Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Brentwood, New York 11717: A Multimedia Ethnographic Study On An Immigrant Town, Ashley Mungo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Brentwood, New York is a working-class town of about 60,000 situated forty miles east of Manhattan on Long Island. As of the 2010 Census, 68.5 percent of residents are Latino or Hispanic, with 10.7 percent of the overall population living below the federal poverty level. Less than ten percent of the population has obtained a bachelors degree or higher. Street violence, gangs, and overall crime are frequently addressed at community meetings, igniting a fierce debate on immigration within the town that has reached national media, with critics arguing that the exponentially increasing Latino migrant population has caused this crisis.

The …

Beyond The Binary: Gender Identity And Mental Health Among Transgender And Gender Non-Conforming Adults, Chassitty N. Fiani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite increasing endorsement of non-binary gender identities among TGNC (transgender or gender non-conforming) populations, research regarding TGNC experiences often over-emphasizes pathology relative to positive psychology and reinforces binary conceptualizations of gender (exclusively male/female). TGNC individuals face increased rates of depression, suicide risk, anxiety, substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, homelessness, victimization, and negative police interactions. These disparities are exacerbated by discrimination, lack of culturally competent resources, and internalized stigma. Despite these negative experiences and increased risks, TGNC individuals hesitate to seek treatment and/or police assistance due to fears of discrimination, cultural incompetence, and/or re-victimization. To address these gaps, the present investigation utilized a …

Testing The Efficacy Of Interventions To Decrease Racial Bias In Jury Selection, Karima Modjadidi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite legal restrictions, attorneys continue to use peremptory challenges to strike minorities from juries (Clark, Boccaccini, Caillouet, & Chaplin, 2007; Equal Justice Initiative, 2010; Gabbidon, Kowal, Jordan, Roberts, & Vincenzi, 2008). The current protection against racially motivated peremptory challenges provided by Batson v. Kentucky (1986) has not been effective in reducing racial discrimination during voir dire and social scientists have yet to identify a suitable procedure for reducing the bias. The present research examined if methods used in reducing discrimination in industrial and organizational psychology can have a similar impact in a legal setting. Participants viewed venirepersons who varied in …

The Sound Patterns Of Kachok In The Context Of Bahnaric And North-Bahnaric Studies, Emily L. Olsen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a description of the sound patterns of Kachok, Austroasiatic language spoken in northeastern Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. The language is spoken by approximately 3000 people and is considered endangered (Simons & Fennig, 2018). Kachok is undocumented, and this dissertation is the first attempt to describe the language and its sound patterns. The goals of this dissertation are twofold: to contribute to linguistics and the science of phonetics and phonological typology, as well as increase the body of work on Austro-Asiatic languages, and to create resources for the Kachok language, culture, and people that have the potential to outlive …

The Upright Battle: Morphological Trends Of The Bipedal Pelvis, Nicole M. Webb

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The shift to bipedal locomotion is a distinguishing feature of the human lineage that required substantial remodeling of the postcranium in hominins. The pelvis, due to its important functional role as a stabilizing and weight-bearing structure, has undergone one of the most drastic transformations in the skeleton to accommodate obligate bipedalism, thus making it a valuable region for studying locomotor behavior within the fossil record. Although bipedalism occurs in several mammalian groups, it is rare within primates and the ability to utilize a striding gait with an erect, or orthograde, posture remains unique to hominins. Orthograde posture in this context …

What’S Your Story? Assessing Childhood Maltreatment Using The Thematic Apperception Test In An Adult Inpatient Population., Thachell C. Tanis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a robust evidence that childhood maltreatment contributes to the development of adult psychopathology (Brown & Anderson, 1991; Johnson, Cohen, Brown, Smailes, & Bernstein 1999; Johnson, Smailes, Cohen, Brown, & Bernstein, 2000; Ruggiero et al., 1999). However, the identification of childhood maltreatment remains a methodological problem that results in inconsistencies in the reported incidence and psychological sequelae of maltreatment. A primary method for identifying histories of childhood maltreatment among adults is retrospective self-report measures which are susceptible to multiple biases (Briere, 1992; Cicchetti & Rizley, 1981; Shaffer, Huston, & Egeland, 2008). This present study suggests that childhood maltreatment can …

The Effects Of Pyramidal Training On Staff Acquisition Of Five Behavior Analytic Procedures, Lindsay M. Maffei-Almodovar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Direct care staff members serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are often required to implement several behavior analytic procedures with only limited training soon after being hired. Pyramidal training is an effective model for disseminating applied behavior analytic skills to employees that treat individuals with developmental disabilities. This study used a multiple probes design across teachers and a delayed multiple baseline design across teaching assistants to evaluate the effects of video models, role play and feedback on teachers’ accuracy in implementing behavioral skills training and on teaching assistants’ accuracy in implementing five applied behavior analytic procedures (i.e. stimulus-stimulus pairing, …

The Patterns And Prosecutions Of Media Leakers, Julia M. Lipkins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper examines the cases of government employees who are responsible for the disclosure of confidential information to the press, known as media leakers. I claim that the government and media leaker engage in a series of patterned responses, which leads to both the disclosure of information, and prosecution of the leaker. More specifically, I demonstrate how the government’s executive branch manages a game of leaks, in which ‘illegitimate’ leakers are separated from elite officials who also leak, but are often spared from prosecution because they are considered ‘legitimate’ players of the game. Although the boundaries surrounding ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ …

A Narrative Approach To Investigating The Contextual Nature Of Adolescent Self-Regulation, Kelly Conover

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Self-regulation has been identified as important for academic achievement, positive mental health, and social success (Steinberg, 2014, Mischel, 2014). This inquiry begins with self-regulation defined traditionally as “modulation of thoughts, emotions and behaviors working in conjunction, with deliberate or automated use of specific mechanisms and skills" (Karoly, 1993, pg. 25) and extends beyond that and similar definitions to a definition that adds “as enacted in relationships and situations with culturally-relevant media.” The need for such an expansion urgently accounts for the fact that young people are living in high-risk settings, where trauma, violence and economic difficulty are implicated not only …

From Prison To Homeless Shelter: Camp Laguardia And The Political Economy Of An Urban Infrastructure, Christian D. Siener

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At this time of increasing housing insecurity, recent reforms in homeless shelter policy have attracted the attention of scholars and activists. This research sheds light on these changes by placing them in historical and political-geographic perspective, focusing on the role of homeless shelters in stabilizing social displacement by destabilizing solidarity. It demonstrates historical continuity between prisons and homeless shelters in New York City through a case study of conditions surrounding the transition of Camp LaGuardia, a prison that slowly transformed into the city’s largest, and longest lasting, homeless shelter. The case study is an empirical demonstration of some of the …

"But The Heart Stays Turkish": Identifications Of Immigrants And Boundaries Of Belonging In America, Zeynep Selen Bayhan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on the symbolic boundary-making processes of first-generation Turkish immigrants in New York and New Jersey, where Islam has been tainted with negative meanings and symbols. By focusing on the characteristics, salience and endurance of ethno-national, religious and gender boundaries that immigrants perceive and experience in the U.S., it examines the possibilities of social inclusion and assimilation/integration of immigrants into the mainstream society. The dissertation addresses following research questions: What sort of symbols and markers, as well as narratives do immigrants use in order to construct boundaries regarding American society? How do Turkish immigrants, in the aftermath of …

Parents Frame Childhood For The World To See In Digital Media Postings, Aysenur Benevento

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With the wellbeing of children being at the center of contemporary media discourse (Livingstone & Bovill, 2013), developmental studies are ever more challenged to understand both children’s and adults’ behavior in online spaces. Parents and children are involved in the human development process in complementary ways (Johansson, 2010; Uprichards, 2008) while using media platforms. As the development and use of innovative media technology are accelerating at a fast pace, theory and methods for analyzing uses of digital media for human development have lagged behind. This study examines adults’ postings of photos of their children on social media and offers a …

The Trajectory From School To Work: A Study Of Life Chances Of School Leavers In The United States, The United Kingdom, Germany, And Sweden, Dirk Witteveen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The school-to-work transition is traditionally perceived as a one-time event; moving from education to one’s first job. In response to the increased complexity within today’s relationship between education and work, the research in this dissertation takes a different approach to the study of inequality and stratification. It considers the life phase between these two institutions as a trajectory – a pathway of several years wherein school careers and work careers overlap and interact.

Given the longitudinal approach, this study starts with a comparison of patterns of school-to-work trajectories in four distinct welfare state regimes: the United States, the United Kingdom, …

Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography Of An Indian Resource Frontier, Madhuri Karak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work analyzes resource extraction and development as mutually constitutive logics of rule in India’s bauxite-rich, densely forested Niyamgiri Hills. Nestled in the southwestern corner of Odisha state, the region is marginal to both colonial and postcolonial orders, an inaccessible resource frontier. I discuss how Dongria Kondh and Kutia Kondh communities threatened with displacement by bauxite mining – two of India’s 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups – draw on historically oppositional subjectivities to re-envision relations of power between the state, the market and the commons.

Over the past decade, new forms of sociality borne out of Niyamgiri’s anti-mining social movement …

Making It Pay To Be A Fan: The Political Economy Of Digital Sports Fandom And The Sports Media Industry, Andrew Mckinney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a series of case studies and sociological examinations of the role that the sports media industry and mediated sport fandom plays in the political economy of the Internet. The Internet has structurally changed the way that sport fans access sport and accelerated the processes through which the capitalist actors in the sports media industry have been able to subsume them. The three case studies examined in this dissertation are examples of how digital media technologies have both helped fans become more active producers and consumers of sports and made the sports media industry an integral and vanguard …

Highly Skilled Immigration In The United States In An Age Of Globalization: An Institutional And Agency Approach, Marcela F. González

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation proposes an institutional and agency approach in order to answer a new question to a new set of conditions, processes, and architecture of the new immigration trend for highly skilled immigration in the United States that emerged in the 1990s. The complexification of visa policies for highly skilled immigrants since the 1990s forces many immigrants to follow a multi-step legal pathway to acquire legal permanent residency: first, immigrants have a variety of temporary legal statuses or no legal status, and in a subsequent stage they achieve legal permanent residency. The central question that organizes the dissertation has two …

Delivering Justice: Food Delivery Cyclists In New York City, Do J. Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In New York City (NYC), food delivery cyclists ride the streets all day and night long to provide convenient, affordable, hot food to New Yorkers. These working cyclists are often Latino or Asian male immigrants who are situated within intersectional and interlocking systems of global migration and capital flows, intense time pressures by restaurants and customers, precarious tip-based livelihoods, an e-bike ban and broken windows policing, and unsafe streets designed for drivers. I approach this research through participatory action research (PAR) and han, an indigenous Korean word that describes collective transgenerational traumas that are rooted in systems and structures …

Forensic Analysis Of Fiber Dyes Via Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy, Mircea A. Comanescu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fibers are a common piece of evidence found at crime scenes that may become a link between the scene and a suspect, or allow for the reconstruction of certain crime events. Although a big portion of fibers are still white cottons, the advancement of commercial fiber production and dyeing in the past century led to an increase in types of synthetic fibers and dye applications that can be found and used in forensic analyses. Nonetheless, the fiber evidentiary value is not fully explored, as for the most part, the separation and analysis of the dye on the fiber is not …

Uneven Policing: Low-Level Arrests During Gentrification, Fiscal Crisis, And Suburbanization, Brenden Beck

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I analyze trends in low-level policing between 1990 and 2015. I explore how three contextual changes may have shaped policing during this time: gentrification, fiscal crisis, and the suburbanization of poverty and of people of color. I ask four interrelated research questions: How widely did “broken windows” policing, with its emphasis on misdemeanor arrests, diffuse? Do police make more stops and arrests in neighborhoods undergoing gentrification? Do local governments experiencing revenue shortfalls cut their criminal justice functions to save money, or do they increase them to reassert social order? Did the suburbanization of poverty and of people …

Stereotype Threat As An Explanation For Sexual Risk Taking Behavior In Gay Men: A Multi-Study Exploration Of Mechanisms, Inna Saboshchuk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Stereotype threat is a hindrance in performance that occurs when an individual’s awareness of negative stereotypes associated with his/her group results in inadvertent conforming to that stereotype. Stereotype threat research has been conducted on myriad group and domain identifications but gay men are strikingly absent from the stereotype threat literature. One of the most prevalent stereotypes about gay men indicates they are sexually promiscuous and that this promiscuity is linked to HIV infection. In a series of three research projects, a theoretical model proposing stereotype threat as a mechanism for sexual risk taking behavior in gay men is tested. In …

Oil Pollution On The High Seas: The Establishment Of An International Regime To Deal With Public International Law And Private Law Issues And The Role Of Non-State Actors In Their Resolution Prior To And At The 1969 International Legal Conference On Marine Pollution Damage (“Brussels Conference”), Milton Ottensoser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

On March 18, 1967, the Torrey Canyon, an oil tanker flying the flag of Liberia and carrying thirty million gallons of crude oil, smashed onto rocks off the coast of the United Kingdom. The oil spill metastasized into an environmental catastrophe, and this event became the first major environmental disaster of the electronic media age. As a direct result of the Torrey Canyon catastrophe, two treaties were signed in November 1969, at a conference in Brussels sponsored by the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO), a United Nations Specialized Agency. The first treaty (the public law treaty) dealt with the right …

An Experimental Study Of The Differences Between "Just" And "Only": Npi Licensing And Modal Scope, Taletha Callahan-Kanik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout much of the theoretical semantic literature, the two exclusives only and just have been assumed identical in their structures and semantics. This manuscript contests that assumption, using parallel examples with negative polarity items (NPIs) and modals to demonstrate the asymmetry of these exclusives. After reviewing the existing theoretical literature, I utilize these examples to inform an experimental study centering around NPIs. This experiment (influenced by Chemla, Homer, and Rothschild (2011)) employs an acceptability judgment task where participants (n=90) are asked to judge sentences containing negation, only, and just (both with and without NPIs) on a 6-point scale.

Using …

Syntactic Processing And Cross-Linguistic Structural Priming In Heritage Spanish Speakers And Late Bilinguals: Effects Of Exposure To L2 English On Processing Illicit Structures In L1 Spanish, Ian Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines real-time heritage language syntactic processing and tests the hypothesis that some commonly observed properties of heritage languages—apparent instability in grammatical knowledge and divergence from monolingual grammatical norms—can be attributed to cross-linguistic influence from the socially dominant language during online processing. To test this hypothesis, a novel cross-linguistic structural priming experiment based on self-paced listening was conducted with a group of heritage Spanish speakers and late Spanish-English bilinguals to test whether exposure to preposition stranding in English—a feature of core syntax that does not exist in Spanish—could facilitate processing of (ungrammatical) preposition stranding in a subsequently encountered Spanish …

The Prediction Of Personal Narrative On Features Of Recovery Among People With Schizophrenia-Spectrum Disorders, Beth Vayshenker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Among individuals with schizophrenia, research has demonstrated that in addition to the positive and negative symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia, the diminishment of the self also represents an important aspect of the illness (Lysaker & Lysaker, 2010). Research has confirmed that the self-experience, particularly as measured by the telling of one’s life story through the Scale to Assess Narrative Development (STAND), is linked to a variety of subjective and objective recovery outcomes from schizophrenia. While this association has been documented in different research studies, less is known about the ways in which personal narrative functions to predict recovery outcomes in a …

The Impact Of Defendant Gender And Attractiveness On Juror Decision-Making In A Sexual Offense Case, Georgia M. Winters

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years, instances of educator sexual assault against students have flooded the media. In particular, female teachers who abused students have seized the public’s attention as they are often portrayed as attractive and a sexual fantasy. This portrayal can then impact the way society perceives these sexual assaults. Importantly, however, it is not known whether this perception influences the prosecution and sentencing of these cases. The current study examined the impact of gender and attractiveness of a teacher, as well as gender of the student victim, on juror decision-making in a teacher/student sexual assault case. Using a 2 (Teacher …

Against Criminalization And Pathology: The Making Of A Black Achievement Praxis, Charles M. Green Sr.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Utilizing 29 in-depth semi-structured interviews, the life-course narratives of Black male scholars who, as victims of varying manifestations of structural violence, have “beat the odds” academically. Findings suggest that Black men and boys benefit from positive, racially-informed socialization that assists in the development of an internalized identity that (a) acts as a protective and resistant barrier against some of the impediments of institutional racism, (b) operates as a counter-criminogenic influence, and (c) facilitates educational resilience. Criminogenic Resistance Theory (C.RT) is presented as an alternative conceptualization of the process by which Black boys resist the criminogenic influences of structuralized violence.

Software Of The Oppressed: Reprogramming The Invisible Discipline, Erin R. Glass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers a critical analysis of software practices within the university and the ways they contribute to a broader status quo of software use, development, and imagination. Through analyzing the history of software practices used in the production and circulation of student and scholarly writing, I argue that this overarching software status quo has oppressive qualities in that it supports the production of passive users, or users who are unable to collectively understand and transform software code for their own interests. I also argue that the university inadvertently normalizes and strengthens the software status quo through what I call …

Adults’ Perceptions Of Children With Mental Illness Labels Who Tell Truths And Lies, Jessica Lynn Mccurdy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined whether children’s truth- and lie-telling is perceived differently by adults when the children have mental illness labels (MIL). Participants (N= 432) read a vignette and watched a video from each of four veracity/motivation (i.e., prosocial truth, antisocial truth, prosocial lie, antisocial lie) and child label (i.e., control, ADHD, depression, asthma) conditions. After each video/vignette combination, participants rated their impressions of and responses towards the child. Participants also completed measures of their implicit and explicit attitudes towards mental illness. The results indicated participants had more negative perceptions of children they rated higher on dangerousness and lower …

Global Pretrial Detention Use: A Cross-National Analysis, Martin Schönteich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

To better understand global pretrial detention patterns, this study explores economic, political, and social factors associated with two measures of pretrial detention: the number of pretrial detainees as a rate of the general population, and the number of pretrial detainees as a proportion of the overall prison population. Through simple correlation analysis, stepwise regression, and moderation analyses, the study identifies factors which are most strongly associated with the two pretrial detention measures. The literature does not report any large-scale cross-national studies on pretrial detention. This study addresses this gap, focusing exclusively on pretrial detention using a large cross-national sample of …

“Are They Supposed To Be Heugin?": Negotiating Race, Nation, And Representation In Korean Musical Theatre, Ji Hyon Yuh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines contemporary Korean musical theatre as a form of popular culture that has served an important role in reflecting and establishing personal and national identity in Korea, especially as it intersects with the global and local manifestations of race and racial ideologies. I argue that musical theatre has served an important political and economic role, since its beginning as a cultural weapon in the height of the Cold War to more contemporary examples in which Korean musicals serve as a tool to brand Korea as an advanced nation in the world. To make a case for this relationship …