Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Happiness Theory And Worker Cooperatives: A Critique Of The Alignment Thesis, Mark J. Kaswan

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Work may provide subsistence, but for most people it is a necessary evil. For communities, businesses lie at the heart of our economic system, but often come with negative externalities. This article considers whether worker cooperatives will tend to have more positive impacts on the happiness of their workers and of the community than do traditional businesses. Worker cooperatives are businesses, but they are rooted in the community. Based on the work of 19th-century political economist William Thompson, I examine what I call the alignment thesis, which suggests that the democratic and ownership structure of cooperatives will align the interests …

Demographic Factors As Domains For Adaptation In Linguistic Preprocessing, Sara Morini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Classic natural language processing resources such as the Penn Treebank (Marcus et al. 1993) have long been used both as evaluation data for many linguistic tasks and as training data for a variety of off-the-shelf language processing tools. Recent work has highlighted a gender imbalance in the authors of this text data (Garimella et al. 2019) and hypothesized that tools created with such resources will privilege users from particular demographic groups (Hovy and Søgaard 2015). Domain adaptation is typically employed as a strategy in machine learning to adjust models trained and evaluated with data from different genres. However, the present …

Class Matters: School Affluence And Other Predictors Of Attainment For Wealthy And Poor Students, Alison Brockhouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Public schools in the United States are becoming increasingly segregated by socioeconomic status. Though the educational consequences of socioeconomic segregation are well researched, segregation is often ignored or exacerbated by education reform. To learn more about the wider implications of socioeconomic segregation, this study utilizes theoretical frameworks derived from Max Weber’s theory of social stratification to analyze over 10,000 students’ experiences from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) 2002, 2004, and 2012 waves of data collection. More specifically, this research explores the impact of attending an affluent high school on long-term educational attainment. It finds …

Unstitching The Borders: Color, Class And Consumption In Queens, New York, Cassandra R. Barnes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following thesis is a comparative multipart examination into the ways in which globalization, translocality, and gentrification influence communities and their inhabitants through the lens of fashion. Political and social forces drive processes of consumption. In the Corona and Jackson Heights sections of Queens, New York, several waves of migration and immigration have given rise to an extremely diverse yet socially complex area. Historically, four major shopping districts: Roosevelt Avenue, 74^th Street, 82^nd Street, and Junction Boulevard developed in the two towns and reflected much of the demography within. Currently these districts are physically accessible to anyone able …

Rich In Needs: The Forgotten Radical Politics Of The Welfare Rights Movement, Wilson Sherwin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Situated temporally between the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement, the Welfare Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s distinguished itself by its militant critique of waged labor. Returning to the movement’s archives I examine how the mostly poor, Black, female participants developed their “antiwork politics”, how they asserted their right to live not only meager but occasionally luxurious lives—demanding not only bread but also roses. In the courts, streets, welfare offices, department stores, policy proposals, and numerous internal debates, these women waged national battles to assert full autonomy over their families, consumption, sexuality, and their own time.

As …

Mood Choice And Context Availability: A Variationist Approach To The Subjunctive In New York City Spanish, Joanna Birnbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the variable treatment of the Subjunctive in Spanish in New York City. Both Mood choice (Subjunctive versus Indicative) and Linguistic context availability (the presence and absence of Subjunctive-inducing contexts in speech) are studied. Data are from sociolinguistic interviews with 142 informants, stratified with respect to immigrant generation, gender, age, socio-economic status, national origin, etc. Subjunctive rates are analyzed, at the macro-level, in nine linguistic contexts and, at the micro-level, in the four most popular contexts (Modal, Protasis Si, Temporal, and Apodosis Si). Results of bivariate Pearson correlations and Chi-square tests reveal consistent usage patterns of …

The Impact Of Mentalization And Self-Compassion On Psychological Adjustment In Adolescents, Jaleh Hamadani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following study was designed to look at the impact of Mentalization (or Reflective Functioning (RF)) as well as Mentalized Affectivity (MA) [comprised of Identifying, Processing, and Expressing] and Self-Compassion (SC) on psychological adjustment in adolescents. Psychological adjustment in this study was measured utilizing measures of psychological symptoms (internalizing and externalizing symptoms) and well-being.

While deficiencies in RF have been associated with increased psychological symptoms in clinical sample of adolescents, studies examining RF in community sample of adolescents have shown a mixed picture. Furthermore, no study to date has examined the impact of MA on psychological adjustment in …

Getting The Benefit Of The Doubt: The Effect Of Randomization Ratio On The Placebo Response, Taiki Matsuura

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Placebos are commonly employed in clinical trials as inactive treatments to which experimental treatments are compared against in order to control for psychological “noise.” Randomized double-blind placebo control studies are considered the “gold standard” in epidemiologic research because they can provide the strongest possible evidence of causation if designed correctly (Hulley, Cummings, Browner, & Grady, 2007). One phenomenon that poses a threat to the integrity of this evidence is the placebo response (PR), or referred to as the “placebo effect.” Expectancy is considered a central PR mechanism and boasts the most empirical support among all proposed mechanisms. Expectancy is not …

Black Women At Work In Corrections In The Era Of Mass Incarceration: Documenting Demographic Changes In The New York City Department Of Correction, Carolyn Fisher

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent work has popularized the idea that mass incarceration arose in the wake of the civil rights movement to maintain the social and economic subordination of African Americans previously enforced under Jim Crow. This discussion has not accounted for the many black Americans working in corrections, particularly in large metropolitan jail systems. This paper documents the increase in black women working as correction officers and administrators in the New York City Department of Correction since the late 1970s and explores the implications of this growth on the strict racial argument about mass incarceration. Using administrative and archival sources, it argues …

Same-Sex Union Formation And Dissolution In The United States And Europe, Eric Ketcham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite recent improvements in the availability of data on same-sex union formation and dissolution, the field remains understudied. Recent findings on the stability of same-sex unions in the United States and in Europe are inconsistent both within and between countries. Using three data sets – How Couples Meet and Stay Together, the Generations and Gender Survey, and the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social sciences surveys – event-history analyses are conducted to examine the stability of same-sex unions relative to male-female unions in the United States and continental Europe. The availability of partners for LGBT-identified males and females in eighteen …

Visual Entrainment Of Perception-Related Neural Oscillations As A Mechanism For Maintaining Rhythmic Temporal Expectations Across A Wide Range Of Frequencies, Michael James Gray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Visual sensitivity fluctuates rhythmically, in-synch with ongoing, EEG-recorded neural oscillations across a wide range of frequencies (~1-25hz). Some recent work has suggested that these perception-related neural oscillations can be entrained by rhythmic visual stimulation. Evidence is also emerging that the entrainment of ongoing oscillations in visual and auditory cortices is involved in rhythmic temporal expectations. In the introduction chapter, I attempt to bridge these bodies of literature and hypothesize that rhythmic visual stimuli automatically entrain ongoing, perception-related neural oscillations and that this mechanism supports the maintenance of rhythmic temporal expectations. Chapters 2 and 3 address this hypothesis from different angles. …

Essays In Empirical Economics, Agustin Indaco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters that utilize distinct econometric methods and novel datasets.

In the first chapter, “From Twitter to GDP: Estimating Economic Activity From Social Media”, I collect all geo-located image tweets shared on Twitter in 2012-2013 to study whether the volume of tweets is a valid proxy for estimating current GDP in USD at the country level. My preferred model explains 94 percent of the cross-country variation and the residuals from the model are negatively correlated to a data quality index, indicating that my estimates of GDP are more accurate for countries with more reliable GDP data. …

Waiting: History, Fear, And Healing In Ballynafeigh / The Upper Ormeau Road Of Belfast, Northern Ireland, Molly J. Hurley-Depret

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in one neighborhood of Belfast called Ballynafeigh / the upper Ormeau Road in 2006–2007, I argue we need to pay closer attention to the “inconspicuous transformations” that may have been occurring in parallel to the official peace process. Walter Benjamin notes that “refined and spiritual things” do “make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour, cunning, and fortitude.” Benjamin states that “the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of …

Memory-Guided Selective Attention: An Instance Theory Of Automatic Attentional Control, Nicholaus Paul Brosowsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cognitive control enables flexible goal-directed behavior via attention and action selection processes that prioritize goal-relevant over irrelevant information. These processes allow us to behave flexibly in the face of contradicting or ambiguous information and update behavior in response to the changing environment. Furthermore, they are thought to be in direct opposition to learned, automatic processing in that they enable us to disregard learned behaviors when they are inconsistent with our current goals. The strict dichotomy between stimulus-driven and goal-driven influences, however, has downplayed the role of memory in guiding attention. The position forwarded in this thesis is that a memory-based …

Does Ethnic Identity, In-Group Preference, And Acculturation Protect Latinas With A History Of Interpersonal Trauma From Developing Symptoms Of Ptsd?, Evelyn M. Ramirez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research suggests ethnic identity, a sense of belonging to a particular cultural group, may be protective against symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, the role of ethnic identity, in-group preference (i.e., an individual’s preference for interactions with members of their own ethnic group) and acculturation (i.e., the level of comfort with the mainstream culture) have not been investigated as protective factors for Latinas with a history of interpersonal and sexual trauma. In this study, ethnic identity, in-group preference and acculturation were assessed via self-report on the Scale of Ethnic Experience in two samples of undergraduate Latina and non-Latina …

Mobile Media Beyond Mobile Phones, Jordan Frith, Didem Özkul

Publications

In this introduction, we argue for an expanded focus in mobile media and communication studies (MMCS) that accounts for the many types of mobile media that affect our lives. We begin by pointing out that mobile phone/smartphone research has dominated MMCS as a field. That focus makes sense, but it runs the risk of MMCS essentially turning into “smartphone studies,” which we argue would limit our impact. To make that case, we identify a few examples of the types of oft-ignored technologies that could add to the depth and breadth of MMCS research (e.g., RFID [radio frequency identification] tags, the …

Depression In Black Men: One Church’S Solution, Dwayne T. Baskin

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation examines the Black Church’s influence on Pentecostal African-American men who are depressed, and how the church may assist these men to heal from the wounds of despair through a Pentecostal experience. While many Pentecostal African-American men have matriculated through the ranks of leadership, establishing successful businesses, churches, ministries, and organizational denominations; they are teetering on the edge of an emotional and spiritual breakdown. Researchers have found that African-American men are understudied and underdiagnosed as it pertains to depression. Eight African-American Pentecostal men were interviewed and given questionnaires to examine how depression affected them while maintaining leadership roles in …

The Information In Asset Fire Sales, Sheng Huang, Matthew Ringgenberg, Zhe Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Asset prices remain depressed for several years following mutual fund fire sales. We show that this price pressure is partly due to asymmetric information which leads to an adverse selection problem for arbitrageurs. After a flow shock, fund managers do not scale down their portfolio, rather, they choose to sell a subset of low-quality stocks that subsequently underperform. In other words, fund managers have stock selling ability. Our findings suggest an explanation for the tendency of asset prices to remain depressed following fire sales: information asymmetries make it difficult for arbitrageurs to disentangle pure price pressure from negative information.

Authentic Leadership In The Digital Age, Richard R. Smith

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Artificial intelligence algorithms are actively assessing our personality and behaviour based on our social media footprint with amazing accuracy – even after we have retired or died.

Thailand's 2019 Vote: The General's Election, Jacob Ricks

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Thailand’s March 2019 ballot was the first for the country since 2011, and for many it signaled the potential end of the military junta’s five-year rule. But was it truly a return to democracy? This essay argues that the election was far from a democratization event. Instead, it was a highly orchestrated exercise to ensure authoritarian longevity. The junta employed techniques of institutional engineering as well as managing the election’s outcomes in an effort to extend the premiership of Prayuth Chan-ocha despite increasing pressure for a return to civilian rule. The results of the election suggest that Thai society continues …

County Wicklow Social Enterprise Strategy, Gerard Doyle, Tanya Lalor

Reports

No abstract provided.

Case Study: Tourism In Traditional Brazilian Quilombo Communities – From Theory Into Practice, Carolin Lusby, Thais Pinheiro

Journal of Global Business Insights

This case study discusses an initiative to aid a traditional Quilombo community in the State of Rio de Janeiro through community-based tourism (CBT). Through the Young Leaders of Americas program, a US Department of State funded initiative, the authors worked together in Brazil and the United States to increase visibility, linkages and awareness of this CBT project. The paper highlights how research in the field influenced what specific steps would be taken in practice to increase the benefits of tourism for the community. CBT as a concept is briefly discussed, and a background of Quilombos in Brazil is given.

Tourism Taxes In Italy: A Sustainable Perspective, Lucia Rotaris, Marta Carrozzo

Journal of Global Business Insights

In Italy, a tourism tax was introduced in 2011, since then it has been adopted in most of the Italian provincial capitals and tourist cities. This tax can mitigate the negative externalities caused by tourists; however, it should be carefully planned both in terms of the amount of money to be levied and in terms of the uses to be financed with the tax revenues, it could, otherwise, negatively impact the tourism sector, decreasing—rather than increasing— the social welfare. The aim of this paper is to assess the acceptability of such a tax and to examine how the tax should …

Rrh Library Newsletter, September 2019, Libraries At Rochester Regional Health

Rochester Regional Health authored publications and proceedings

Newsletter sections include: Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing

Resilience In Children Exposed To Violence: A Meta-Analysis Of Protective Factors Across Ecological Contexts, Kristen Yule, Jessica Houston, John Grych

Psychology Faculty Research and Publications

Children who experience violence in their families and communities are at increased risk for a wide range of psychological and behavioral difficulties, but some exhibit resilience, or adaptive functioning following adversity. Understanding what promotes resilience is critical for developing more effective prevention and intervention strategies. Over 100 studies have examined potential protective factors for children exposed to violence in the past 30 years, but there has been no quantitative review of this literature. In order to identify which protective factors have received the strongest empirical support, we conducted a meta-analysis of 118 studies involving 101,592 participants. We separately evaluated cross-sectional …

Cusp Catastrophe Models For Cognitive Workload And Fatigue In Teams, Stephen J. Guastello, Anthony N. Correro, David E. C. Marra

Psychology Faculty Research and Publications

The use of two cusp catastrophe models has been effective for untangling the effects of cognitive workload, fatigue, and other complications on the performance of individuals. This study is the first to use the two models to separate workload and fatigue effects on team performance. In an experiment involving an emergency response simulation, 360 undergraduates were organized into 44 teams. Workload was varied by team size, number of opponents, and time pressure. The cusp models for workload and fatigue were more accurate for describing trends in team performance criteria compared to linear alternatives. Individual differences in elasticity-rigidity were less important …

Treatment Impact On Recidivism Of Family Only Vs. Generally Violent Partner Violence Perpetrators, Arturo L. Cantos, David S. Kosson, Daniel A. Goldstein, K. Daniel O'Leary

Psychological Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background/objective: The outcome of a treatment program for a large sample of male perpetrators on probation for intimate partner violence (IPV) was evaluated with particular reference to the differential impact on family only (FO) versus generally violent (GV) perpetrators.

Method: Official rates of recidivism for three years post termination of treatment and probation were examined for 456 perpetrators after they were classified as FO and GV.

Results: Both treatment completion and type of perpetrator were predictive of IPV recidivism and time to recidivism. However, analyses conducted separately for the two groups indicated that participation in the intervention predicted both recidivism …

A Time For Creativity: How Future-Oriented Schemas Facilitate Creativity, Brandon Koh, Angela K. Y. Leung

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

According to the creative cognition approach, extraordinarily creative ideas are rare because people often generate ideas by retrieving and incrementally modifying concepts from accessible schemas. Grounded in social schema research, we hypothesize that a future-orientation is a means to broaden thinking through activating change and progress schemas, which in turn facilitates creativity. We first offered qualitative evidence that people generally hold a schema that the future is inundated with change and progress. In three experimental studies, we established the creative benefit of future-oriented (vs. present-oriented) thinking in divergent thinking tasks. Further, we offered support that schemas of change and progress …

Designing Policies In Uncertain Contexts: Entrepreneurial Capacity And The European Emission Trading Scheme, Ishani Mukherjee, Sarah Giest

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The paper focuses on enterprising agents in policy formulation and design by looking at their capacity of dealing with different levels of uncertainty. In climate policy specifically, different degrees and types of uncertainties pose a challenge to policymakers. Policy entrepreneurs and the combination of their analytical, operational and political competences are a relevant component in reducing ambiguity in policy design and translating broad policy goals to operational programmes and specific policy instruments. Using the case of the European Emission Trading Scheme, we suggest that the success of policy entrepreneurs in catalysing policy change is determined by their capacity to work …

Counselling Referral For University Students: A Phenomenological Study From The Teachers’ Perspective, Poh Yaip Steven Ng, Yee Lin Ada Chung

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This small-scale pilot study analysed the input of two university teachers regarding their approaches, attitudes and understanding regarding counselling referrals for students in a university setting in Singapore. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, four main categories of themes were defined from the findings: referral procedures, challenges/difficulties, support and awareness. The academic teaching staff has an important role in the holistic development of students by helping them obtain counselling referrals. The key issues raised are outlined for consideration by policymakers, academic teaching staff and practitioners both within and outside of Singapore. The findings are discussed, including …