Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Documentary Research And Archaeological Investigations At The Turner House, Pembroke, Massachusetts, Elizabeth G. Tarulis, Christa M. Beranek

Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications

The Turner House (PEM.49) is an early 19th-century house in Pembroke, standing on land owned by the town. In order to assist the town’s Historical Commission in developing long term management plans for the property, the Fiske Center conducted a shovel test pit (STP) survey of the areas around the house. We excavated 50 x 50 cm STPs at 33 locations, two of which were expanded into larger excavation areas. Most of these test pits confirmed that use of the property in the late 20th and early 21st centuries had completely disturbed the historic deposits in most areas. In some …

2021 Adult Foster Home Resident And Community Characteristics Report On Adult Foster Homes, Paula Carder, Jason Z. Kyler-Yano, Ozcan Tunalilar, Sarah Dys, Sheryl Elliott, Ellis Jourdan Hews, Minju Kim

Institute on Aging Publications

This report describes results from an annual study of Oregon adult foster homes (AFH). Data contained in this report include home and owner characteristics; monthly charges and payment sources; and resident characteristics, personal and health-related needs. The study’s purpose was to collect and report data that can inform and advise policymakers, state and county agency staff, aging advocates and AFH owners about the status of AFHs in Oregon. These data were collected between December 2020 and February 2021. This report constitutes the first year during the COVID-19 pandemic that these annual data were collected.

The Green Morocco Plan: A Case Study Of The Unintended Consequences Of Sustainable Development Initiatives, Sofiya Asedrem

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Morocco is often regarded as a regional leader in addressing climate change. This may not come as a surprise given recent reports that also show that it is particularly vulnerable to adverse effects of climate change, including extreme water shortages. Therefore, what has the state been doing in response to this crisis, and even more, how have state initiatives impacted the country's most vulnerable populations and the environment? This thesis focuses on the Green Morocco Plan (GMP), an agricultural strategy launched in 2008 that intended to address environmental concerns while also increasing modern agricultural productivity and improving the conditions of …

Beyond The Second Sidewalk: A Study Of Collective Efficacy At Institutions Of Higher Education And Surrounding Communities, Rebecca Decesare

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Social disorganization theory (Shaw 1942; 1969) suggests that communities with greater racial heterogeneity, residential mobility, and low socioeconomic status will be less organized, thereby less able to collectively repel criminal behavior. These characteristics describe many institutions of higher education (IHEs), so we should expect that IHEs would have higher crime rates than neighboring areas with greater social organization. However, recent explorations of social disorganization have considered the mitigating concept of collective efficacy. This research suggests that the characteristics of social control, social cohesion, and trust present in communities will mitigate crime (Sampson 1997). These community characteristics also describe many IHEs. …

Predicting Employee Performance: A Meta-Analysis And Systematic Review On Data Mining Methods, Turku Erengin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Data mining methods have been used to study a variety of topics in industrial and organizational psychology, including predicting employee performance. With the increased interest in predictive analytics in human resources, the present study aimed to review and explore the application of two commonly used data mining methods, decision trees (DTs) and artificial neural networks (ANNs), for predicting employee performance in organizational settings. Out of 103 studies reviewed, eight studies were retained and used for the meta-analyses. The number of employee performance classifications meta-analyzed was 2430 in total. The results suggested that both data mining methods showed good performance in …

Latinx Population Hit Hard In The Covid-19 Recession: Mounting Hardships And One Big Idea For An Inclusive Recovery, Trevor Mattos, Bansari Kamdar, Phillip Granberry, Fabián Torres-Ardila

Gastón Institute Publications

Back before the COVID-19 crisis hit and the economy was relatively strong in the aggregate, Massachusetts’ Latinx population—a diverse and growing community that makes valuable economic and cultural contributions—had the lowest incomes and lowest homeownership rate among racial/ethnic groups in Massachusetts. Latinx working-age adults tended to have lower levels of educational attainment and were more likely to have limited English language proficiency. These, in part, contributed to higher levels of unemployment and food insecurity before the pandemic. Then the COVID crisis hit in March of 2020, serving to compound many of these pre-existing challenges, as Latinx workers were more likely …

O Espaço E O Tempo Do Valor, David Harvey, Artur Renzo

Publications and Research

O artigo discute a lei do valor em Karl Marx como valor em movimento, que se faz valer no espaço e no tempo. Entende-se que o movimento não pode ocorrer no vácuo, sendo necessário abandonar a visão do valor que se move sem estar ancorado em nenhum lugar e passar a enxergá-lo criando geografias de cidades e redes de transportes; formando paisagens agrícolas para a produção de alimentos e matérias-primas; englobando fluxos de pessoas, bens e informações; determinando configurações territoriais de valores fundiários e habilidades de trabalho; organizando espaços de trabalho, estruturas de governo e administração. Conclui-se que há três …

Edible Seaweeds Of The Salish Sea: Contaminant Levels And Comparison With Common Foods, Jennifer Hahn

WWU Graduate School Collection

To increase our seafood safety knowledge with respect to seaweed, this study compares contaminant concentrations in three species of edible seaweeds (Fucus distichus, F. spiralis, and Nereocystis luetkeana) harvested from 43 locations within the Salish Sea from June to September 2015. Fucus spp. were analyzed for 162 chemicals: 17 metals, 94 persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and 51 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Nereocystis luetkeana was analyzed for metal content. Two health-based screening levels were calculated, one on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Reference Dose (RfD) and the other on the USEPA Cancer Slope Factor (CSF) when these data …

Barriers To Educational Resources: The Effect Of Disability Disclosure On Ratings Of A Scholarship Applicant, Yichuan Yin

WWU Graduate School Collection

We investigated how a disclosure of an applicant’s blindness would influence evaluations of applicants to a scholarship and whether disclosure early or late in the impression formation process would result in optimal application outcomes. A total of 356 participants read profiles of applicants whose qualifications were clearly strong, clearly weak, or mixed (diligent but unintelligent, or intelligent but lazy). Participants were told that the applicant was blind either at the at the beginning or at the end, or no disability was disclosed. We found that surprisingly, blind applicants were rated more positively than those without a disclosure, and the benefit …

“Not Like Other Girls”: Implicit And Explicit Dimensions Of Internalized Sexism And Behavioral Outcomes, Kira K. Means

WWU Graduate School Collection

Unlike other forms of internalized oppression, internalized sexism, or women’s bias against other women, has been rarely studied in psychology. In this study, we aimed to determine whether implicit and explicit internalized sexism would predict internally sexist comments made in focus groups. Driven primarily by System Justification Theory, we hypothesized that implicit internalized sexism would predict participants’ proportions of internalized-sexism coded comments even above and beyond the effect of explicit internalized sexism. We also hypothesized that internalized sexism would be negatively associated with self-esteem. Participants completed measures of implicit and explicit internalized sexism as well as measures of implicit and …

Assessing Energy Justice: The Case Of Xwe’Chi’Exen, Cherry Point, Andrea Gemme

WWU Graduate School Collection

Energy justice, based within the roots and philosophy of environmental justice, is a relatively new framework of assessing justice throughout our energy systems from production to consumption (Jenkins et al., 2020). Environmental justice emerged in the 1980s in response to the disproportionate burden that low income and communities of color experience from environmental harms and their negative externalities (Bullard & Johnson, 2000). Energy justice applies these concepts to our energy systems in a variety of ways. This research operationalizes one popular definition of energy justice to assess the presence of justice within the siting proposal of an energy infrastructure project. …

Creating A Comprehensive Western American/Canadian Fire Dataset, 1880-2018, Katherine Welch

WWU Graduate School Collection

The currently available fire-history data of Western North America (US/Canada) available for geographic and other analyses is largely piecemeal and difficult to find. Data from before the 1980s is scattered among many sources and held by a plethora of different agencies. The aim of this project was to change that daunting reality and provide a single dataset that would fill that data gap and make doing research on and mapping of fires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries more accessible.

This data encompasses 138 years (1880 - 2018), 12 US states, three Canadian provinces and two Canadian territories. …

Vamos Outdoors Project’S Innovative Schools Based Programs During Covid-19: Program Assessment, Andrew Basabe

WWU Graduate School Collection

This Masters of Arts Project describes the evolution of a pilot program to a scale model that served youth in the Bellingham School District who were identified as “10% furthest from opportunity” and/or Latinx, Migrant, and English Language Learner (ELL) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Vamos Outdoors Project delivered the pilot project in partnership with the Bellingham School District, serving students in-person and on-site to improve educational and socio-emotional outcomes during online learning and quarantine. The scale model, Connections, was delivered as a multi-organizational community partnership with the same goals. As the literature describes, Latinx, ELL, and Migrant youth experience inequitable …

Not My Privilege: How Construal Level Explains Reactions To Male Privilege, Allison Schwam

WWU Graduate School Collection

Awareness of one’s privilege has been shown to evoke feelings of defensiveness or collective guilt, particularly when one’s privileged identity is highly central to their sense of self. Research on privilege indicates that people may psychologically distance themselves from the notion of privilege in order to protect themselves from its potentially threatening manner (Phillips & Lowery, 2015). Construal level theory states that concepts that are more psychologically close are construed in more concrete terms whereas concepts that are more psychologically distant are construed as more abstract (Trope & Liberman, 2010). In the present study, 246 male participants were assessed for …

Optimistic Anthropology: Identity And Well-Being On Instagram, Katherine Picchiotti

WWU Graduate School Collection

This study investigates how students at Western Washington University practice well-being through identity performance on the social media platform, Instagram. Data collection involved multiple qualitative methods, including an initial online survey, 25 semi-structured individual interviews, 5 focus group discussions, and photovoice analysis of participant submitted images. My analysis shows that the participants in this study use Instagram to perform multifaceted identities, and have an acute awareness of the specific affordances the application has to offer, and how that environment impacts overall well-being. Therefore, I argue that these participants have developed methods they perceive as beneficial to their own (definition of) …

Gender Socialization In Contemporary American Culture, Drew Elizabeth Wright

WWU Graduate School Collection

The social changes of the previous decade have led to an increase in gender egalitarianism. Popular national retailers such as Target have removed gender labels from their toy sections in a move toward gender inclusivity (Yagoda, 2016). The goal of the current study was to investigate the relationship between parent and child preferences for gendered objects, in light of these societal changes. We examined whether the shift toward gender egalitarianism in the broader cultural context is evident in both parent and child selections of items in our three domains of interest. In this correlational design, participating dyads (N = 85) …

From The Achievement Gap To The Opportunity Gap: Increasing Accountability Among Faculty And Staff In Stem Through An Inclusion And Social Mindfulness Intervention, Kayla Christiani

WWU Graduate School Collection

Racial disparities in graduation rates and academic performance measurements have long existed in higher education (Bowen et al., 2009) and are even more pronounced in STEM fields (RiegleCrumb et al., 2019). Some researchers argue that students of color are experiencing a gap in opportunity due to racial hostility and exclusion both on campus and in the classroom, and interventions should focus on changing the negative environment students of color are exposed to at colleges and universities (Johnson-Ahorlu, 2012). Faculty members at Western Washington University (WWU) developed the Inclusion and Social Mindfulness in STEM (ISMs) workshop series in an effort to …

Intergroup Conflict And The Spread Of The Bow And Arrow In The Salish Sea Region, David Hanna

WWU Graduate School Collection

The bow and arrow is thought to have had a major impact on the introduction of social stratification in the Salish Sea region through increased use of individual hunting, mirroring similar patterns from other parts of North America, as well as being introduced in the Salish Sea region roughly contemporaneously with a period of increased intergroup violence. While the bow and arrow may primarily have been used as a tool for hunting, it was fully capable of being used as a weapon in intergroup and interpersonal conflict. Many of the features that made it a more effective individual hunting tool …

Local Museums, Global Publics: How Online Programing During Covid-19 Impacted The Way Museums Define Their Audiences, Madeline R. Duffy

WWU Graduate School Collection

In the peri-pandemic ‘new normal,’ museums occupy physical and online spaces. Many museums responded to the COVID pandemic by moving much of their programing to online modalities. One consequence of the dramatic increase in online programing compelled by COVID-19 is that previously location-based museum programs are suddenly more accessible to global publics: worldwide populations of cultural heritage stakeholders, defined more by common interest than by geographic location. I hypothesize that increased interaction with global publics during the pandemic has inspired an expansion of museums’ concept of Publics (or key audiences) to include a broader Global Public in addition to their …

Financial Literacy, Experience, And Age Differences In Monetary Sequence Preferences, Jenna M. Wilson

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The emerging research on age differences in monetary sequence preferences suggests that older adults make decisions that are normatively correct from the standpoint of economic theory when choosing to receive larger versus smaller amounts of money sooner than later, but make non-optimal decisions about paying money. In an adult life-span sample (N = 594, aged 20-88, M_age = 46.48, SD= 15.16) recruited through MTurk, the present study examined age differences in monetary sequence preferences. Participants received eight hypothetical scenarios that described monetary events, and completed measures of financial literacy and financial experience. Older age was associated with …

Exposure Therapy: Stimulus Intensity As A Factor In Treatment Preference, Matthew C. Arias

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Currently, a host of treatments are available for treating anxiety disorders, including specific phobia. Treatment of specific phobia includes pharmacological, psychosocial, and combined approaches. Exposure therapy, however, is considered the leading psychological treatment for specific phobia, and has shown to be effective. Exposure therapy challenges held beliefs about feared stimuli/situations and attempts to integrate new learning about the feared object/situation. Despite exposure being effective to treat specific phobia, it is associated with low adherence and high dropout rates. There is a need to examine, therefore, ways to improve patient adherence for exposure. A way to examine this issue is to …

Transference Of Emotional Intelligence And Self-Efficacy Observed Through Adventure West Virginia Student Trip Leaders, Ashley Irene Fox

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Since the creation of university sponsored outdoor recreation trips, research studies have been conducted to examine the impact of this programming on participants. These studies have typically assessed impacts through measuring common components used to quantify overall leadership abilities such as emotional intelligence, self-efficacy, and transference. In this study, researchers utilized a quasi-experimental approach to attempt to measure the impact of leading outdoor orientation trips on leader ability to transfer leadership skills to other areas of life. A sample (N = 29) of undergraduate student trip leaders of West Virginia University’s Adventure West Virginia (AWV) program was surveyed and divided …

Enacting Sustainability In Footwear Product Development, Mary Samantha Hale

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The apparel and footwear industry's negative environmental impacts have companies facing scrutiny as consumer environmental consciousness increases (Brewer, 2019). Apparel and footwear companies are scrambling to develop sustainable initiatives with more consumers demanding they be held accountable for their actions. The industry has focused on recycling, raw materials sourcing, and reducing production waste during product development for more sustainable outcomes. This qualitative case study explores how sustainability as an abstract corporate initiative affects footwear companies and product development processes. The best way to explore how companies engage and execute sustainable practices in their product development process is by examining it …

Evaluating Social Media As A Medium Of Private Communication Through Steganographic Images, Kendall Weldon Coles

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Social media is a vastly used communication tool with billions of users worldwide. These social networks provide users the ability to share their ideas and thoughts through the messages, videos, and images that they post. The images that are shared can possibly be embedded with private messages through the use of a steganographic tool. The messages are embedded in a fashion that doesn’t change the visual appearance of an image. This allows for these types of images to hide in plain sight, which creates the possibility of someone communicating privately in a public social media setting. This project proved how …

Standby Lovers: A Typology And Theoretical Investigation Of Back Burner Relational Maintenance, Dana Borzea

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the connections between relational maintenance behaviors, theoretical factors, and relational characteristics in back burner relationships. A back burner relationship involves at least one individual who is romantically or sexually interested in a target, but they are not currently involved with the target. Given that back burners maintain communication with each other with the possibility of becoming romantically or sexually involved in the future, Study 1 was concerned with inductively identifying the relational maintenance behaviors used in back burner relationships. Following prior typology methods, participants (N = 86) in Study 1 were …

Hannah Arendt Meets Qanon: Conspiracy, Ideology, And The Collapse Of Common Sense, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A June 2020 survey found one in four Americans agreeing that “powerful people intentionally planned the coronavirus outbreak.” In fall 2020, seven percent said they believe the elaborate and grotesque mythology of QAnon; another eleven percent were unsure whether they believe it. November and December 2020 found tens of millions of Americans believing in election-theft plots that would require superhuman levels of coordination and secrecy among dozens, perhaps hundreds, of otherwise-unconnected and unidentified miscreants.

Conspiracy theories are nothing new, and they raise a question that preoccupied Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism: whatever happened to common sense? Arendt …

After The Protests: A Campus Racial Climate Case Study Of The Perception And Curricular Responses For Institutional Reforms, Following The Black Students’ Demands For Interventions At The University Of Missouri-Columbia, Bruce E. Mitchell Ii

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This qualitative method single case study explores the phenomenon of a racially tense campus climate at the University of Missouri Columbia, a Predominantly White Midwestern Institution. At the forefront of the media regarding student and athlete protests, leading to the resignation of senior level administrators, African American students put forth eight demands to their administrators. Included, was the creation and implementation of a required racial awareness and inclusion curriculum. The study explores the perceptions of the institutional response to an exceptional campus racial climate issue and the process of formulating and participating in a diversity training course and a semester …

#Canceled: Positionality And Authenticity In Country Music’S Cancel Culture, Gabriella Saporito

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

From its beginning in film and television and its early adoption by Black Twitter, cancel culture has become a phenomenon in the era of social media. Marked by the popular hashtags #cancel, #canceled, #[InsertNameHere]isOverParty, and #Surviving[InsertNameHere], cancel culture is a practice which involves publicly denouncing and/or shaming a person or company when they do something that is considered offensive or objectionable. It saw a resurgence in the era of #MeToo that has not slowed down in an age dominated by social media presidents and global pandemics. Cancel culture has also seen a recent re-adoption by the political right, which begs …

Exploring The Perceptions Of Produce Processors Operating In Non-Profit Commercial Kitchens In West Virginia, Megan Christine Govindan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die each year from foodborne illness. The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) shifted the focus of the Food and Drug Administration from response, to prevention of foodborne illness. The FSMA identified seven rules related to food safety prevention measures, including inspection and compliance, response and enhanced partnerships to ensure food safety along the food system, and employee-training compliance measures. Increasing access to healthy, local foods has economic, public health, and environmental benefits. Farm to Institution policies are becoming more popular nationally, …

Innovations In Money And Banking Markets, Eduardo Guimaraes Minuci

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The U.S. banking industry has experienced several technological and banking regulatory changes in the past two decades. This dissertation is composed of three papers that review and investigate how these banking and technological innovations have impacted depositors, bank provision of monetary assets, and bank performance. The order in which the papers are presented follows the order in which they were produced as the production of one paper helped spark ideas that led to the next.

Motivated by the fact that money has become more heterogeneous in terms of its returns, Chapter 1 focus on innovations in money markets by focusing …