Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Impact Of Presentence Investigations On Plea Bargained Dispositions In Kings County Supreme Court, Joseph G. Enright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the presentence function of probation from an historical and empirical perspective which argues that the purported diminution of the role of the presentence report (PSR) in the sentencing process–as a result of sentence bargaining–is more reflective of a prevailing disenchantment with the rehabilitative ideal than any thoroughly considered, reliable validation of the PSR's dispensibility. It is demonstrated, through a review of the literature, that poorly conceived, polemically biased empirical research has helped to perpetuate the notion that these reports have little value. A survey of studies and inquiries conducted in New York over the past twenty years …

Precursors Of Creativity: Metaphor, Symbolic Play And Categorization In Early Childhood, Jay A. Seitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Four and 6-year-olds were presented with seven different types of metaphorical relationships in both pictures and words. The core task consisted of a metaphor comprehension task of identical triads (target, nonliteral match, literal match) comprising perceptual/color, perceptual/shape, physiognomic, cross-modal, collectional, psychophysical and taxonomic matches. Children matched items based either on nonliteral similarity or literal contiguity. A series of symbolic play tasks were given to half the subjects at each age group and were hypothesized to facilitate the comprehension of metaphor because of an underlying structural similarity common to systems of reference invoked in both the act of metaphor comprehension and …

Social Security, Savings, And Labor Supply Of The Elderly In Japan, Tetsuji Yamada

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study examines the controversial, inconsistent empirical results of the effect of social security on personal savings and analyzes the interdependency in the context of social security between the personal savings and labor supply behavior of elderly workers.

Very few studies in this field have been done, and it has not theoretically and empirically been accomplished yet in Japan. Time-series data are used for 1946-1982, and the methods of technique are ordinary least squares and a simultaneous-equation model in the life cycle framework.

The study finds that social security affects personal savings and that the benefit effect dominates the retirement …

The Experience Of Public Art In Urban Settings, Roberta Degnore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The sine qua non for an artwork in the urban realm is neither its judged "goodness" nor the ability of audiences to perceive it "correctly," but is the total experience the work contributes to as part of the fabric of interlocking meanings that places have in people's lives.

In urban settings, the physical attributes and private intentionality of a work do not stand alone. As carefully as an artist installs his/her pieces in a gallery, the same concern for their working together and with their total environment must be applied to artworks in complex public settings, where choice to be …

Viewers' Perceptions Of Gender Roles On Television, Susan Barbara Prager

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation develops and applies a method for studying viewers' perceptions of gender roles on television. Two hypotheses–selective perception and oversocialization–were tested. In contrast to other studies which rely on subjects' long-term memories, subjects were shown a tape of One Day at a Time, a popular television show, immediately prior to responding to a questionnaire on the show. Subjects were also asked for demographic data and administered the Demplewolff Sex Role Attitude Test. T-Tests and correlations were done, using groups formed around the sex role attitudes of the subjects (as measured by the Demplewolff Sex Role Attitude Test), as …

Working At Home And Being At Home: The Interaction Of Microcomputers And The Social Life Of Households, Jamie L. Horwitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Not until the recent upsurge of interest in microcomputers and home work has attention been devoted to the household as a setting for technical learning and invention, or organizational and independent work. Drawing upon theoretical implications of research on industrial technology and the household, this study contributes to the development of an empirical basis for understanding the first ten years of microcomputer use at home.

The environmental approach to this psychological study includes two stages. In the first, a survey and content analysis of over 400 articles in mainstream periodicals and national newspapers revealed that since 1976 the representation of …

Working At Home And Being At Home: The Interaction Of Microcomputers And The Social Life Of Households, Jamie Horwitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Not until the recent upsurge of interest in microcomputers and home work has attention been devoted to the household as a setting for technical learning and invention, or organizational and independent work. Drawing upon theoretical implications of research on industrial technology and the household, this study contributes to the development of an empirical basis for understanding the first ten years of microcomputer use at home.

The environmental approach to this psychological study includes two stages. In the first, a survey and content analysis of over 400 articles in mainstream periodicals and national newspapers revealed that since 1976 the representation of …

The Political Economy Of Populist-Nationalism In Argentina, 1943-55: Peronism As A Transitional Stage In The Development Of A Dependent Industrial Economy, Thomas M.H. Kappner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Focusing on the Peronist period from 1943 to 1955 as the high point of a transitional process between two patterns of dependency on foreign capital, the study explores the dynamics underlying the pendular cycle so characteristic of Latin American political life–the dialectical movement between some variant of populist rule and that based on military power as a means of repressing popular aspirations. Peronism emerged in the context of contradictions within a developmental pattern based on an alliance of the export producing, landowning oligarchy with foreign, primarily British, commercial and financial groups. The developmental model promoted by the Peron government in …

Trouble-Shooters And Trouble-Makers: Witchfinding And Traditional Malawian Medicine, Arnold Paul Wendroff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation describes and analyzes the system of traditional medicine operating in northeastern Malawi, especially those beliefs in witchcraft and spirit possession which cause people to seek out traditional rather than Western healers. Although a wide range of illustrative material is presented, the discussion focuses on an analysis of client correspondence to traditional herbalists (nganga) and diviner-witchdoctors (nchimi). Such correspondence is apparently the first reported in the anthropological literature of central and eastern Africa, and the letters that comprise it are used to elucidate the role of traditional healers and the nature of the healer-client relationship. An examination is also …

Analyzing Country Risk: Estimating The Probability Of External Debt Repudiation In The Post-Oil-Embargo Decade, Thomas Joseph Webster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the use of logit analysis as a tool for assessing the likelihood that a sovereign risk cannot, or will not, adhere to the terms of its foreign debt obligations as a result of adverse political, social, economic, or financial disruptions. The discussion is divided into two parts. Part one is devoted to a review of the topic of assessing the likelihood of debt servicing difficulties by borrower nations by first tracing the growth of international bank lending activities by U.S. commercial banks, followed by a general discussion of the international debt crisis and a brief survey of …

The State And Underdevelopment In Spanish America: The Political Roots Of Dependency In Peru And Argentina From The Conquest To 1895, Douglas Stuart Friedman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study challenges the dependency perspective claim that Spanish American countries developed agro/mineral export economies in the nineteenth century as a result of their integration into the capitalist international economy. It offers an alternative interpretation which argues that the process of State building and the response of the emergent Spanish American States to internal political class struggles were chiefly responsible for setting the direction of their economies as well as the degree and character of their integration into the international economy.

Rather than focusing on the effects of the international economy in explaining the roots of dependency and underdevelopment in …

The Utilization Of Communicational Cues By One- And Two-Year-Old Children, Rhianon Allen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The relationships between three models for describing pragmatic response to utterances were surveyed and the application of these models to young children's response patterns evaluated. Of particular interest was how children might discriminate action-directive and information-testing usage of language.

In order to empirically test the validity of these models, sixteen one- and two-year-old children were visited in their homes. Each child participated in two video recorded play sessions with an experimenter, during which he or she was asked complex What-questions that could take either informational or action responses. Gestural accompaniments and preceding discourse were systematically varied in Experiment I. Each …

Neighborhood Change In New York City: A Case Study Of Park Slope, 1850 - 1980, Timothy James O'Hanlon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a case study about social and economic changes in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Since the 1960's communities in New York City have been undergoing the process of deterioration and abandonment, or alternatively, the conversion of homes and warehouses for upper income families in high rent districts. In Park Slope both of these trends have been occurring. This study aims through an examination of a single community to provide both a comprehensive and comprehensible account of the process of neighborhood change in New York City.

This research describes the pattern of change in Park Slope within the context of the …

Capgras' Syndrome, Robert J. Berson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Capgras' Syndrome, the delusion of doubles, is a rare delusional phenomenon in which a person believes that identical doubles have replaced significant people in his life and/or that there exist identical doubles of himself. These delusional doubles are almost always believed to be malevolent. The delusion occurs in a variety of psychotic states, usually schizophrenia. It occurs in both women and men in a wide age range. This dissertation reviews early French reports by Capgras and his associates as well as over 100 cases reported in English. Previous efforts to explain the Syndrome have stressed both organic and psychodynamic factors. …

A Path Model For Black And White Educational Achievement, David George Null

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research is an attempt to further develop intergenerational research in educational achievement by refining the "Wisconsin Model of Socioeconomic Achievement." The data source was the 1972 wave of the "Panel Study of Income Dynamics" (popularly known as the "5,000 Families") collected by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. This data, which contained families originally sampled and "spin-off" families that were created by the establishment of a new family by a member of a sample family, was reprogrammed so that the parental characteristics were linked with those of their offspring. The subsample was of all spin-off male …

The Economics Of Corrections: An Exposition, Gail S. Funke

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this dissertation is to present an exposition of the applications of economics to corrections. The approach includes a synthesis of knowledge in the area, suggestions on how economics might be further brought to bear on correctional issues, and recommendations for future research. The overall framework is one of policy analysis, in which objective, scientifically-based information is used in the action setting of public programs.

A review of the history of corrections is included to provide an appreciation for the multiple, conflicting goals under which corrections functions today. A review of the state-of-the-art in corrections provides a sense …

Rules Of Order: Or So To Speak, Arthur Emanuel Blank

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How members of a social unit acquire their shared knowledge about the social world was approached in Sherif's (1935, 1936) writings on norm formation and in the phenomenological descriptions of Schutz (1971, 1973) and Berger and Luckmann (1967). Both traditions presume that shared understandings originate in face-to-face encounters, but they diverge in that the phenomenologists argue that talk, and the construction of "typifications," plays a prominent role in the acquisition of shared knowledge. For the phenomenologists, a "typification" enables members to categorize behavior as a known event and permits individuals to consider disparate behaviors as belonging to the same class …

Minority Group Blame-Orientation And Reactions To Social Protest, David W. Greene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Money, The Dynamics Of Inflation And The Balance Of Payments In Latin America, 1947-1976, Anthony Cassese

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The main focus of this dissertation is to empirically test a number of assumptions of simple monetary models of the balance of payments using annual data on sixteen Latin American countries. The usual assumption of rapid price arbitrage is shown not to hold for most of these countries. Moreover, by using the technique developed by Granger, it is shown that the domestic rate of inflation is not an exogenous determinant of the respective official settlements balance of payments for most of these countries. Therefore, single equation models of the balance of payments which use the domestic rate of inflation as …

Mother And Infant At Play: Reciprocity In Gazing Behavior, Goldie Alfasi-Siffert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Twenty mothers and their 3-month-old male infants were studied in an attempt to isolate and describe some of the motivational components that contribute to infant gaze. Infants were videotaped in two conditions: playing with mother and playing with a female stranger. The videotapes were then analyzed on a second-by-second basis with respect to infant gaze and a variety of maternal/stranger behaviors. Results show that infants spend more time gazing at the stranger than at mother and that looks at the stranger are of much longer duration. In addition, high levels of infant gaze tend to be associated with facial and …

The Effects Of Apprehension, Conviction And Incarceration On Crime In New York State, Hope Corman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Modes Of Representation, The Epistemic Subject And Developmental Word Association Phenomena, Ellen M. Gerschitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study was devised to investigate the developmental syntagmaticparadigmatic word association shift. In syntagmatic associations the stimulus and associative response are of different grammatical form classes and appear to be grammatically continuous, as response may follow stimulus in an utterance (e.g. cat-meows). These are the predominant responses of children before the ages of six to eight. Older children and adults shift to making paradigmatic associations in which stimulus and response are from the same form class and may be substituted for one another in an utterance (e.g. cat-dog). This shift was explained in terms of underlying symbolic mediational processes and …

Experience With Pregnancy, The Demand For Prenatal Care And The Production Of Surviving Infants, Eugene M. Lewit

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The object of this research is to develop a model of household demand for prenatal care and attempt to measure the productive value of prenatal care per se on infant health as measured by survival. Traditionally, infant mortality rates have been used as indices of a nation's health status. Since the U.S. has lagged significantly behind other developed nations in reducing infant mortality since the mid-1950's, there have been charges of a malfunction in the U.S. health delivery system. Particularly in the area of infant health, critics have charged that more prenatal care Inputs are needed and that they should …

Linguistic Nature Of Prenasalization, Mark H. Feinstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The linguistic nature of the class of sounds which are traditionally called "prenasalized consonants" (PNCs) has never been adequately explored. The purpose of this work is to provide a descriptively adequate framework in which to characterize PNCs, and to express their behavior most generally. This is done within the theory of generative phonology (essentially the Standard Theory of Chomsky and Halle 1968), incorporating a theory of markedness and syllabification. It is argued that PNCs cannot be described adequately as monosegmental entities in linguistic theory. Rather, PNCs in all languages are claimed to be sequences of homorganic nasal and oral consonant …

A Discourse-Based Grammar Of Baule: The Kode Dialect, Judith E. Timyan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

The Favorability Of Person Perception As A Function Of Perceiver And Target Person Personality Style, Alfred D. Kornfeld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

[no abstract provided]

Stability Of Visual Fixation With And Without Feedback, Antoinette Ruth Appel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Periodicity Instability On The Detection Of Interaural Time-Of-Arrival Difference, Roy F. Sullivan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Click-Intensity Discrimination In Relation To The Statistics Of The N1 Response, Harvey B. Taub

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract available.

Post-Discrimination Generalization In Human Subjects Of Two Different Ages, Jeffrey S. Landau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.