Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Substitution Of Religiosity For Socioeconomic Status And Its Correlation With Adolescent Drug Use, Jordan Coburn, Mikaela Dufur

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Adolescents with higher socioeconomic status participate in fewer negative activities. Religiosity is correlated with more positive activities. Religiosity can help through socialization: interacting with people who influence pro-social norms.

Collaborating On Description And Digitization: The Perry Special Collections Land Indentures Project, Rebecca A. Wiederhold, Ryan K. Lee, Shanna Bessendorfer

Faculty Publications

A unique collection of English land indentures from the 16th to 20th centuries is at the center of a large undertaking at BYU’s Perry Special Collections. Born of a simple faculty digitization request, a much larger project with the potential to benefit other classes and researchers developed through the collaboration and coordination of multiple departments and individuals. This project required close collaboration between the faculty member who made the original digitization request, the Special Collections curator, our Collection Management team, the Conservation lab, our Manuscripts Cataloger, the digital lab, our Metadata Cataloging Specialist and multiple student workers. This presentation gives …

Supercharged Digital Collections: Moving To The Fast Lane With Scalable Open Source Infrastructure, Jeremy Myntti, Anna Neatrour, Matt Brunsvik, Brain Mcbride, Harish Maringanti, Alan Witkowski

Faculty Publications

What we’ll cover today

• History
• SIMP demo
• Migration
• Lesson Learned

Social Anxiety Disorder In College Students And Its Differing Treatments, Taylor Hubbert

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

• Approximately one in six College Students report having anxiety or being treated for anxiety
• Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is defined as anxiety that is caused by social experiences, and an individuals fear/ phobia of social situations
• Research available to us on Social Anxiety Disorder is extensive. This review examined the symptomology and prevalence of SAD, and compared both individual therapy and group therapy as treatments for college students.

Choose Your Own Research Adventure: Developing A Technical Services Based Research Project, Jeremy Myntti, Liz Woolcott

Faculty Publications

How to Create a Research Project

What Did We Find?

The Challenges And Solutions Of Online Surveys, Rachel Cannon, Amanda Loh, Dan Dewey

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Surveys are a valuable tool in research. However, there is currently no place where researchers can find compiled information about the challenges of online surveys and their corresponding solutions. Research publications typically address a specific single issue, and these articles are published in a wide range of journals, making it difficult to access various findings. Our findings, which we presented as a work in progress at the Georgetown University Round Table (GURT) 2016 conference, provide a useful source that researchers can use to easily learn about the challenges of online surveys and the solutions to these challenges, helping them to …

Mongolian Vowel Harmony And Palatalization, Joshua Sims, Dirk Elzinga

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The Mongolian language is spoken by approximately 3,000,000 people in the East Asian nation of Mongolia. The language exhibits vowel harmony, a rare phenomenon where the vowels in a single word must belong to matching categories. Mongolian grammars traditionally classify the seven vowels as either “male” or “female,” as well as rounded or unrounded. The “male” vowels are pronounced with a retracted tongue root (RTR), sounding “darker,” while “female” vowels are pronounced with an advanced tongue root (ATR), sounding “lighter.” The vowel /i/ is considered neutral, neither male nor female, but its presence tends to change the pronunciation of male …

Strength-Based Assessment For Children With Autism And Related With Disabilities In Kosovo, Ari Kokol, Blake Hansen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Kosovo was a focal point of conflict in the wars in Yugoslavia in the late 1990s. In 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia leaving Kosovo partially recognized as an independent state today. Due to the combination of war, ethnic conflict, and poverty, Kosovo has been left with little resources available to meet the needs of parents and educators. Caring for children with these types of disabilities puts a heavy strain on Kosovar Families. “For parents of children with autism, identifying positive characteristics of the child and the relationship may be particularly beneficial because the stressors associated with the disability are …

Western Philosophy For A New Generation, Sondra Sasser, Dennis Packard

Journal of Undergraduate Research

As planned, Dr. Packard and I finished researching and writing our textbook, Western Philosophy for a New Generation. We are still editing some things and getting advice from other academics, but we deem the book to be a great success, and so do the classes who have used it for two semesters at BYU. Students who were initially uninterested in philosophy made comments like, “I finally understand what before was totally unintelligible,” and “Now I see how it could be valuable for me.”

Family Educational Backgrounds Variations In Student Attitudes And Experiences Using The Sharps Utah Data, 2015, Mandy Chidester

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

This research analyzed 150 variables within the SHARPS 2015 data to find the majority of differences that are coming between those grade school students who live with adults who have an education level of high school or less compared to the those who live with an adult who has completed college. The analyzed variables showed three main themes of major differences: monitoring of the student’s actions, neighborhood the student lives in, and student’s perception of drug risk. Also included is those variables who showed significant differences, but did not fall into any particular category. This categories show us areas of …

"Accounting" For Last Names: The Effect Of Surname Initial On Success In Academia, Natalie Wolford, Mason Snow

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

- Academic journals typically follow conventions of ordering authors by surname initial in both the title page as well as the bibliography section.

- Einav and Yariv (2006) find significant effects from the alphabetical placement of an Economics professor’s last name on their likelihood of gaining tenure.

- While the majority of accounting journals follow alphabetical conventions, some order the authors strictly on reported contribution.

Comparison Of Lifestyles Between Married And Unmarried Emerging Adults, Braden Wake, Jessica Hadfield, Makenzie Lewis, Toree Hafen

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Emerging adulthood contains many lifestyle changes such as leaving the comfort of home, working full time, and for some, getting married (Arnett, 2012). To unmarried emerging adults, marriage seems to be an important factor in the changing dynamics of friendship. Married friends seem to no longer attend social gatherings or participate in the same activities they once did. The question that this research team set out to answer is whether or not these observations actually exist or if they are imagined. This study examined areas of lifestyle, such as sociality, financial trends, personal priorities, stress, and religion for unmarried and …

Town Hall Drama: What's All The Gossip About?, Mckay Randall

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

When the new Congress took their seats at the beginning of 2017, Republicans were on a mission to replace Obamacare. To gear up for the legislative struggle, legislators took to the streets and towns of their districts to speak to constituents about Obamacare and other policies. During the first town halls in January and February, Republican legislators found themselves confronted with rowdy and raucous crowds who nearly shouted them down every time they had chance to speak. The News took note of this phenomena in late February and started reporting on the story. The popular headlines from The Washington Post, …

Collision Or Cohesion? Hmong Shamanism And Ontological Holism In France, Madison Harmer, Telisha Pantelakis

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

The Hmong are an ethnic group from Southeast Asia who’ve lived as forced migrants and political refugees for the past several hundred years. Current U.S. literature has attributed Hmong difficulties adapting to Western culture, specifically health care from shamanic practices. They claim that traditional and western healing practices are incompatible. (Franzen-Castle & Smith 2013, Fadiman 1997). While living in a small town in central France, we conducted an ethnographic study observing Hmong refugees and their interactions and beliefs between traditional healing practices and Western medicine to explore this claim.

The Benefits Of Culturally Adapted Mental Health Treatments: A Meta-Analysis, Juan Valladares, Madeleine Coenen, Niyeli Herrera, Yoojin Kim

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Cultural values, ideas, beliefs and word views may affect the way a mental intervention is received and therefore how effective it is. Historically, research has not focused on cultural minorities and these groups tend to have poorer success rates in treatments (Gonzalez et al., 2010). The purpose of this meta-analysis is to establish the aggregate effect of those mental health interventions that have been adapted to clients' cultural or ethnic backgrounds.

Second Generation Immigrants: Their Self-Esteem And Educational Aspirations, Anika Price

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Immigrants experience unique stresses & discrimination, which leads to lower levels of self-esteem. (Stets & Burke, 2003; Kao, 1999; Gee et al., 2010). Do Second-Generation Immigrants experience the same thing? If so, will that affect their educational expectations for the future?

Time For A Change: Continuous And Discontinuous Transformation In Highly Religious Families, Ashley Tuft

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

While change is a natural occurrence in marital and family relationships, there is an inadequate amount of literature that discusses how this “spontaneous” change occurs within families independent of professional intervention (Fincham, Stanley, & Beach, 2007). Religion is one instrument through which these changes are facilitated in families. We use life course, as explained in Elder (1994), as the theoretical framework for understanding religiously related transformation, focusing especially on the principles of timing, transitions, and turning points. While some research has used life course to understand religion, most of it does not discuss family-level change (Petts, 2009, 2014). The purpose …

Domain Adaptation In Machine Translation, Joshua Mathias, Deryle Lonsdale

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This study uses an open source statistical machine translation system (Moses) to perform machine translation for specific domains, or text types. A machine translation system can be adapted to a specific domain by using training data from the same domain. In this work we show significant improvements for machine translation by training for specific domains and compare the effectiveness of using training data in each of these domains. We also evaluate the effectiveness of different amounts of training data and combining data from different domains.

Will We Let A Language Die?, Joseph Heath, William Eggington

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My project examined efforts to maintain the Rusyn language (also known as Ruthenian ). Rusyn is spoken by 50,000 people living primarily in Slovakia and Ukraine. Unless protected, this language may go extinct within several generations. It is one of over 100 languages in Central and Eastern Europe that have received “threatened” or “endangered” status. Globalization threatens the existence of cultures lacking nationstates, and my professional aim is to assist in the preservation of some of these cultures and their languages.

It's No Accident: Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Vehicle Safety Inspections, Alex Hoagland, Trevor Woolley

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Traffic fatalities have fallen steadily over the past two decades, particularly those due to car failure. Many have attributed this fall to safer vehicle technology. This trend has led many states to reevaluate mandatory vehicle safety inspection programs. This study sought to answer the question, does the elimination of vehicle safety inspections have an effect on traffic fatalities?

Has Party Identification Changed In Utah?, Devin Johanson

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Three weeks before the 2016 election, Utah was labeled as a swing state by most main-stream media outlets. The offensive rhetoric from both the Trump and Clinton campaigns and the rise of a popular independent candidate increased the potential for changes in the party identity of the Utah electorate. My research question is as follows: How has party identification changed in the state of Utah between the 2012 and 2016 elections?

Cerebral Lateralization Of Second Language, Emily Peterson, Gregory A. Thompson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

It has been generally accepted that language shows left-hemisphere dominance in right-handed monolinguals. In contrast, current models of L2 lateralization reveal no such consensus. Some studies (Galloway and Scarcella 1982; Gordon and Zatorre 1981; Paradis 1992) have either found no evidence supporting increased right hemisphere involvement in L2 processing or indicated that bilinguals’ L2 is not any more bilaterally organized than their L1. Other studies (Ke 1992; Hoosain and Shiu 1989; Jia et. al. 2013) have shown the opposite, finding that the L2 is significantly less left-lateralized. Still other studies have suggested that there is simply too much inter-individual variation …

Do Municipal Officials Represent The Views Of Their Constituents?, Steven Jamieson

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Municipalities make decisions that effect millions of Americans every day. Research has been done to assess the link between citizen’s preferences and municipal policy (Tausanovitchand Warshaw2014). However, the link between the policies and the officials who make them is missing.

Now, What Do You Want Me To Do?: New And Emerging Roles For Cataloging And Metadata Librarians, Jeremy Myntti, Liz Woolcott

Faculty Publications

How are libraries preparing for the changing roles for cataloging and metadata librarians?

Relationship Quality As A Predictor Of Eating Disorder Symptoms And Body Image Perception In Women, Jordan Sgro, Dr. Wendy Birmingham

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Eating Disorders (ED) are recognized as an important cause of morbidity and mortality in adolescents and adults and are much more common in women than in men. Women may exhibit ED symptoms but not be clinically diagnosed. Research has shown that individuals who exhibit sub-clinical eating disorder symptoms may eventually develop full syndrome. Thus, sub-threshold ED women are at increased risk but remain undiagnosed. Our culture often values women for their appearance, and this message is continually sent via media and other social institutions (e.g., religion), but having a supportive spouse can help buffer the negative messages women receive. While …

Reconciliation In Religious Families, Betsy Hughes Barrow, David C. Dollahite, Loren D. Marks

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

How do religious families resolve conflict and heal relationships? Through an in-depth study of interviews with 198 highly religious families, we explored motivations, processes, and outcomes of reconciliation. Through this analysis we have identified spiritual, relational, personal and practical processes, in the context of everyday family life, that help families strengthen relationships and resolve differences.

Neural Networks Of Eye-Movements During Reading, Trenton D. Jackman, Benjamin Carter, Steven Luke

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Reading is an important part of normal life. We move our eyes 2-4 times per second. Each movement is called a saccade, and each pause is called a fixation. Progress has been made understanding saccade control during deliberate tasks. Not much is known about saccade control during more automatic tasks like reading. Using fMRI concurrently run with eye-tracking we looked at BOLD MRI response compared to amplitude of saccades, for 43 participants performing a simple paragraph reading task.

Literature Review Of Animal Hoarding, Corina L. Schroeder

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

This paper reviews the characteristic features, origin, and treatment of animal hoarding. It evaluates the similarities and differences of hoarding disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, showing that it seems to be more closely related to object hoarding. This disorder often originates with a traumatic life event, which triggers a psychological vulnerability to compulsively collect animals. In some cases, the hoarder was neglected by parental figures at a young age, so he or she developed relationships with animals to cope. Other theories for the origin include addiction models, delusional disorders, and dementia models. Several theories are reviewed to explain the characteristic lack …

Sex And Money: Exploring How Sexual And Financial Stressors, Perceptions And Resources Influence Marital Instability For Men And Women, David B. Allsop, E. Jeffrey Hill, Ashley B. Lebaron, Roy A. Bean

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

This project explores how finances and sex relate to each other and to marital in-stability for men and women. Data come from the Flourishing Families Project (N = 301 couples) and are organized using the ABC-X model of family stress. Financial stress predicted sexual dissatisfaction for men but not for women. Parenting stress predicted sexual dissatisfaction for women but not for men. Financial dissatisfaction and sexual dissatisfaction predicated marital instability for both men and women. Financial and relational communication fully mediated all significant relationships with marital instability except in the mediational model, couple income still predicted marital instability for men.

Policy Reforms Amidst Corruption: Ukrainian Attitudes Toward Economic Development, Eliza Riley

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

This research examines what economic policies Ukrainians think should—and could– work in Ukraine to reform the economic system and combat widespread corruption. This study tests how region specific determinants and corruption perception levels influence attitudes toward democracy and optimism toward future reform possibilities in Ukraine.