Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Cup Size Effects On Soda Consumption, Lisa Heiser

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Who Is Riding Shotgun? The Influence Of Multinational Corporations On International Negotiation Outcomes, Isabelle Fourcroy Howes

Senior Independent Study Theses

This study seeks to determine if multinational corporations attempt influence the outcome of international negotiations. In order to examine this, I conducted two case studies pertaining to international trade negotiations between the United States and the European Union. The results from my analysis indicate multinational corporations do attempt to influence international negotiation outcomes through various methods.

The Effects Of The Norm Of International Election Monitoring On Voters' Confidence Levels In Francophone West Africa's Presidential Elections 1990-2011, Lauren E. Gilliss

Senior Independent Study Theses

International election monitoring is a phenomenon that began to spread rapidly in the 1990s and has since become an essential element of elections in the developing world. This study assesses the relationship between the presence of international election monitors during presidential elections and levels of voters' confidence in the electoral process. Several questions guide the study: How did the norm of international election monitoring develop and how widely do governments adhere to this norm? Are citizens more confident in the efficacy and transparency of presidential elections when international monitors are present? I hypothesize that when governments adhere to the norm …

International Seminar On "Is Access Enough? Understanding And Addressing Unmet Need For Family Planning", Iussp Scientific Panel On Reproductive Health

Reproductive Health

The IUSSP Scientific Panel on Reproductive Health, in collaboration with STEP UP and AFIDEP, held a seminar in Nanyuki, Kenya, in May 2013. The seminar brought together 44 scientists, policymakers, and program managers to present and discuss a range of issues relating to the definition, determinants, and consequences of unmet need for family planning and program interventions designed specifically to reduce unmet need in groups at high risk. Based on discussions and presentations, unmet need (and family planning in general) should be looked at both from a development perspective and from a service-delivery and health-sector perspective. Overall, the seminar papers, …

The Call Of The Wild (And The Caged): The Impact Of A Zoo's Exhibition Styles On The Attitudes Of Its Human Visitors, Erin S. Behn

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

By Librarians, For Librarians: Building A Strengths-Based Institute To Develop Librarians' Research Culture In Canadian Academic Libraries, Heidi Lm Jacobs, Selinda Adelle Berg

Leddy Library Publications

In spite of the increase in formal and informal expectations for research by Canadian librarians, there have been few—if any—Canada-wide initiatives to help support librarians in meeting research expectations. Moreover, there have been few opportunities to address academic librarians’ needs and Canadian librarian research culture in any systematic way, especially on a national scale. As a way of redressing these absences and filling this need, a four-day nation-wide institute was proposed and conducted in order to bring together Canadian librarians interested in developing their own research programs and working toward fostering a positive and productive research culture in Canadian academic …

The Effect Of Context On The Evaluation Of Obese Vs. Average-Weight Children As A Function Of Antifat Attitude, Stephanie Mcshane

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

Scaling Up Advocacy For Gender-Based Violence And Child Sexual Abuse In The East, Central And Southern Africa Region: Technical Exchange And Meeting, East Central And Southern African Health Community

Reproductive Health

The East, Central and Southern Africa (ECSA) Health Community, which prioritizes gender-based violence and child sexual abuse as regional health concerns, partnered with the Population Council to convene a pre-conference Expert Committee meeting of the Research, Information and Advocacy Programme. The conference marked a major milestone in the ECSA Health Community’s commitment to promote and support region-wide sharing and utilization of health research and policy information among its member states. This report summarizes the deliberations of the two-day workshop and the recommendations for implementing an advocacy plan to address this important facet of the region’s development agenda.

Green Politics In China: Environmental Governance And State-Society Relations, Joy Y. Zhang, Michael S. Barr

Books

Based on interviews with members of grassroots organisations, media and government institutions, Green Politics in China is an in-depth account of the novel ways Chinese society is responding to its environmental crisis, using examples rarely captured in Western media or academia.

The struggle for clean air, low-carbon conspiracy theories, is transforming Chinese society, producing new forms of public fund raising and the encouraging the international tactics of grassroots NGOs. In doing so, they challenge static understandings of state-society relations in China, providing a crucial insight into the way in which China is changing internally and emerging as a powerful player …

“Bridges To Nowhere”: Rethinking Summer Bridge Programs For Historically Underrepresented Students, Donald Mitchell Jr., Ph.D.

Executives, Administrators, & Staff Publications

While institutions continue to use and develop summer bridge programs (SBPs), the influences of SBPs remain unclear. The purpose of this current note is to highlight existing literature on SBPs for historically underrepresented students and provide recommendations for building and sustaining successful SBPs.

Barriers To Psychologists Seeking Mental Health Care, Jennifer Lynn Bearse, Mark R. Mcminn, Winston Seegobin, Kurt Free

Faculty Publications - Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) Program

Professional psychologists provide help to people in need, but how freely do psychologists seek psychotherapy themselves when facing personal challenges and struggles? What obstacles make it difficult for professional psychologists to seek psychotherapy? A survey of 260 professional psychologists (52% response rate) was conducted to investigate the frequency of various stressors impacting professional psychologists and the barriers they experience in seeking mental health services. Though none of the stressors were rated with particularly high frequencies, burnout was identified as the most frequent problem. Difficulty finding a psychotherapist and a lack of time were identified as the greatest obstacles to seeking …

The Effects Of A Prayer Intervention On The Process Of Forgiveness, Sarah L. Vasiliauskas, Mark R. Mcminn

Faculty Publications - Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) Program

A vast amount of research examining forgiveness has now been reported, as has a sizable amount of research on prayer, but these two constructs have rarely been examined together. This experimental intervention study investigated potential benefits of prayer among Christians seeking to forgive an interpersonal offense. Participants consisted of 411 undergraduate students from private Christian colleges across the United States, randomly assigned to a prayer group, a devotional attention group, or a no-contact control group. The prayer group participated in a 16-day devotional reading and prayer intervention focused on forgiveness, whereas those in the devotional attention group meditated on devotional …

Changes In The White-Black House Value Distribution Gap From 1997 To 2005, Eric Fesselmeyer, Kien T. Le, Kiat Ying Seah

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This paper examines the white-black house value gap across the entire value distribution. Instead of using standard conditional mean analysis and decomposition methods (via OLS regression), we estimate and decompose the changes in the white-black house value gap from 1997 to 2005 using quantile regression. We find that the racial gap in 1997 and 2005 is mostly explained by differences in housing characteristics of white- and black-owned houses but that the variation in the racial gap is explained by racial differences in implicit prices of housing characteristics. Our results show that analysis at the conditional mean masks variations at the …

Strategic Exploitation Of A Common Resource Under Environmental Risk, Eric Fesselmeyer, Marc Santugini

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

We study the effect of environmental risk on the extraction of a common resource. Using a dynamic and non-cooperative game in which an environmental event impacts the renewability and the quality of the resource, we show that the anticipation of such an event has an ambiguous effect on extraction and the tragedy of the commons. A risk of a reduction in the renewability induces the agents to extract less today while a risk of a deterioration in the quality has the opposite effect. Moreover, when environmental risk induces conservation, the tragedy of the commons is worsened. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. …

Measuring Differentials In Communication Research: Issues With Multicollinearity In Three Methods, Sonny Rosenthal

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Models of communication processes sometimes require the computation of the difference between two variables. For example, information insufficiency is the difference between what people know and what they think they need to know about an issue, and it can motivate information seeking and processing. Common methods that compute this differential may bias model estimates as a function of the correlation between the differentiated variables and other variables in the model. This article describes Citation the general form of Cohen and Cohen's (1983) analysis of partial variance for computing differentials and analyzes simulated data to contrast that method with two alternative …

Wpa News 92 (2013), World Pheasant Association

Galliformes Specialist Group and Affiliated Societies: Newsletters

WPA News (Winter 2013), number 92

Published by the World Pheasant Association

The Effects Of Earlier School Start Times On Cognition And Sleep In Children Ages 7-10, Kimberly Bryant

Undergraduate Review

Adolescent sleep deprivation has been the focus of recent research; its primary cause is a shift in adolescents’ biological rhythms (Carskadon, Wolfson, Acebo, Tzischinsky, & Seifer, 1998). As a result, many school systems have chosen to restructure their school start times to allow high school students to start school later, resulting in younger students going to school earlier. Despite the research describing the benefits this change in school start times will provide adolescents, there has been virtually no research regarding its effects on younger children. This study examines the effects that a change in school start time between 2nd grade …

Ex-Prisoners’ Perceptions Of The Availability And Effects Of Programs And Services In Correctional Settings, Jenna Houston

Undergraduate Review

The U.S. system of retributive justice drives punitive measures, rather than interventions that could reduce recidivism. If prisoners’ needs are not met while serving time within the penal system, their chances of re-offending are greater (Baillargeon, 2010). The purpose of this study was to gather information about correctional programming from male ex-prisoners who have been involved in community re-entry services at Span Inc. in Boston, MA. Furthermore, this study also examines whether or not the programming contributed to positive coping skills during their incarceration as well as adaptation upon reentering the community. Data were collected during ten interviews, using a …

The Object Of Desire: How Being Objectified Creates Sexual Pressure For Heterosexual Women In Relationships, Tiffany Hoyt

Undergraduate Review

The objectification of women is widespread in the United States (American Psychological Association, 2007). In heterosexual relationships, a woman can feel objectified by her partner. When a woman feels objectified by her partner, she may internalize the objectification, feel like she has less control, and perceive more sexual pressure and coercion. However, there is relatively little research on objectification in romantic relationships. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to explore how partner objectification might be related to sexual pressure in heterosexual relationships. A sample of 162 women from all over the United States participated in an online study that …

A Study In Sherlock, Rebecca Mclaughlin

Undergraduate Review

In 2010, the BBC launched its newest series, Sherlock. The show was an instant success in the UK, Europe, and the United States. In early 2012, Season Two aired with even greater success. But we might ask why, nearly 120 years after he was first introduced, the character of Sherlock Holmes, along with his companion Dr. John Watson, still captures the attention of TV audiences? My study examines the representation of this fictional male friendship as a popular culture phenomenon both at the turn of the twentieth century and today. Focusing on the representation of domesticity and unmarried men, …

Early To Bed, Early To Rise: How Changing To An Earlier School Start Time Affects Sleep Patterns And Cognitive Functioning In School-Aged Children, Laura Pistorino

Undergraduate Review

The purpose of this project was to elucidate the impact of earlier school start times on elementary school children. Research demonstrates that adolescents are chronically sleep deprived due to shifting biological rhythms and early school start times. As a result, some schools have restructured their schedules to allow for later start times for middle and high school students. This change has inadvertently resulted in earlier start times for the elementary school students. Although studies demonstrate a positive impact of later start times for adolescents, no studies have examined younger children. This project, therefore, examined the effect of an earlier start …

"Terrorism" In The Age Of Obama: The Rhetorical Evolution Of President Obama’S Discourse On The "War On Terror", Kelly Long

Undergraduate Review

Since the events that transpired on the morning of September 11th, 2001, “terrorism” has become a part of the vocabulary of modern American culture. The word “terrorism” has become a powerful ideograph—a word or phrase that is abstract in nature, but has a great deal of ideological power—in American culture. This commonly used abstract word can be heard almost daily in the media and within the larger lexicon of American political discourse. Rhetoricians use the word to describe their motives and persuade audiences to align their ideological principles with those of the larger cause. This study examines how during President …

Virtual Ideals: The Effect Of Video Game Play On Male Body Image, Zeely Sylvia

Undergraduate Review

Popular media has long been cited as a negative influence on body image and self-esteem by perpetuating unrealistic ideals of the human body. However, the influence of video games has remained largely unexamined despite their growing popularity as a media form, particularly among men. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether playing video games that emphasize an unrealistic male body ideal has a negative impact on male body image. Male participants were randomly assigned to play a highly realistic video game with either a muscular character or a character of average build. Men in the muscular condition reported …

Car Modification: A Vehicle For Self Expression, Emily Kearns

Undergraduate Review

When considering what falls into the remarkably broad discipline that is folklore, some of the first images that come to mind are peasants and farmers performing folk dances, passing down folktales, and engaging in age-old rituals and ceremonies. I certainly never would have considered car modification to fall under the folkloric umbrella – after all, it seems far too modern, and we often have the misconception that folklore is concerned exclusively with the lower-class workers of the distant past. However, after looking closely at some of the more modern interpretations and definitions of folklore (of which there are many), it …

Conditional Spending After Nfib V. Sebelius: The Example Of Federal Education Law, Eloise Pasachoff

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court’s recent case addressing the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the Court concluded that the expansion of Medicaid in that Act was unconstitutionally coercive and therefore exceeded the scope of Congress’s authority under the Spending Clause. This was the first time that the Court treated coercion as an issue of more than mere theoretical possibility under the Spending Clause. In the wake of the Court’s decision, commentators have expressed either the concern or the hope that NFIB’s coercion analysis may lead to the undoing of much of the federal regulatory state, …

Hypergraph Index: An Index For Context-Aware Nearest Neighbor Query On Social Networks, Yazhe Wang, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social network has been touted as the No. 2 innovation in a recent IEEE Spectrum Special Report on “Top 11 Technologies of the Decade”, and it has cemented its status as a bona fide Internet phenomenon. With more and more people starting using social networks to share ideas, activities, events, and interests with other members within the network, social networks contain a huge amount of content. However, it might not be easy to navigate social networks to find specific information. In this paper, we define a new type of queries, namely context-aware nearest neighbor (CANN) search over social network to …

International Conventions And The Failure Of A Transnational Approach To Controlling Asian Crime Business, Mark Findlay, Nafis Hanif

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The paper argues that without a realistic understanding of criminal enterprise located against the commercial forces shaping contemporary Asian market contexts, then domestic, bi-lateral, regional and international control initiatives are not only likely to fail in their regulatory objectives, but the premises on which they are constructed may heighten the market conditions for crime business profitability.The international convention-based approach to regulating transnational and organized crime is the framework from which a critique of non-market centred law enforcement control concentrations is developed. This critique reveals the transposition of flawed normative control considerations from domestic to supra-national control contexts, and shows how …

Unplanned Drinking And Alcohol-Related Problems: A Preliminary Test Of The Model Of Unplanned Drinking Behavior, Matthew R. Pearson, James M. Henson

Psychology Faculty Publications

Much research links impulsivity with alcohol use and problems. In 2 studies, unplanned (or impulsive) drinking is assessed directly to determine whether it has direct effects on alcohol use and alcohol-related problems. In Study 1, we examined whether unplanned drinking serves as a proximal mediator of the effects of impulsivity-like traits on alcohol-related outcomes. With a sample of 211 college student drinkers, we found that the Unplanned Drinking Scale was significantly related to alcohol use, and perhaps more important, had a direct effect on alcohol-related problems even after controlling for frequency and quantity of alcohol use. Furthermore, unplanned drinking partially …

Stewardship Of The Biosphere In The Urban Era, Michail Fragkias

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We are entering a new urban era in which the ecology of the planet as a whole is increasingly influenced by human activities (Ellis 2011; Steffen et al. 2011a, b; Folke et al. 2011). Cities have become a central nexus of the relationship between people and nature, both as crucial centres of demand of ecosystem services, and as sources of environmental impacts. Approximately 60 % of the urban land present in 2030 is forecast to be built in the period 2000–2030 (Chap. 21). Urbanization therefore presents challenges but also opportunities. In the next two to three decades, we have unprecedented …

Urbanization Forecasts, Effects On Land Use, Biodiversity, And Ecosystem Services, Burak Güneralp, Robert I. Mcdonald, Michail Fragkias, Julie Goodness, Peter J. Marcotullio, Karen C. Seto

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Several studies in recent years have forecasted global urban expansion and examined its potential impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services. The amount of urban land near protected areas (PAs) is expected to increase, on average, by more than three times between 2000 and 2030 (from 450,000 km² circa 2000) around the world. During the same time period, the urban land in biodiversity hotspots, areas with high concentrations of endemic species, will increase by about four times on average. China will likely become the nation with the most urban land within 50 km of its PAs by 2030. The largest …