Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Feminine Ideology, Relational Self-Concept, And Internalizing Symptoms In Women, Anjali George

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Investigators have theorized that women may experience internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety more frequently than men in part because of unique socialization processes that women undergo. One aspect of early socialization thought to contribute to women’s propensity for depression and anxiety is the way women are brought up to relate to themselves in relation to others, often placing greater importance on the needs, desires, and value of others, at times at a psychological cost to themselves. This study attempts to elucidate the relationship between gender socialization, relational self-concept, and internalizing symptoms in women.

Methods: Two hundred and …

Looking For Leverage: Strategic Resources, Contentious Bargaining, And Us-African Security Cooperation, Sobukwe O. Odinga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to much of the international relations literature on security alliances weaker states are rarely in a position to drive hard bargains with their more powerful allies. Yet African states, for example, do not simply endure what they must to be of service to powerful friends. They often attempt to use security alliances to gain leverage over their stronger partners and extract concessions from them. When and why do they succeed?

This dissertation focuses on intelligence liaisons, military basing agreements, and coordinated military interventions as strategic resources that Ethiopia, Zaire (now D.R.C.), and Uganda have mobilized in intra-alliance bargaining with …

Extracting Indigeneity: Oil, Environment And Self-Determination In The Falkland Islands (Malvinas), James J. A. Blair

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic and historical project examines how the settlers of the Falkland Islands (In Spanish, Malvinas) are constructing themselves as “natives” through new forms of governance over energy resources. Three decades after a violent war that cemented the archipelago’s British status, offshore oil discoveries led Argentina to renew its sovereignty claim. In response, the Falkland Islanders held a 2013 referendum on self-determination, in which 99.8% voted to remain British, with just three dissenters out of 1,517 valid votes. Most of the Islanders are white settlers, making their invocation of self-determination different from that of former colonial subjects with aboriginal rights. …

“Dropouts” Drop In: Re-Visualizing The “Dropout” Stereotype, Rondi Silva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Dropouts” Drop In aims to challenge conventional views of both “dropping out” and “dropouts.” When young people “drop out” of high school, they open themselves up to a world of negative assumptions and blame, which are directed at them from the outside and are also deeply internalized. Young people are constantly messaged that “dropping out,” or being a “dropout” is at best a bad choice and at worst something akin to being a criminal. Lost in this messaging is that in reality “dropping out” of high school is often a positive move out of untenable social and educational situations and …

Does Intergroup Threat Cause Distinct Contact Orientations For High And Low Status Groups?, Brian M. Johnston

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A variety of groups, such as White and Latino Americans, predominantly live in segregated clusters. This is evident by looking at demographic data in the U.S., and often occurs in the absence of legal mandates. To explain why segregation occurs, this dissertation developed a theoretical model with hypotheses on how perceiving a threat to ingroup resources could cause segregation behaviors, but with unique behaviors for high and low status groups. Whites (high status) could view Latinos as a threat to jobs, for example, and be motivated to avoid Latinos. Latinos (low status) could similarly view Whites as a threat to …

The Words And Worlds Of Disability: Discourses On Disablement Within The Situated Practices Of Service Providers, Enitza C. Carril

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From a traditional perspective, disability stood outside the normal bounds of development, belonging within the realm of pathology and the disabled person was defined as deficient. Disability may also be characterized as an instance of human diversity and disabled as a designated identity that is socially constructed in an ongoing process—an interaction between individuals and social contexts. The process of disablement is linked to discourses used to define and act upon people ascribed with a disabled identity. This study assumes that disability is an instance of human diversity, a valid developmental trajectory, which is enacted and embedded in sociocultural, political, …

Effect Of An Internet-Based Education Program On Self-Care Agency In People Living With Human Immunodeficiency Virus, Darcel M. Reyes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Both low health literacy and insufficient electronic health literacy (ehealth) impede access to reliable internet health information for people living with chronic illnesses such as HIV/AIDS. Use of reliable internet health information has been shown to improve self-care through increased understanding of symptoms, disease processes, and improvements in adherence with treatment plans.

This study examined the effectiveness of two interventions that taught people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWH) how to recognize reliable internet based HIV health information. Orem’s Self-Care Theory was the framework for this quasi-experimental study that used a non-equivalent two-group design with two experimental interventions (MEDLINE and E-HELP). Participants …

Student Perspectives On Meaningful Adult Relationships In A Transfer School, Susan E. Collins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

High school models that provide alternative ways for students who are overage and under-credited and have dropped out or disengaged from school to re-engage and graduate with a high school diploma have grown in New York City in the past ten years. The school model in this study conceives “Building Healthy Relationships” as one of five essential elements of the model and central to the re-engagement and success of students in school. Students in this model are paired with an advocate counselor who supports them while in school and towards graduation from high school. In this study, I interviewed thirteen …

What The Tides May Bring: Political "Tigueraje" Disposession And Popular Dissent In Samaná, Dominican Republic, Ryan A. Mann-Hamilton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation is a historical and ethnographic project that delves into the conflictive relationship between the development of the Dominican state and the formation of the community of the port city of Samaná. The African diasporic community of Samaná has actively constructed the local space throughout shifting political projects, while sustaining their collective voices against the waves of dispossession crashing on their shores. Using a combination of archival research, participant observation, oral history and ethnography, I document multiple instances of state intervention to understand how the Samaná community has been coerced over time to consent to these processes. I juxtapose …

Headhunting: Evaluating The Disruptive Capacity Of Leadership Decapitation On Terrorist Organizations, Ted Clemens Iv

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Leadership decapitation -- the practice of removing a leader from a position of authority through targeted killing (i.e. assassination) or arrest -- has long been a feature of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency strategies the world over. Still, how effective is the practice of leadership decapitation in actually bringing a halt to, or even impeding, terrorist activity? Can removing top leaders of terrorist enclaves from power disrupt their groups to the point of organizational degradation or dissolution? And lastly, because no two terrorist groups are the same; when a terrorist group experiences leadership loss, how can the group be expected to react? …

Risk Factors Of Eating Disorders And The Modern Orthodox Jewish Family, Susan D. Schmool

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eating Disorders (EDs) are characterized by maladaptive attitudes, beliefs, and/or behaviors related to eating. Maladaptive behaviors can include restrictive eating, bingeing, purging, excessive exercising, and use of diuretics. Research has identified several characteristics within individuals that can be considered risk factors for the development of EDs including perfectionism, low self-esteem, elevated BMIs, affluence, and stressful life events. Several of these characteristics are very common in the Modern Orthodox Jewish community. Modern Orthodox Jewish female adolescents are a very unique and at-risk population in society. This population has a prevalence of EDs that is 50% higher than the general population (Baruchin, …

Increasing Accessibility For Map Readers With Acquired And Inherited Color Vision Deficiencies: A Re-Coloring Algorithm For Maps, Gretchen M. Culp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Approximately 8% of the male population suffer from an inherited form of color vision deficiency (CVD). Age, diabetes, macular degeneration, cataracts and glaucoma result in eye defects including an acquired form of CVD. Inherited CVD is marked by a difficulty in discerning red from green, while acquired CVD is marked by a difficulty in discerning blue from green. A recent review of the cartographic literature revealed a deficit in studies on accessible maps for readers with the acquired form of CVD. In addition, research on accessible maps for readers with the inherited form of CVD was restricted to the design …

Essays In Labor And Development Economics, Stephen Daniel O'Connell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is comprised of two chapters that investigate the long-term effects of a quota policy for women in local government in India.

In the first chapter, "Political Inclusion and Educational Investment," I investigate whether political empowerment can affect the human capital investment decisions of children. By using exogenous variation in the implementation of the policy, nationally-representative survey data allow me to estimate effects on educational enrollment in a geographic discontinuity design using adjacent areas on either side of a state border as counterfactuals receiving different levels of exposure to the quota policy.

In this paper, I find a sizable …

(Dis)Entangling Gender Expression And Race In Antigay Discrimination: An Intersectional Approach, Steph M. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Current psychological definitions and operationalizations of antigay discrimination conceptualize negative treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer (LGBQ) individuals as a response to their same-gender sexual orientations and not other factors. Because an individual’s sexual orientation is always understood through racialized hegemonic gender ideologies, however, attention to gender expression – how one “does” gender – and dynamics of race within antigay encounters is essential. Comprised of two mixed-method studies, this dissertation examines the role of gender expression and race in antigay discriminatory encounters from two perspectives: those who are targets of discrimination (i.e., cisgender and transgender LGBQ individuals) and those …

Essays On The Well-Being Of An Aging Population, Alice Zulkarnain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three essays that examine health and labor issues among the middle aged and elderly.

Chapter 1. A Delayed Retirement Policy and Male Labor Supply: Evidence from the Entire Dutch Population

This chapter examines the labor supply effects of a national delayed retirement policy introduced in the Netherlands in 2009. The policy offers a reduction in taxes on labor income for each year after the age of 62 in which a person worked. I estimate the average effect of the policy on male labor supply as well as its responsiveness to the size of the incentive. Comparing …

Characteristics Of Newly-Hired Members Of The New York City Police Department As Predictors Of Subsequent Job Performance, Francis E. Spangenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It would be advantageous for law enforcement agencies if it could be determined which applicants for employment were most likely to provide superior performance over the course of their careers. In order to do this, it is necessary to determine a) what constitutes superior performance by police officers, b) what measurements can be used to record such performance, and c) if there are characteristics known about newly-hired police recruits that can serve as predictors of superior performance over an extended career. This study looked at the career histories of the 1,707 members of the New York City Police Department class …

Claiming Time: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, And Adam Smith On Freedom And Futurity, Jennifer Corby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation engages the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith through the lens of time. By first analyzing their earlier works on the nature of self-consciousness, it demonstrates that each offers a theory of subjectivity that, despite important differences, shares a singular point of distinction from those that typified early modern thought. Against the predominant view that human freedom necessitates immaterial agency, each theorizes a materialist agent that is able to overcome the determinism of the material world by way of the temporal nature of subjectivity. Each understands self-consciousness to be constituted by an extension of memory …

Kongo To Kings County, Marcus Alan Watson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to provide evidence to support the hypothesis that the artifact assemblage found in 1998 under the garret room floor in the attic of the Lott Farmstead is an extension of Kongo-descended cultural practices. This connection is shown by the presence of several artifacts that taken together, invoke a Kongo Cosmogram called the diKenga, alongside artifacts arranged in what is believed to be a Kongo N’Kisi, or spiritual container, that also originates in Kongo ideology. The ceramic found in the kitchen house with an incised X indicates a reverence to this diKenga symbol. Similar symbols have been found …

Media Representation Of Asian Americans And Asian Native New Yorkers’ Hybrid Persona, Min Huh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Asian Americans, having been degraded in the realm of popular media and neglected in the consumer market, have been unable to obtain a voice or leave a trace in American pop culture. The meager representation that Asian Americans rarely have is highly controlled through a distorted lens, inclined to paint them in a grotesquely exaggerated light for comic relief. The absence of Asian Americans in the media has compelled the Asian American youth to adapt the personas of different cultures in their desires for social and cultural mobility. These factors have given birth to a hybrid persona among Asian Native …

An Exploration Of The Paradox Of Bisexuality In Women: The Dawn Research Study, Anna Levy-Warren

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research on lesbian, gay and bisexual populations has reported higher levels of emotional distress among bisexual adults than their gay and lesbian peers. Findings also demonstrate substantial variability in distress levels within populations of bisexual adults. Little research has examined reasons for this variability. Theoretical explanations for distress among bisexuals include foundations in Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Minority Stress Theory, though these theories have not addressed the variability across outcomes. The current study proposes a new theoretical model to explain variability in levels of distress across bisexual women. According to this theory, levels of psychological distress in bisexual women are …

Event Parsing In Narrative: Trials And Tribulations Of Archaic English Fairy Tales, Rebecca Lovering

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While event extraction and automatic summarization have taken great strides in the realm of news stories, fictional narratives like fairy tales have not been so fortunate. A number of challenges arise from the literary elements present in fairy tales that are not found in more straightforward corpora of natural language, such as archaic expressions and sentence structures. To aid in summarization of fictional texts, I created an class - a template for a digital object, in this case a semantic and story event - that captures elements predicted to help classify events as important for inclusion. I wrote a processor …

Breaking Cover: Confronting Crisis And Displacement In Timbuktu, Mali, Andrew Hernann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Spring 2012, a loose alliance of ethnic Tuareg nationalist and Jihadi-Salafist militant groups occupied Mali’s northern regions, forcibly displacing nearly 300,000 residents and ultimately imposing their harsh interpretation of shari’a among those who remained. Later, in January 2013, as these groups began marching towards southern Mali, the French army suddenly intervened, “liberating” urban centers in the North as the militants fled into the Sahara Desert and across the Algerian border. My research examines this period of occupation, displacement and intervention, which most Malians have come to term “the crisis.” Specifically, I analyze the cultural and religious frameworks through which …

The Effect Of Health Information Technology On Hospital Quality Of Care, Ruirui Sun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Health Information Technology (Health IT) is designed to store patients’ records safely and clearly, to reduce input errors and missing records, and to make communications more efficiently. Concerned with the relatively lower adoption rate among the US hospitals compared to most developed countries, the Bush Administration set up the Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in 2006 to mandate the Health IT implementation with $25.9 billion subsidies to eligible hospitals starting 2009. Underlying the huge subsidy is the belief that Health IT can reduce hospital cost by improving efficiency and quality, and can help reduce total health expenditure. …

The Relationship Between Fragile Self-Esteem, Mindfulness, And Hostile Attribution Style, Robyn L. Haertel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study aimed to expand upon existing literature pertaining to self-perception, awareness towards the environment, and related attributions. Specifically, mindfulness and self-esteem, as well as the subset of fragile self-esteem, were examined as predictors of a hostile attribution style (HAS). Additionally, self-esteem and fragile self-esteem were investigated as correlates of mindfulness. Undergraduate students from across the country were invited via social media to participate in this online study. A total of 190 students completed four surveys used for data analyses: the Mindful-Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS; Brown & Ryan, 2003), Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RES; Rosenberg 1965), Contingencies of Self-Worth Scale (CSWS; …

Tradition And Transition: American Orthodox Jewish Women Preparing And Becoming Sexually Active Within Marriage, Shoshannah D. Frydman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this project is to expand knowledge about the lived experience of married Orthodox Jewish women’s preparation and transition into sexual activity in marriage. When Orthodox women get married, they are undergoing a significant shift, for many, this is their first experience having a sexual relationship. In addition to the prohibition of premarital sexual behavior, the Orthodox Jewish community has a number of rituals, laws, and practices specifically related to menstruation and sexual relations within marriage. These laws, taharat hamishpacha, or family purity, are a set of laws and practices that regulate sex within marriage for both …

The South African Elderly: Neglect, Social Contribution And The Hiv/Aids Epidemic, Alessia Frisoli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With a slowing fertility rate and an increasing longevity, the world population is aging. Both developed and developing countries have seen their elderly become more numerous with an increasing burden on their financial, medical and social system. Many scholars have suggested immediate change of policies to contain the predicted crisis that will affect the health care and the pension schemes in the next decades. However, few have investigated the positive role that the seniors play contributing to society, beyond the complications caused to the economy and welfare system. This thesis will support the argument that the elderly, if appropriately cared …

On The Screen, In The Mind: An Erp Investigation Into The Interaction Between Visuo-Spatial Information And Spatial Language During On-Line Processing, Emily Zane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore neurophysiological brain responses to prepositional phrases involving concrete and abstract reference nouns (e.g., "plate" and "moment", respectively) after the presentation of objects with varying spatial features. Prepositional phrases were headed by in or on and were either matching (e.g., "in the plate/moment") or mismatching (e.g., "on the plate/moment"). Conjunction phrase matches and fillers were also presented. Before half of the concrete-phrase items, a photographic depiction of the reference noun was presented. In these photographs, objects were displayed in a way that was either more appropriate for in or for on. Similarly, before …

Understanding School And Interethnic Relations Of Mexican Immigrant Youth In A Post-Industrial Community, Roberto Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a dearth of literature on how immigrant groups understand minority groups in the United States, in particular, African-Americans. Increased technology and more rapid global movement in the 21st Century challenges 20th explanations of assimilation (Chicago School) and necessitates more research focused on how immigrant groups and racialized minorities interact to negotiate new worlds. This ethnographic research was conducted over thirteen months during 2012 and 2013 in a post-industrial neighborhood in the northeast that had been the site of 11 purported anti-bias attacks against Mexican immigrants during the summer of 2010. Research questions focused on: 1) Mexican immigrant youth …

Language-Mixing In Discourse In Bilingual Individuals With Non-Fluent Aphasia, Avanthi Paplikar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Language-mixing (LM) as defined by Chengappa (2009, p. 417) is an “intra-sentential phenomenon referred to as the mixing of various linguistic units (morphemes, words, modifiers, phrases, etc.), primarily from two participating grammatical systems”. LM is influenced by grammatical, environmental, and social constraints (e.g., Milroy & Wei, 1995; Bhat & Chengappa, 2005). Researchers have suggested that LM in patients with aphasia is a communicative strategy used to achieve successful exchanges between speakers; the effectiveness of this mixing, however, had yet to be demonstrated quantitatively.

In the current study we investigated whether LM is present in bilingual speakers with aphasia, and if …

Ethnicity Matters: Implications For Understanding And Acting Upon Disparities In Health Affecting Black Men In The United States, Helen V. S. Cole

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Compared to non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks have higher rates of mortality from heart disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and HIV/AIDS. Black men have a life expectancy approximately 4.7 years than the life expectancy of non-Hispanic white men, due in part to higher prevalence of chronic disease among black men. Many factors are hypothesized to contribute to disparities in health between races, including differences in socioeconomic status; culturally-linked behaviors such as diet, substance use, and physical activity; access to quality healthcare and other resources; and experiences of racism, both institutional and interpersonal. However, in public health research, race is usually treated as …