Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Essays On Paid Sick Leave In The United States, Shaoying Ma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters.

Chapter 1 This study estimates the causal effect of access to paid sick leave on worker mobility, by exploiting variation in the implementation of local paid sick leave mandates over time in the U.S. I use May 2004 - June 2019 Current Population Survey (CPS) basic monthly data, and by taking a Difference-in-Differences approach, I find that the local mandates significantly reduce private sector employees' monthly job turnover. This study is, to the best of my knowledge, the first to present the effect of local paid sick leave mandates in the U.S. on worker …

Acquisition Orders And Instructional Sequences: A Case Study Of Russian Textbooks, Olga Ozhiganova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research on English as a second language has established the linguistic phenomenon of the natural order of morpheme acquisition in which grammatical features are acquired by learners in a specific order. The acquisition of Russian morphosyntax as an L2 had not been established until Gor’s (2019) research. The present study employs Gor’s (2019) findings to examine whether the order in which five Russian morphosyntactic features—case, impersonal sentences, location-direction, aspect, verbs of motion (VoM)—are acquired is reflected in second-year Russian instructional materials by investigating three commonly used textbooks. The results reveal that (1) the documented order in which Russian morphosyntactic …

Inspirations For Awake: Expressions Of Trauma Through Fiction And Autoethnographic Literature, Sophia Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Awake is a novella based on true events in my own life. This capstone project addresses my own experiences with intimate partner violence. While it is inspired by my life, I chose to write a fictional narrative rather than a strictly biographical piece of nonfiction. Instead, this novella illustrates a few of the traumas that I went through from within the lens of a fictional narrative. This enabled me to tell about my experiences by crafting my memories into a story, without the pressure of submitting an accounting of them. Writing Awake has been helpful to me in that it …

Doing Discipline Different: Evaluating The Implementation Of Restorative Justice As An Alternative To Punitive Discipline In New York City Public Schools, Virginia Diaz-Mendoza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Given that punitive discipline practices have disproportionately impacted its poor students of color, New York City is committed to transforming school discipline and improving school climate by implementing restorative justice as an alternative. This study is an evaluation of the restorative justice pilot program funded by the New York City Council and managed by the New York City Department of Education where key stakeholders including officials at the Department of Education, school administrators, educators, school staff, and community organizations are involved in the implementation of restorative justice in schools with high suspension rates. Data was collected through interviews, observations of …

Threat Perceptions And Russian Foreign Policy: From Cooperation To Assertiveness, Angela Borozna

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian foreign policy has ranged from openly embracing partnership with the United States to criticizing, challenging, and confronting the United States on numerous foreign policy issues. What explains change in Russia’s foreign policy—from cooperation to balancing the United States—between 1991 and 2018? What are the causes of Russia’s turn to a more assertive foreign policy? I test a main hypothesis that Russia’s change in foreign policy is a direct result of the change in Russia’s assessment of threat and compare it to alternative explanations for Russian foreign policy assertiveness.

The most …

Fiscal And Monetary Policies And Stock Market, Ilhami Gunduz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters.

The first chapter analyzes the stock market transmission channel of the monetary policy of the Turkish economy not only at the aggregate but also at the sectoral level in a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework. I adopt alternative variables as a policy instrument. When the spread is used as a policy instrument, I find that contractionary monetary policy has a significant negative effect on both output and the price level and it appreciates the Turkish Lira. In addition, tight monetary policy reduces both aggregate and sectoral market returns. Hence, the results suggest that policymakers …

Spheres Of Identity: Theorizing Social Categorization And The Legitimacy Of Criminal Justice Officials, Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Identity is of central importance in the subjective experience of justice and assessments of legitimacy. In this study, the researcher explores whether perceptions of legitimacy are constructed differently across social group identity, particularly where social groups differ in relation to government (e.g., outgroup or ingroup). The analyses are conducted using data from a procedural justice study conducted in two U. S. cities. The findings suggest evidence of a generally similar construction of legitimacy though with important dissimilarities based on social group. Additionally, certain respondents’ narratives follow common narrative scripts in describing interactions with police, suggestive of a shared master narrative …

Memory For Episodic Details Of Naturalistic Events Remains Stable Over The Course Of One Week, Kennedy E. Stomberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We have many experiences every day, and we tend to parse them into individual events. While many studies have been conducted to understand the nature of event segmentation, less is known how event memories change over time. In the present study, participants watched a movie clip, and then were asked to immediately retell what they had seen. They performed the same free recall task a week later. We found that the passage of time did not significantly affect the number of recalled events or the detailedness of event memories. We discuss potential explanations for our findings, including our small sample …

Engaging Neighbors: Housing Strategies And Political Mobilization In Moscow's Renovation, Anna Zhelnina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In summer 2017, residents of thousands of socialist-era apartment buildings in Moscow were invited to vote and decide whether their building should be included in the demolition and relocation program proposed by the Mayor’s Office. Renovation is an ongoing urban renewal plan, first announced in Moscow in February 2017, to demolish whole neighborhoods of socialist-era, five-story buildings and replace them with high-rises. The vast project affected more than 5,000 buildings with approximately a million inhabitants.

This dissertation addresses general questions of political agency and the possibility for diverse people in urban neighborhoods to produce change: to achieve desired policy outcomes, …

Essays On Trade Liberalization, Structural Change, And Technical Efficiency, Li Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A recent and growing literature analyzes differential growth across regions of Asia, Latin America, and Sub Saharan Africa. The structural change of labor reallocation is an important determinant of growth in developing countries having large productivity gaps across sectors within the border. Therefore, sectoral characteristics are still an important determinant of cross-region studies. In addition, it is well-known that labor reallocation across economic sectors does not automatically occur without external shocks, especially from international trade.

However, recent studies debate the importance of trade policy as more research focuses on the cost of transportation and communication in international trade and economic …

The Racial Position Model As A Framework To Understand Friendship Formation Between Latinx Americans And Other Racial Minorities, Darren Agboh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Three experiments utilized the Racial Position Model (RPM, Zou & Cheryan, 2017) in intraminority relations context to examine how Latinx Americans form friendships with a Black or Asian American interaction partner based on their shared or separate axes of subordination on the RPM. Latinx Americans may have contrasting interaction expectations with Black Americans and Asian Americans, as they share inferiority with Black Americans and foreignness with Asian Americans but are inferior compared to Asian Americans and foreign compared to Black Americans (Zou & Cheryan, 2017). Results showed that Latinx Americans feel more similar in terms of inferiority to Black Americans …

Migratory Timescapes: Experiences Of Pausing, Waiting, And Inhabiting The Meanwhile Of Migrants And Asylum Seekers In Mexico, Isabel Gil Everaert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico´s southern border with Guatemala, this dissertation provides insights into contemporary experiences of migration in Mexico by engaging with the notions of movement, control, and settlement from a critical perspective. I explore these experiences through the idea of migratory timescapes, defined as structural temporal-relational contexts in which migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are socially embedded. In the case of this dissertation, I unpack three migratory timescapes which are situated in a regional context of growing displacement and increasingly restrictive migratory and asylum policies, what I call the block-and-wait system.

First, I introduce the idea …

Examining Racial And Ethnic Disparity In Prosecutor’S Bail Requests And Downstream Decision Making, Connor Concannon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rigorous academic research into prosecutorial and judicial decision making has been taking place for over three decades, but a great deal remains unknown about the mechanics of prosecution. A majority of the work done by prosecutors occurs outside of public view, and most research focuses on the ‘back end’ of the adjudication process, leaving unanalyzed numerous decision points made upstream of the final plea and sentencing outcomes. Using unique data from the New York County District Attorney’s Office that tracks 43,971 felony complaints, this research examines racial and ethnic disparity at multiple decision points during case processing, with a focus …

The Temporal Dynamics Of Ensemble Perception, Michael L. Epstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The striking disparity between the subjective richness of experience and the considerable limitations of perceptual processing has emerged as an essential, enduring question in both vision science and philosophy of mind. A potential solution to this issue is ensemble perception: the ability for the visual system to compute the statistical summaries of object groups, effectively compressing an otherwise overwhelming amount of information. Previous work has supported that ensemble statistics can be perceived quickly and accurately for a wide range of object features. This has motivated models of ensemble perception as an early process in vision, providing an initial sense of …

Searching For Pōhakuloa: A Citizen Scientist’S Journey In Aloha ‘Āina, Drake Logan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation tells a story about the United States (US) military’s land occupation of two Indigenous Hawaiian wahi pana (sacred places), on O’ahu and Hawai’i Island, which have produced widespread health concerns regarding exposure to military toxins. I conducted six months of fieldwork in Hawai’i, in which I partnered with local communities in a Critical Participatory Action research process. Together, we formed and co-led a community-based science pilot study of contamination from Pōhakuloa Training Area, generating new citizen science methods capable of uncovering evidence on confirmed military toxics uses. These methods were developed in critical solidarity with international communities who …

Structural And Functional Brain Markers Of Trauma-Related Symptoms, Glenn Blessington

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The neurocircuitry model of posttraumatic stress disorder suggests an association between trauma-related symptoms and abnormalities in the structure and function of limbic and prefrontal brain regions. Evidence also suggests that these structural and functional abnormalities are related. We tested the relation between whole brain white matter integrity, resting-state functional connectivity of a fronto-limbic network, and trauma-related symptoms in 22 trauma-exposed women. We hypothesized that components of whole brain white matter would correlate with components of resting connectivity within a fronto-limbic network. We used parallel independent component analysis (pICA) to test the associations between whole brain fractional anisotropy (FA) maps and …

360º Video And Language Documentation: Towards A Corpus Of Kanien'kéha (Mohawk), Joseph Pentangelo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Robust documentation is a major goal of documentary linguistics. Recognizing spoken language as a multimodal phenomenon, researchers working in this field broadly agree that video is an improvement over audio-only recording. At the same time, video is limited by the format’s frame, which permits only a relatively small portion of the visual field to be recorded at any given time. This results in much data being lost, as the documenter must decide where to aim their camera, necessarily leaving out more than they record.

In this dissertation, I apply 360º video to language documentation for the first time. 360º video, …

The Dynamic Linkages Between Structural Interdependencies, Computer-Mediated Communication, And Emergence In Newly Formed Virtual Groups, Erik Pesner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Virtual groups and teams are increasingly common in today’s organizations, particularly since the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. However, little is known about how specific design features predict communicative team processes and emergent phenomena in the days immediately following virtual team formation. This dissertation examined the effects of task interdependence (i.e., shared resources) and outcome interdependence (i.e., shared goals and feedback) on task-oriented and relationship-oriented electronic communication between group members and emergent group perceptions over a 5-day experimental simulation. Results showed that while the majority of hypotheses were not supported, three key findings were culled from the analysis. First, virtual …

Thrown Off Course: School Suspension And Its Consequences For Students’ Educational Trajectories And Outcomes, Celina Cuevas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Purpose: The literature on exclusionary school discipline has repeatedly documented disparities in its use and its relationship to various negative outcomes, causing the use of suspensions to become a pressing concern in the United States. The goal of this dissertation is to add this body of literature by being the first to examine the educational trajectories youth take after first being suspended, and how the effect of school punishment on trajectories may be more severe for subgroups of students disproportionately affected by school discipline and often underserved in school settings.

Methods: New York City Department of Education data is used …

Being And Becoming: Voice And The Performance Of Self By Black And Brown Women Members Of An Educational Space Organized In Whiteness, Anamaria Correa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation joins the voices of experiences of Black and Brown individuals in elite white spaces of independent schools. As a qualitative research project this study utilizes narrative, I Poems, and art-ifacts to create an ecology of experiences illustrating the past and the resiliency of the present. This research disrupts status quo narratives of lauded diversity efforts of excellent private school education and is a call to action for accountability in anti-racist owning up and restructuring of independent school spaces, leadership, governance and cultural practices. Undergirded by Critical Race Feminist Theory as the theoretical framework this dissertation presents the intersectional, …

Exploring Psychological Mechanisms Underlying Plea Bargain Decisions, Melanie Close

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to an economic model of plea bargaining, defendants’ plea decisions are based on their estimated trial prospects (i.e. likelihood of conviction and severity of sentence). However, information communicated during interrogations may provide defendants with misinformation about trial prospects, thus biasing their subsequent plea decisions. Furthermore, the model fails to address why innocent individuals plead guilty less often than guilty individuals even when trial prospects are identical. I investigated whether Reid-style interrogation techniques increase the likelihood of a guilty plea by inflating suspects’ estimates of the severity of the outcomes should they go to trial. I also examined whether anxiety …

Thoughts Of Becoming: Negotiating Modernity And Identity In Bangladesh, Humayun Kabir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation constructs a history and conducts an analysis of Bangladeshi political thought with the aim to better understand the thought-world and political subjectivities in Bangladesh. The dissertation argues that political thought in Bangladesh has been profoundly structured by colonial and other encounters with modernity and by concerns about constructing a national identity. Negotiations between the incomplete and continuous projects of modernization and identity formation have produced certain anxieties about becoming that permeates political consciousness and ideas in the country. Though such anxieties of becoming are also shared by other postcolonial countries, the specific, though not necessarily exclusive, character of …

False Cures Of U.S. Nationalism: The Border Wall – A Raucous Call From The Silent Center, Tatiana N. Browne-Kai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In trying to grasp the authoritarian surge in the U.S. since 2016, political theorists have increasingly turned their focus back to the Studies of the Authoritarian Personality. In response to the risk of these contemporary studies’ use of psychoanalysis in a de-historicized and individualized way, this paper opts for a double historicization of modern mass-formations. In analyzing the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, the Minuteman Border Fence and We Build the Wall, civil initiatives that aim at fortifying the U.S.-Mexican border wall (D. Trumps central campaign theme), the current surge to the right is shown to be based on and made …

Gender Differences In Personality: An Item-Level Analysis, Casey C. Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Personality is a social and organizational construct with a substantial history and discourse. One particular area in personality that is of interest is gender differences in personality. Gender differences have been found on scales measuring various aspects of personality, such as narcissism (Grijalva et al., 2014). While there are differences present in personality data, there hasn’t been a consistent explanation for why this occurs. This research looked specifically at the construction of personality items to begin to understand the differences in personality by gender. While social roles and social context are mostly referenced to inform the response patterns of men …

Stalking And Attachment Theory: Causes And Management, Zoe Turner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Stalking is an issue that has drawn increasing attention over the past four decades. Approximately 6 million Americans report being the victims of stalking each year. The psychological and physical effects of stalking can be severe, ranging from anxiety and depression to physical harm and even death. With the rise of technology and social media, cyberstalking has become an additional problem in recent years. It is vital to understand the root causes of stalking behavior from a psychological perspective in order to create appropriate management and treatment plans. The current research investigates the role of attachment theory in stalking. Within …

Does The Word "Chien" Bark? Representation Learning In Neural Machine Translation Encoders, Emily Campbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis presents experiments with using representation learning to explore how neural networks learn. Neural networks which take text as input create internal representations of the text during their training. Recent work has found that these representations can be used to perform other downstream linguistic tasks, such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging. This demonstrates that the neural networks are learning linguistic information and storing this information in the representations. We focus on the representations created by neural machine translation (NMT) models and whether they can be used in POS tagging. We train 5 NMT models including an auto-encoder. We extract the …

The Cognitive Thalamus: Source Analysis Of Scene Working Memory Delay Activity, Bernard A. Gomes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Working Memory represents a limited-capacity store for maintaining information and manipulating the store's contents over a short period for the guidance of goal-directed behavior. Working Memory is an essential component of executive functions that are intricately associated with the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC has been implicated in maintaining task-related information online for brief periods in the absence of relevant information. This active maintenance phase is called the delay period that occurs between encoding and retrieval of the stimulus. Previous studies have attempted to understand the relationship between working memory and the PFC, especially during the delay or maintenance phase …

Understanding Gender Differences In Traditional And Cyberbullying: An Evaluation Of Construct Validity Of The 2013 School Crime Supplement To The National Crime Victimization Survey, Anthony Betancourt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Few measures assess cyberbullying and traditional bullying simultaneously while also reporting standards of reliability and validity. As a result, it remains unclear whether cyberbullying should be considered a separate type of bullying. This dissertation advances the literature by examining data from the 2013 School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS-SCS) to provide psychometric information about the factor structure of the 2013 NCVS-SCS traditional and cyberbullying scales. Furthermore, the dissertation uses that information to evaluate if cyberbullying emerges as a unique factor. Finally, measurement invariance will determine if bullying holds the same meaning for boys and girls (e.g. …

The Medium Of Liberation: Kurdish Language And Education Activism In Turkey, Demet Arpacik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic study examines the Kurdish language and education activism, which I argue, is an anti-colonial movement generating decolonial forms of practices as responses. Prohibited to be spoken even in private spaces until 1991 in Turkey, the Kurdish language has been an intense object of struggle between the Turkish state and the Kurdish population. What historical, political, and sociocultural forces have contributed to colonial language governmentality in Turkey against the Kurdish language and its speakers? How do Kurdish activists challenge the linguistic hegemony in their semi-formal spaces and in what ways are their practices, discourses and policies decolonial? My study …

Many Forms Of Black Death: Coal Extraction, Transnational Activism And The Value Of Life In Colombia, Oscar H. Pedraza Vargas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

After the murder of the president and vice president of the coal union by paramilitaries in the department of Cesár, Colombia, the union is left adrift. Its fragility is only heightened when the person who decides to take over, is killed six months later. The union has been vocal on their critique of environmental destruction produced by coal and argues that their criticism is part of the reasons why they were targeted. Not far from there, in the department of Guajira, the conglomerate in charge of Cerrejón, the largest open-pit coal mine of South America, wants to divert a creek …