatures on colorism and physical attraction and examines the complex relationship between skin color, physical attractiveness, gender, on the one hand, and three indicators of status attainment (educational attainment, hourly wage and job quality), on the other, for black young adults. Controls include family SES, family structure, parent–child relationships, and other covariates. Analysis was conducted in STATA and via structural equation modeling using MPlus software. …

Interpersonal Discrimination And Mental Health Among Minority Students At Predominantly White Institutions: Does Racial Identity Matter?, Marissa Lynn Cardwell

Department of Sociology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Large proportions of minority group members commonly report experiencing interpersonal racial discrimination in many different domains of their lives, and this exposure to discrimination may be particularly salient for minority group members attending Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). Persistent exposure to discrimination has been linked to diminished wellbeing. Given this link, research has begun to identify potential buffers to the association between racial discrimination and diminished mental health. One such protective factor is racial ideology. The current paper investigates whether racial identity attitudes serve as protective factors between racial discrimination and mental health outcomes using daily diary data from 146 students …

Do College Students’ Perceptions Of The Police Differ By Education Level And Major?, Lashanti Wilson Brown

Theses and Dissertations

Little is known about the impact that higher education has on students’ perceptions of the police, especially with respect to justice education. This study examines perceptions of the police among college students at Illinois State University. It questions how differences in education levels, major, race, age, and gender affect student perceptions about the police. A 55-question online survey was administered to 451 students at Illinois State University.

Results revealed that those with more education did not have significantly different contact with police officers than those with less education, however, they were significantly more likely to report negative attitudes towards the …

Sexual Assault Campus Climate Surveys: Insights From The First Wave, Kristen M. Budd, Alana Van Gundy, Rose Marie Ward, Glenn W. Muschert

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

One tool to help institutions of higher education (IHEs) to address campus sexual assault is the campus climate survey (CCS); yet little is known about the CCS implementation process. This study used a mixed methods approach to examine the implementation process of CCSs deployed during the 2015/16 academic year at 244 IHEs throughout the United States. Quantitative results indicate CCSs were designed primarily by the Title IX officer and campus administration; assessed victimization rates and knowledge about campus resources; and were voluntary. Qualitative findings generate concerns surrounding generalizability, participation rates, validity of data, and suggestions for improvement for future CCSs.

"Baby Factories": Exploitation Of Women In Southern Nigeria, Jacinta Chiamaka Nwaka, Akachi Odoemene

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Despite the writings of feminist thinkers and efforts of other advocates of feminism to change the dominant narratives on women, exploitation of women is a fact that has remained endemic in various parts of the world, and particularly in Africa. Nigeria is one of those countries in Africa where women are largely exposed to varying degrees of exploitation. This paper examines the development and proliferation of baby-selling centers in southern Nigeria and its impacts on and implication for women in Nigeria. It demonstrates how an attempt to give protection to unwed pregnant girls has metamorphosed into “baby harvesting” and selling …

Filling The Sex Trade Swamp: Robert Kraft And His Predecessors, Janice G. Raymond

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Distancing Strategies, Exclusive Clusters And Other Ironies Of My American Peers, Mai Trinh

SURGE

Being able to study abroad is a huge privilege. I am very lucky to have been given that privilege twice. I was accepted to Gettysburg College two and a half years ago, and studied abroad in the United States. Now, I am studying abroad again in Copenhagen, Denmark with a program that connects many colleges and universities in the US. It has been a month now and I am having a good time.

But my first few weeks in Copenhagen were not the same as my first few weeks in Gettysburg. Strangely enough, it was much more uncomfortable and harder …

General Interviewer Techniques: Developing Evidence-Based Practices For Standardized Interviewing, Nora Cate Schaeffer, Jennifer Dykema, Steve M. Coombs, Rob K. Schultz, Lisa Holland, Margaret Hudson

Interviewer Workshop, 2019: Interviewers and Their Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective

The practices of standardized interviewing developed at many research sites over many years. The version of standardization that Fowler and Mangione codified in Standardized Survey Interviewing has provided researchers a core resource to use in training and supervising standardized interviewers. In recent decades, however, the accumulation of recordings and transcripts of interviews makes it possible to re-visit the practices of standardization to describe both how respondents actually answer survey questions and how interviewers actually respond.

To update General Interviewer Training (GIT), we brought observations of interaction during interviews together with research about conversational practices from conversation analysis, psychology, and other …

Understanding Farm Households' Participation In Nong Jia Le In China, Tie Wang, Wei Wang, Zhongjun Wu, Ching-Hui Su, Ming-Hsiang Chen

Faculty Publications

As the dominant form of rural tourism (RT) in China, Nong Jia Le (NJL) has made it possible for local farm households to benefit. In this article, a four-step strategy based on binary logistic regression was introduced to identify the most important factors influencing the participation of farm households in NJL. Next, a comparative study based on data from two NJL communities was conducted to test the approach and identify the most important influential factors as well as the differences. The results showed that the approach could identify the optimal model and the most influential factors in different rural communities. …

How Two Sunken Ships Caused A War: The Legal And Cultural Battle Between Great Britain, Canada, And The Inuit Over The Franklin Expedition Shipwrecks, Christina Labarge

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

Given Today's New Wave Of Protectionsim, Is Antitrust Law The Last Hope For Preserving A Free Global Economy Or Another Nail In Free Trade's Coffin?, Allison Murray

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

Scientists, Uncertainty And Nature, An Analysis Of The Development, Implementation And Unintended Consequences Of The Northwest Forest Plan, Gilbert David Miller

Dissertations and Theses

The conflict in the Pacific Northwest between competing visions of how federal forests should be managed resulted in a political stalemate in the early 1990s. The Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) was initiated to resolve the demands for maintaining ecosystem processes and biological diversity with the social and economic needs for timber harvest. The foundation for the plan rested with the development of ecosystem management. The intent of this research is to explore the events which led up to the adoption of the NWFP, how it was implemented by the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management and the subsequent …

Ua12/2/1 The Hill In Review, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

Newsletter recapping the top stories of the week.

Police Legitimacy In Trinidad And Tobago: Resident Perceptions In A High-Crime Community, Ericka B. Adams

Faculty Publications

Violent crime in Trinidad and Tobago has increased over the last two decades, yet the police have been largely unsuccessful in reducing violence. Between 1999 and 2016, the murder rate increased by 475%. Despite the fact that the murder rate has increased, approximately 76 homicides are cleared each year, resulting in a low-homicide clearance rate. Using 40 semi-structured interviews with community members from a high-crime, low-income community in Trinidad and Tobago, this study examines residents’ experiences with police officers, and respondents’ willingness to work with the police to clear criminal cases. The results indicate that due to a lack of …

Antecedents And Consequences Of Interviewer Pace: Assessing Interviewer Speaking Pace At The Question Level, Allyson L. Holbrook, Timothy P. Johnson, Evgenia Kapousouz, Young Ik Cho

Interviewer Workshop, 2019: Interviewers and Their Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective

The pace at which interviewers read survey questions may vary considerably across interviewers (e.g., Cannell, Miller, & Oksenberg, 1981) and as a function of interviewer experience (Olson and Petchev, 2007). The pace at which interviews are conducted can influence respondent perceptions of the importance of interaction (Fowler, 1966). Interviewer training typically includes instructions to read questions slowly and clearly to respondents is based on the assumption that doing so maximizes data quality (e.g., Fowler and Mangione, 1990). In this research, we examine possible causes and consequences of interviewer pace using data from in person surveys conducted with respondents from four …

Race-Of-Virtual-Interviewer Effects, Frederick Conrad, Michael Schober, Daniel Nielsen, Heidi Reichert

Interviewer Workshop, 2019: Interviewers and Their Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective

In developing self-administered interviewing systems that go beyond text, survey designers are faced with choices about how to represent the interviewing agent. In speech-dialog systems like ACASI and IVR, designers must decide if the voice that presents the spoken questions is unambiguously male or female, whether the pronunciation is regionally marked, etc. Any visual representation of an interviewer (e.g., a photograph, a video) requires designers to choose features that visually convey demographic features like race, gender, age, etc. Here we investigate whether the representation of animated virtual interviewers (VIs) affects responses in the same way that analogous attributes of human …

Interviewer Variation In Third Party Presence During Face-To-Face Interviews, Zeina N. Mneimneh, Julie De Jong, Jennifer Kelley

Interviewer Workshop, 2019: Interviewers and Their Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective

The presence of a third person in face-to-face interviews constitutes an important contextual factor that affects the interviewee's responses to culturally sensitive questions (Aquilino, 1997; Casterline and Chidambaram, 1984; Mneimneh et al., 2015; Pollner and Adams, 1994). Interviewers play an essential role in requesting, achieving, and reporting on the private setting of the interview. Our recent work has shown that the rate of interview privacy varies significantly across interviewers; while some interviewers report high rates of privacy among their interviews, others report low rates of privacy for the interviews they administered (Mneimneh et al., 2018). Yet, there is a lack …

The Cannell Legacy, Nancy A. Mathiowetz, Peter V. Miller

Interviewer Workshop, 2019: Interviewers and Their Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective

Charles Cannell engineered the study of Interviewer-respondent interaction. He created conceptual frameworks for understanding the interviewing process and its impact on data quality. He invented methods for observing and recording interview interaction. He pioneered the use of randomized experiments in the survey context. He amalgamated insights from clinical and social psychology, sociology, group dynamics, as well as research on verbal and nonverbal communication to inform his work. This interdisciplinary approach has broadly influenced both interviewing research and practice. In this paper, we review Cannell’s many contributions to the field and his enduring legacy.

The Accuracy And Utility Of Using Paradata To Detect Interviewer Question-Reading Deviations, Jennifer Kelley

Interviewer Workshop, 2019: Interviewers and Their Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective

Deviations from reading survey questions exactly as worded may change the validity of the questions, thus increasing measurement error. Hence, organizations train their interviewers to read questions verbatim. To ensure interviewers are reading questions verbatim, organizations rely on interview recordings. However, this takes a significant amount of resources. Therefore, some organizations are using paradata generated by the survey software, specifically timestamps, to try to detect when interviewers’ deviate from reading the question verbatim.

To monitor interviewers’ question reading behavior using timestamps, some organizations estimate the expected question administration time to establish a minimum and maximum question administration time thresholds (QATT). …

Interacting With Interviewers In Voice And Text Interviews On Smartphones, Michael Schober, Frederick Conrad, Christopher Antoun, Alison W. Bowers, Andrew L. Hupp, H. Yanna Yan

Interviewer Workshop, 2019: Interviewers and Their Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective

As people increasingly adopt SMS text messaging for communicating in their daily lives, texting becomes a potentially important way to interact with survey respondents, who may expect that they can communicate with survey researchers as they communicate with others. Thus far our evidence from analyses of 642 iPhone interviews suggests that text interviewing can lead to higher quality data (less satisficing, more disclosure) than voice interviews on the same device, whether the questions are asked by an interviewer or an automated system. Respondents also report high satisfaction with text interviews, with many reporting that text is more convenient because they …

Interviewer Falsification In Survey Research: Detection Methods And Impact Of Fraudulent Interviews, Silvia Schwanhäuser, Joseph Sakshaug, Yuliya Kosyakova, Frauke Kreuter

Interviewer Workshop, 2019: Interviewers and Their Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective

The role of the interviewer and sources of interviewer error in the survey data collection process are widely discussed topics in the survey methodology literature. An understudied problem in this context is the falsification of interview data by the interviewer. Research gaps concern, for example, how conclusions drawn from survey data are affected by falsified interviews. So far it is commonly assumed, that the possible effect of falsifications on univariate statistics can only be as high as the overall share of falsified data. Since the share of faked data is usually very low for most surveys, the problem is regarded …

Comparison Of Different Approaches To Evaluate And Explain Interviewer Effects, Geert Loosveldt, Celine Wuyts

Interviewer Workshop, 2019: Interviewers and Their Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective

Within survey methodology it is common knowledge that interviewers in face-to-face or telephone interviews can have undesirable effects on the obtained answers. These effects can be created in an active way by, for example, asking suggestive questions or they can be obtained in a passive way as a consequence of certain interviewer characteristics eliciting socially desirable answers. These active and passive effects may differ from interviewer to interviewer. These differences between interviewers in systematic effects create additional variance in the data. The proportion of variance in a (substantive) variable that can be explained by the interviewers is the ‘so called’ …

Designing Studies For Comparing Interviewer Variance Components In Two Groups Of Survey Interviewers, Brady T. West

Interviewer Workshop, 2019: Interviewers and Their Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective

Methodological studies of interviewer effects often seek to identify factors that influence the magnitude of interviewer variance for particular survey questions. There is a long history of work in this area, and results from studies like this have informed current interviewing practice. Unfortunately, many studies of this type suffer from one or more of the following limitations in terms of their designs: 1) a failure to randomly assign interviewers to the treatments being compared; 2) a failure to formally test for differences in the variance components between the two groups; and 3) insufficient statistical power for comparison of the variance …

Let’S Talk About Money! How Do Interviewer Expectations Affect Item Nonresponse To Income And Asset Questions?, Sabine Friedel

Interviewer Workshop, 2019: Interviewers and Their Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective

Personal income and assets are sensitive topics to discuss and the discussion of money tends to be a taboo. This phenomenon is reflected by high nonresponse rates to items that address income and assets questions in interviewer-mediated surveys. However, such information is important to obtain, as household income and different types of assets are used as core variables in socio-economic models. Such item nonresponse is influenced by interviewers. Although interviewers are trained to conduct standardized interviews, some interviewers obtain a higher number of item nonresponses than others. This study examines interviewer effects on nonresponse to several income and asset questions …