Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Normalization Policies With Cuba: Implications For Political And Economic Reform, Ramona N. Khan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For longer than the past half century, the relationship between the United States and Cuba has been one of antagonism, mistrust, betrayal, hostility and defiance. Decades of mutual hostility arising from Cuba’s post revolution adoption of an economic system that emulated that of the Soviet Union, along with the long history of U.S. interference in Cuba’s domestic and international affairs that predated the Castro revolution and continued afterward, have resulted in this rancorous relationship. Cuba’s move to communism shortly after the Castro regime came to power was regarded as a threat to both democracy and capitalism by the United States, …

Interstate Alliances Of The Fourth-Century Bce Greek World: A Socio-Cultural Perspective, Nicholas D. Cross

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers a reassessment of interstate alliances (συμμαχία) in the fourth-century BCE Greek world from a socio-cultural perspective. Although there are a number of studies of ancient and modern alliances that approach the topic from a politico-military perspective, this is the first to apply a socio-cultural perspective to classical Greek alliances. By considering the subject in its own context, from the primary literary and epigraphic sources rather than modern theoretical models, this study aims to identify how contemporaries understood and represented their collaborative activities with other poleis. This approach leads to insights that challenge the widespread notion that classical …

Cognitive And Affective Aspects Of Personality And Academic Procrastination: The Role Of Personal Agency, Flow, And Executive Function, Marc Graff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Academic procrastination is a prevalent issue that affects school-related and other experiences of many students, with some studies identifying as many as a third of college students sampled as‘severe’ procrastinators. This study investigated some of the factors previous studies have identified as potential contributors to procrastinating in the academic arena. In defining procrastination as a self-regulation issue, it is proposed that distinct executive function processes play a role in one’s efforts at academic task engagement and completion and resisting the tendency to procrastinate on these tasks. It is also proposed that the frequency with which one experiences ‘flow’, a state …

Thiscollegestory.Com: How Interactive Writing Media Influenced The Way First-Year Students Made Sense Of Their College Transition, Philip Kreniske

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on insights from Bakhtin (1986) that demonstrated the significance of writing as an interaction, and building on recent developments in narrative analysis that offer insights into narrator’s sense making processes (Daiute, 2014; Lucic, 2013); this research explores how freshmen in an educational opportunity program used interactive writing media to make sense of their transition to college. The exploration involved three main questions and each question concerns students’ development over time:

• First, did college students’ writing in two different media (blogs and word-processed text) differ and did these differences change over time?
• Second, how did the narrators and audience interact …

Gender Roles, Social Control And Digital Piracy: A Longitudinal Analysis Of Gender Differences In Software Piracy Among Korean Adolescents, Riccardo Ferraresso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In order to improve our understanding of juvenile delinquency and of the factors that can affect it, researchers may need to examine the new forms of crimes emerging in the cyber world. There is still a large knowledge gap regarding the etiology of cybercrime. In particular, very little research on gender differences in cybercrime and the explanatory power of gender based theories and Hirschi’s social bond theory in cybercrime has been undertaken. The current study attempts to fill some of the gaps in the criminological literature on this modern form of crime by examining the explanatory power of traditional theories …

A Comparative Perspective Between Farc Guerrilleras And Chechen Black Widows, Denise Rivera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will explore the similar and different characteristics between Colombian female combatants who are members of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolutionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and the Chechen female suicide bombers who joined the Chechen insurgency movement. It shall provide a brief historical background of how the FARC, a leftist guerrilla group, and the Chechen insurgency movement ascended into prominence during civil conflicts in Colombia and Chechnya respectively. It will discuss how many women in both countries would pursue a different form of activism and defy patriarchal norms by engaging in acts of violence in the name …

Talk Shows And Language Attitudes: A Sociolinguistic Investigation Of Language Attitudes Towards Taiwan Mandarin Among Chinese Mainlanders, Chun-Yi Peng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the effects of media exposure and language ideologies on Mandarin speakers’ acceptability judgments. Although there is a long-standing tradition against citing media exposure as a source of language variation, I show that 1) media exposure to a non-local perceptually salient variant can make people more likely to rate non-local linguistic features as grammatically acceptable, and 2) media exposure shapes people’s language attitudes—a new alignment of attitudes is emerging among the millennials on the mainland.

Data were collected through an online survey consisting of grammaticality judgments, matched-guise tasks, open-ended attitudinal questions, and demographic questions. The data show …

Real Gender: Identity, Loss, And The Capacity To Feel Real, Hannah Wallerstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project concerns gender and feeling real. It begins with a seeming paradox: on the one hand, since Judith Butler (1999; 2011) we can no longer think gender as ontological in any simple sense; on the other, clinical experience and the voices of transgender and gender-queer individuals shows gender to function on the order of reality, and one exceeding the social. In other words, if feeling real depended entirely on being read as such, how would we account for the many who pass easily as “real” men or women and yet feel unreal, or come to feel more real by …

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …

Literacies Of Bilingual Youth: A Profile Of Bilingual Academic, Social, And Txt Literacies, Michelle A. Mcsweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation identifies three types of language skills that urban Spanish/English bilingual youth possess (academic, social, and texting language), and reports on their relationship while documenting and analyzing the features of text messaging among this population. The participants in this study are Spanish-dominant bilingual young adults enrolled in a high school completion program in New York City. They are in the process of developing both Spanish and English academic literacy skills, and it is well known that they tend to perform below the grade they are enrolled in. For this reason, they are often referred to as being “language-less” (DeCapua …

Transnational Indigenous Migration: Racialized Geographies And Power In Southern Highland Ecuador, Victoria Stone-Cadena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the shifting landscape of social and economic inequalities in the remittance-dominated region of southern highland Ecuador, focusing on the transformations brought about by increased international migration since the early 2000s. The broader question is whether or not transnational migration has facilitated political and social upward mobility among indigenous communities. More specifically I ask: in what ways does indigenous identity figure in contemporary international migration practices, how does transnational indigenous migration complicate bounded notions of rural indigenous life, and how might the strategies employed by indigenous migrants transform social and economic inequalities in two small towns in the …

Producing Discursive Change: From "Illegal Aliens" To "Unauthorized Immigration" In Library Catalogs, J. Silvia Cho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent debates on immigration policies have included a discursive contest over the representation of unauthorized immigrants, in both the news media and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), a subject indexing system administered by the Library of Congress. Using a mixed methods approach from a critical discourse analysis perspective, I examine the responses of the news media and the Library of Congress to societal pressures for change, showing how the Library’s complex institutional position can constrain its responses. Those obstacles, when combined with the characteristics of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) as a linguistic tool for information …

An Examination Of Cross-Domain Authorship Attribution Techniques, Maxwell B. Schwartz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years, Twitter has become a popular testing ground for techniques in authorship attribution. This is due to both the ease of building large corpora as well as the challenges associated with the character limit imposed by the service and the writing styles that have developed as a result. As both false and genuine claims of hacked Twitter accounts have made international news, there is an increasing need for this type of work. For newer Twitter accounts, however, there is little training data. Thus, this study looks to lay the groundwork for cross-domain authorship attribution: training on one source …

Selling National Security: Journalism, Political Actors, And The Marketing Of Counterterrorism Policy, Nicole M. Napolitano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The social construction of terrorism in the public sphere naturally limits and directs logical policy options. In the United States, media are a primary vehicle for the construction of social problems and accompanying policy solutions, as much of public discourse takes place in media narratives. News media play a major part in political communication, both between government and governed as well as among different segments of government.

Social construction in media is shaped by journalistic values and preferences, occurs within an active and influential policy process, and is shaped by powerful policy actors. Government-based policy actors, or governmental policy entrepreneurs, …

The Antipolitics Of Food In Middle-Class America, Neri De Kramer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides an ethnographic account of the food and parenting practices of a diverse group of middle-class families in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. It starts from the basic premise that the economic pressures on the American middle classes find expression in family life around the socially reproductive work of choosing food and parenting.

The current economic climate marked with extreme and rising income inequality, low growth, high unemployment and stagnating wages has complicated the reproduction process for all parents in this study, regardless of income. Scholars have described how this concern for the future of the next …

Processing Filler-Gap Dependencies In Mandarin Chinese: An Effect Of Language Exposure?, Stanley Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates how speakers of Mandarin Chinese process filler-gap dependencies in potentially ambiguous fronted wh-questions. The study recruited native speakers of Mandarin with different degrees of English proficiency. In the experiment, participants were first presented with a wh-in-situ question and then a wh-ex-situ alteration of it that has the wh-phrase fronted to the beginning of the sentence. Participants were asked to judge and rate whether the two sentences could express a similar meaning or not. The results show that the movement of the wh-phrase zai nali (‘where’) is generally accepted by Mandarin speakers, despite Mandarin being a wh-in-situ language …

The Effects Of Goal Orientation And Learning Strategies On Managerial Job Performance, Raphael Y. Prager

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to test a theoretical model of the role of informal managerial learning processes in predicting job performance. Using Goal Orientation (GO) as a framework, this study tested the relationships between dispositional GO, learning strategies, and organizational and managerial support in relation to job performance. Participants were 143 employees across several global regions in an insurance firm. Overall, path analyses indicated that dispositional mastery GO was positively associated with learning strategies and job performance. Contrary to hypotheses, the learning strategies did not positively predict job performance. Differential effects were found for the influence of organizational …

Consciousness, Perception, And Short-Term Memory, Henry F. Shevlin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dissertation Abstract: Consciousness, Perception, and Short-Term Memory

When we engage in almost any perceptual activity – recognizing a face, listening out for a phone-call, or simply taking in a sunset – information must be briefly stored and processed in some form of short-term memory. For philosophers attempting to develop an empirically grounded account of perception and conscious experience, it is therefore crucial to engage with scientific theories of the kinds of short-term memory mechanisms that underlie our moment-to-moment retention of information about the world. To that end, in this dissertation I review recent scientific evidence for a new form of …

Intraindividual Variability As A Predictor Of Cognitive Decline In Elderly, Wendy S. Ramratan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is conceptualized as a transitional state between normal aging and fully developed clinical features of dementia. The literature on MCI is notable for varied measurement approaches and lack of stability in the diagnostic entity, with many individuals remaining stable or reverting to normal cognitive status. Researchers agree that multiple neuropsychological domains should be assessed to enhance the assessment and prediction of cognitive decline. In addition, within-person assessments capture trajectories of decline, which are better suited for understanding individual change than simple comparison to group norms. The current study investigated the ability of within-person change on novel …

The Consequences Of The State Implementation Of A Nationally Standardized Teacher Performance Assessment As A Certification Requirement: A Mixed Methods Study, Deborah Greenblatt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The edTPA (Teacher Performance Assessment) is a nationally distributed and scored standards-based teacher performance assessment being promoted throughout the country (AACTE, n.d.-a). This mixed methods study investigated the experiences of New York City teacher candidates and teacher educators with the elementary education edTPA portfolio. It was found that teacher candidates experienced various supports and challenges based on their personal demographics, school of education, and student teaching placements. Additionally, the edTPA affected participants' personal, professional, academic and student teaching experiences. Furthermore, the study revealed ways that implementation of the edTPA affected teacher educators and the teacher education curriculum.

Based on the …

The Effects Of Alpha Oscillations On Touch Perception And Visuo-Tactile Integration, Lei Ai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous studies have shown that touch perception and visuo-tactile integration have large inter-subject/intra-subject variations. For example, touch perception varies across trials and the temporal binding windows of visuo-tactile integration varies across subjects. I hypothesized that the variations might be due to the change of power, phase and peak frequency of brain alpha oscillations. In the first set of experiments, I examined whether the power and phase of alpha oscillations predict successful conscious touch perception. Near-threshold tactile stimuli were applied to the left hand while electroencephalographic (EEG) activity and fast signal optical imaging were recorded over the somatosensory cortex. Alpha power …

A Behavior Analytic Intervention To Teach Exploratory Motor Behavior To Infants With Down Syndrome, Sara M. Bauer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Exploratory Motor (EM) behavior refers to manipulating a toy in the hand(s). Infants with Down syndrome demonstrate significant impairments in the duration and frequency of EM behavior compared to their typically developing counterparts. A behavior analytic intervention involving multiple opportunities, prompting, and social reinforcement was used to teach three infants with Down syndrome between 4-9 months of age to emit EM behavior. Results indicate that all three infants with Down syndrome emitted the three EM target behaviors to mastery and demonstrated generalized responding across stimuli and other EM behaviors. The importance of these findings in addressing impairments in infants with …

An Iterative Approach To Ground Penetrating Radar At The Maya Site Of Pacbitun, Belize, Sheldon Skaggs, Terry G. Powis, Clara R. Rucker, George Micheletti

Publications and Research

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveys provide distinct advantages for archaeological prospection in ancient, complex, urban Maya sites, particularly where dense foliage or modern debris may preclude other remote sensing or geophysical techniques. Unidirectional GPR surveys using a 500 MHz shielded antenna were performed at the Middle Preclassic Maya site of Pacbitun, Belize. The survey in 2012 identified numerous linear and circular anomalies between 1 m and 2 m deep. Based on these anomalies, one 1 m × 4 m unit and three smaller units were excavated in 2013. These test units revealed a curved plaster surface not previously found at …

Total Youth Arrests For Violent Crime Still Falling Nationwide, Jeffrey A. Butts

Publications and Research

Youth arrests for violent crime are declining across the country. Using Federal Bureau of Investigation data, this databit details trends from 1980 to 2015 and demonstrates how the nation is still seeing a 20-year decline in violent youth crime.

The Capacity Of Cognitive Control Estimated From A Perceptual Decision Making Task, Tingting Wu, Alexander J. Dufford, Melissa-Ann Mackie, Laura J. Egan, Jin Fan

Publications and Research

Cognitive control refers to the processes that permit selection and prioritization of information processing in different cognitive domains to reach the capacity-limited conscious mind. Although previous studies have suggested that the capacity of cognitive control itself is limited, a direct quantification of this capacity has not been attempted. In this behavioral study, we manipulated the information rate of cognitive control by parametrically varying both the uncertainty of stimul measured as information entropy and the exposure time of the stimuli. We used the relationship between the participants’ response accuracy and the information rate of cognitive control (in bits per second, bps) …

New Approaches To Data-Driven Civilian Oversight Of Law Enforcement: An Introduction To The Second Nacole/Cjpr Special Issue, Daniel L. Stageman, Nicole M. Napolitano, Brian Buchner

Publications and Research

In April of 2016, National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE) and John Jay College partnered to sponsor the Academic Symposium “Building Public Trust: Generating Evidence to Enhance Police Accountability and Legitimacy.” This essay introduces the Criminal Justice Policy Review Special Issue featuring peer-reviewed, empirical research papers first presented at the Symposium. We provide context for the Symposium in relation to contemporary national discourse on police accountability and legitimacy. In addition, we review each of the papers presented at the Symposium, and provide in-depth reviews of each of the manuscripts included in the Special Issue.

An Analysis Of Electronic Cigarette And Cigarette Advertising In Us Women’S Magazines, Corey Hannah Basch, Jennifer Mongiovi, Grace Clarke Hillyer, Danna Ethan, Rodney Hammond

Publications and Research

Background: Traditional cigarette advertising has existed in the US for over 200 years. Studies suggest that advertising has an impact on the initiation and maintenance of smoking behaviors. In recent years, electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) emerged on the market as an alternative to the traditional tobacco cigarette. The purpose of this study was to describe advertisements in popular US magazines marketed to women for cigarettes and e-cigarettes.

Methods: This study involved analyzing 99 issues of 14 popular US magazines marketed to women.

Results: Compared to advertisements for traditional cigarettes, advertisements for e-cigarettes were more often found in magazines geared toward the …

Can Noncompliant Behavior Explain Racial/Ethnic Disparities In The Use Of Force By The Nypd? An Econometric Analysis Of New York's Stop-And-Frisk, Omari-Khalid Rahman

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to analyze spatiotemporal variations in NYPD policing patterns in an attempt to identify the causal mechanism(s) driving the observed racial/ethnic disparities; specifically, it addresses questions of how changing neighborhood demographics influence the decision-making of NYPD officers/precincts as it relates to their controversial Stop-and-Frisk policy.

Resource Description And Access: Internationalizing, Teaching And Learning Rda Cataloging Abroad, Sheau-Yueh J. Chao

Publications and Research

This article presents the history and development of cataloging codes, an overview of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) training courses, the author’s experiences in library teaching and learning, cultural exchanges with the Chinese librarians at the National Central Library (NCL), international librarianship in cataloging, library technology and development in Taiwan as well as the National Central Library and the Library Association of China (LAC), and key findings of RDA in its development and transition, implementation, and implications.

Geographies Of Desecration: Race, Indigeneity, And The Militarization Of Hawai'i, Laurel Turbin Mei-Singh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Geographies of Desecration: Race, Indigeneity, and the Militarization of Hawai‘i develops a genealogy of military fences and their relationship to Hawaiian struggles for self-determination and national liberation. Military occupation has transformed entire ways of life on the islands by altering Hawaiian land tenure systems through displacement, disruption of subsistence practices, and environmental degradation. Hawaiian mo‘olelo (stories, history) also structure life in a highly militarized place, centering interconnectivity between human and nonhuman realms while impelling grassroots efforts that shape its landscape.

This dissertation develops in-depth case studies of militarized sites on the Wai‘anae Coast of O‘ahu, where military bases occupy 34% …