Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Choose Your Own Adventure: The Hero's Journey And The Research Process, Mariana Regalado, Helen Georgas, Matthew J. Burgess

Publications and Research

In Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the hero of the story embarks on an adventure and returns transformed, empowered, and enlightened. Two academic librarians and the research process itself were incorporated into the curriculum of an undergraduate composition course that was structured around the research and writing process as a hero’s journey. The experience, which was student/hero-centered, self-directed, self-defined, investigative, and exploratory, was transformative for the students and the librarians as well.

Error Rate On The Director’S Task Is Influenced By The Need To Take Another’S Perspective But Not The Type Of Perspective, Edward W. Legg, Laure Olivier, Steven Samuel, Robert Lurz, Nicola S. Clayton

Publications and Research

Adults are prone to responding erroneously to another’s instructions based on what they themselves see and not what the other person sees. Previous studies have indicated that in instruction-following tasks participants make more errors when required to infer another’s perspective than when following a rule. These inference-induced errors may occur because the inference process itself is error-prone or because they are a side effect of the inference process. Crucially, if the inference process is error-prone, then higher error rates should be found when the perspective to be inferred is more complex. Here, we found that participants were no more error …

Language Complexity, Belief-Consistency And The Evaluation Of Policies, Matthew H. Goldberg, Cheryl L. Carmichael

Publications and Research

Policy proposals often contain complex legal, technical, or scientific jargon, making it difficult for people to evaluate their favorability toward the policy. We proposed one experiment testing the effect of language complexity on people’s evaluation of a policy proposal as moderated by their initial policy beliefs. We hypothesized that when a policy was consistent with one’s beliefs or if participants had no policy preference, they would evaluate it more favorably when it was simple than when it was complex; when a policy was inconsistent with one’s beliefs, they would evaluate it less unfavorably when it was complex than when it …

The Limits Of Transparency: Data Brokers And Commodification, Matthew Crain

Publications and Research

In the United States the prevailing public policy approach to mitigating the harms of internet surveillance is grounded in the liberal democratic value of transparency. While a laudable goal, transparency runs up against insurmountable structural constraints within the political economy of commercial surveillance. A case study of the data broker industry reveals the limits of transparency and shows that commodification of personal information is at the root of the power imbalances that transparency-based strategies of consumer empowerment seek to rectify. Despite significant challenges, privacy policy must be more centrally informed by a critical political economy of commercial surveillance.

Service Learning In Health And Wellness, Leo Spychala

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Academic Library Innovation Through 3d Printing Services, Galina Letnikova, Na Xu

Publications and Research

Purpose – One of the most innovative library services recently introduced by public and academic libraries, the technology of 3D printing, has the potential to be used in multiple educational settings. The goal of the project described in this article was to examine how this novel library digital service motivates students’ learning, and to investigate managerial issues related to the introduction of 3D printing services at a medium-size urban community college library with restricted funding.

Design/Methodology/Approach - Since fall 2014, the LaGuardia Library Media Resources Center has been offering a portable consumer-end 3D printer for classroom use. This paper provides …

Incentives To Change: Effects Of Performance-Based Financing On Health Workers In Zambia, Gordon C. Shen, Ha Thi Hong Nguyen, Ashis Das, Nkenda Sachingongu, Collins Chansa, Jumana Qamruddin, Jed Friedman

Publications and Research

Background: Performance-based financing (PBF) has been implemented in a number of countries with the aim of transforming health systems and improving maternal and child health. This paper examines the effect of PBF on health workers’ job satisfaction, motivation, and attrition in Zambia. It uses a randomized intervention/control design to evaluate before–after changes for three groups: intervention (PBF) group, control 1 (C1; enhanced financing) group, and control 2 (C2; pure control) group.

Methods: Mixed methods are employed. The quantitative portion comprises of a baseline and an endline survey. The survey and sampling scheme were designed to allow for a rigorous impact …

Ice Breaker - Human Bingo, Jill Strauss

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Event Semantics: A Husserlian Critique, Andres Colapinto

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

New Outreach Initiatives At A Community College, Sharell Walker

Publications and Research

This article explores the development and initiation of new outreach programs by the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) Library department after the hiring of a new librarian. The literature review will address current research that was used in the decision making process whilst putting together outreach initiatives and literature used to develop future ideas. The article discusses the development of these outreach initiatives, the problems encountered during their initial implementation, the outcomes of the programs that were offered, feedback, and the future goals of the library department.

Measures Of Greatness: A Lotkaian Approach To Literary Authors Using Oclc Worldcat, Alon Friedman, Jay H. Bernstein

Publications and Research

This study examines the productivity, eminence, and impact of literary authors using Lotka's law, a bibliometric approach developed for studying the published output of scientists. Data on literary authors were drawn from two recent surveys that identified and ranked authors who had made the greatest contributions to world lit- erature. Data on the number of records of works by and about selected authors were drawn from OCLC WorldCat in 2007 and 2014. Findings show that the distribution of literary authors followed a pattern consistent with Lotka's law and show that these studies enable one to empirically test subjective rankings of …

Characteristics Of Individuals Seeking A Text Messaging Intervention For Problem Drinking: Adults 51 And Older Versus Middle-Aged And Younger Adults, Alexis Kuerbis, Katherine Van Stolk-Cooke, Frederick J. Muench

Publications and Research

According to the Institute of Medicine, the vast older adult population is estimated to have mental health and substance use disorders at unprecedented rates and will place high demand on an unprepared healthcare system. Online and mobile health interventions, such as text messaging, could provide an alternative form of frontline intervention that could alleviate some of the burden on the healthcare system; however, it remains unknown what are characteristics of adults over 50 who might be interested in a mobile health behavioral intervention and how they may differ from their younger counterparts. To explore the characteristics of those interested in …

A Pilot Study Of Online Feedback For Adult Drinkers 50 And Older: Feasibility, Efficacy, And Preferences For Intervention, Alexis Kuerbis, Lisa Hail, Alison A. Moore, Frederick Muench

Publications and Research

Normative (NF) and personalized feedback (PF) are moderately effective brief interventions for at-risk drinking middle-aged and older adults. This study tested the feasibility of online feedback for drinkers 50 and older. This study’s aims were to identify whether there is differential effectiveness of PF over NF in prompting drinkers 50 years old and older to plan for change and to determine potential preferences for intervention among adult drinkers 50 and older with practical knowledge about computers. Method—Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, 138 male and female drinkers aged 50 to 75+ were recruited to complete an online survey that asked about their: …

Seeing Library Data: A Prototype Data Visualization Application For Librarians, Mark E. Eaton

Publications and Research

Visualizations can add value to raw library data. Tools that programmatically make such visualizations interactive can further increase the value of this data, by giving librarians visual tools to analyze their data sets. To demonstrate these benefits, Kingsborough Community College Library built SeeCollections (http://b7jl.org/seecollections), a web application that visualizes our libraries’ collections of books and ebooks.

This article discusses the how SeeCollections gathers data from Kingsborough’s discovery layer API (Application Programming Interface), and transforms this data to create visualizations for the web. SeeCollections is a lightweight, proof-of-concept data application based on a vendor API. API data is often accessible in …

Mediating The Tourist Experience: From Brochures To Virtual Encounters, Gordon Alley-Young

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Consumers, Clergy, And Clinicians In Collaboration: Ongoing Implementation And Evaluation Of A Mental Wellness Program, Glen Milstein, Dennis Middel, Adriana Espinosa

Publications and Research

As a foundation of most cultures, with roots in persons’ early development, religion can be a source of hope as well as denigration. Some religious institutions have made attempts to help persons with mental health problems, and some mental health professionals have sought to engage religion resources. These programs have rarely been sustained. In 2008, the Mental Health Center of Denver (MHCD) developed a program to assess the utility of religion resources within mental health care. In response to positive feedback, MHCD appointed a director of Faith and Spiritual Wellness who facilitates community outreach to faith communities and spiritual integration …

Consequences Of Job Stress For The Psychological Well-Being Of Teachers, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Renzo Bianchi, Peter Luehring-Jones

Publications and Research

This chapter examines research on the relationship between job stressors and mental health (depressive symptoms, burnout, and mental disorders such as depression) in teachers. Teachers are exposed daily to job stressors (e.g., student disruptiveness) that have been linked to adverse mental health effects. Epidemiologic research indicates that when compared to members of other groups, teachers experience higher rates of mental disorder, although some studies question that conclusion. Large-scale studies indicate when compared to members of other occupational groups, teachers are at higher risk for exposure to workplace violence, with its adverse mental health consequences. Longitudinal research has linked teaching-related stressors …

The Third Tier In Treatment: Attending To The Growing Connection Between Gut Health And Emotional Well-Being, Joseph Verdino

Publications and Research

The microbial environment of the human gut has powerful influence on immunity, metabolism, and obesity. There is now emerging evidence that the microbiome of our gastrointestinal system may also be a key factor impacting our emotional and behavioral health. The purpose of this article is to elucidate how this emerging area of science can further educate and encourage mental health professionals to explore an additional means to treatment. Since much of this research is found in the biological and neuroscientific literature, it can be quite cumbersome for clinicians to digest and apply, who would critically benefit from a concise discussion …

The Chief Learning Officer: A Model Role For Integrating Hr And Strategic Planning Functions In Libraries, Robert Farrell

Publications and Research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to put forward the position of chief learning officer (CLO) as a potential new role or models for new roles in libraries wishing to integrate human resources, strategic planning, and budgeting.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews the history and present functions of the CLO role in the corporate world, correlating work within the library field with key aspects of the position as way by which to conceptualize the integration of disparate library operations.

Findings – The position of CLO has not yet entered the library and information science (LIS) discourse.

Practical implications …

Learning The Basics Of Scholarly Communication: A Guide For New Subject Liaison Librarians, Madeline Cohen

Publications and Research

Academic librarians are playing a greater role in scholarly communication at their institutions. Scholarly communication has become a part of every academic librarian’s work. In particular, the role of subject liaison librarian often includes responsibilities related to advising discipline faculty on scholarly publishing, open access, institutional repositories and copyright. Liaison librarians might take on these responsibilities without having a firm grasp of the landscape of scholarly communication due to lack of experience or education in this area. This article is a guide to the key issues and concepts of scholarly communication for librarians new to this facet of academic librarianship. …

Reclaiming The Streets: Black Urban Insurgency And Antisocial Security In Twenty-First-Century Philadelphia, Jeff Maskovsky

Publications and Research

This article focuses on the emergence of a new pattern of black urban insurgency emerging in major US metropolitan areas such as Philadelphia. I locate this pattern in the context of a new securitization regime that I call “antisocial security.” This regime works by establishing a decentered system of high-tech forms of surveillance and monitory techniques. I highlight the dialectic between the extension of antisocial security apparatuses and techniques into new political and social domains on the one hand and the adoption of these same techniques by those contesting racialized exclusions from urban public space on the other. I end …

Libraries, Knowledge, And The Common Good: The Cultural Politics Of Labor Republicanism In Progressive-Era Wheeling, West Virginia, Jonathan Cope

Publications and Research

An analysis of the Ohio Valley Trades and Labor Assembly's campaign to defeat a proposed Carnegie library in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1904.

A Collaborative Intervention: Measuring The Impact Of A Flipped Classroom Approach On Library One-Shots For The Composition Classroom, Maureen Garvey, Anne Hays, Amy F. Stempler

Publications and Research

Instruction Librarians teaching one-shot information literacy (IL) sessions to freshman composition classes at academic universities across the U.S. experience a familiar set of issues. In response, librarians have produced a bounty of literature detailing flipped instruction approaches, collaborative case studies with outside departments, and critiques of the library one-shot, but there is little research describing attempts to combine these three approaches in one study. Both a case study and an impact-assessment study, this article describes a collaborative intervention between the Library Instruction team, the Writing Across the Curriculum program, and the English Department, with the purpose of studying the intervention’s …

Painless Portal Partnerships: Collaboration And Its Challenges For Small Organizations, Christine Mcevilly

Publications and Research

This article addresses challenges inherent in collaborative archival projects involving both large institutions and small historical societies. It identifies these unique problems and outlines potential solutions to overcome these issues. Examples are drawn from the Portal to American Jewish History project and contextualized within the professional literature on ethnic or community archives and archival collaboration. This project collected metadata from a wide range of Jewish history archives and aggregated the records in a single searchable website.

Large-Scale Surveillance Of Captive Naked Mole-Rat Colonies Shows Caste Differences In Space Utilization, Michael Kress, Edward F. Meehan, Dan Mccloskey

Publications and Research

African naked mole-rats are eusocial mammals that provide unique opportunity to study complex mammalian social behavior and large-group dynamics in a controlled vivarium setting. Previous reports of captive and wild naked mole-rats have identified a division of labor among non-reproductive colony members along a size polyethism, with large animals specializing in defense behaviors, and small animals performing foraging, nest building, and caretaking functions. This study utilized radio frequency identification (RFID) and advanced computational approaches to monitor the activity patterns and place preferences of all members in two naked mole-rat colonies (N = 36 and 37 animals) for a period of …

The Semantic Difference Between Italian Vi And Ci, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

The Italian adverbial clitics vi and ci, both routinely glossed ‘there,’ are not synonymous but instead are signals of opposing meanings in a grammatical system of Restrictedness of Space. Vi means more Restricted, and ci means less Restricted. Operating at the discourse level, the two meanings function to direct attention onto the relevant conceptual space for each event in a narrative. Conceptual space includes physical places, subject matter complements, and realms of existential constructions. The semantic hypothesis accounts both for quantitative patterns observed in stretches of discourse and for the respective interpretive effects of the two clitics and for …

Burnout Or Depression: Both Individual And Social Issue, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Éric Laurent

Publications and Research

In view of the profound problems attached to the construct of burnout, we recommended in our that occupational health specialists focus on (job-related) depression rather than burnout to help workers more effectively. The phenomena of interest (burnout or depression) should not be confused with the perspectives (individual or social) adopted to elucidate those phenomena. Both burnout and depression are best explained through the interaction of social or external conditions with individual or internal dispositions.

Burnout-Depression Overlap: A Study Of New Zealand Schoolteachers, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Mayor, Eric Laurent

Publications and Research

We examined the overlap of burnout with depression in a sample of 184 New Zealand schoolteachers. Burnout and depressive symptoms were strongly correlated with each other (r = .73; disattenuated correlation: .82) and moderately correlated with dysfunctional attitudes, ruminative responses, and pessimistic attributions. All the participants with high frequencies of burnout symptoms were identified as clinically depressed. Suicidal ideation was reported by 36% of those participants. Three groups of teachers emerged from a two-step cluster analysis: “low burnout-depression,” “medium burnout-depression,” and “high burnout-depression.” The correlation between the affective-cognitive and somatic symptoms of depression was similar in strength to the burnout-depression …

The Origins Of Organized Crime, Danielle Hamilton

Dissertations and Theses

This paper will illustrate the correlation between democratic and market economy transitions and the increase of organized crime. This correlation exists despite the differences in political system prior to the democratic transition. What matters the most is that these transitions either occur at the same time or within a short window of time. Organized criminal groups thrive in unstable and failed states because of the lack of government and law enforcement interference in their illegal activities. However, these groups can also make a home in countries that have relatively short periods of transition between political and economic systems, despite the …

Beyond Ada Compliance: The Library As A Place For All, Jj Pionke

Urban Library Journal

In 2015, the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) celebrated its 25^th anniversary. While libraries have instituted ADA compliance initiatives since the law came into effect in 1990, and new libraries are generally designed with compliance in mind, to be truly accessible for all people, libraries must incorporate principles of universal design not just into the physical building but into all aspects of the library, including our web presence and the services we provide to patrons. This paper argues that libraries are falling far short of true accessibility and that there needs to be a serious mental shift in how …