Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

An Enhanced Mentoring Model’S Impact On Youth In Boys And Girls Clubs, Lisa Mcgarrie, Eric Napierala, Carrie Oliver, Emily Heberlein, Brittany Taylor, Angie Snyder

Journal of Youth Development

Although federal funding has been provided to add mentoring to youth development programs for decades, we still lack knowledge about the impacts of mentoring on youth outcomes. This research seeks to fill a gap by documenting youth outcomes from an enhanced mentoring approach for urban Boys and Girls Clubs (BGC) in the Southeastern United States delivered by paid staff who serve as mentors through group activities and 1:1 interactions with youth. We perform logistic regressions of secondary data from a cohort of BGCs to understand the relationships between enhanced mentoring and youth outcomes related to program retention, behaviors, and academics. …

Using Stem Camps To Improve Female Interest In Technology Careers, April H. Reed, Mark Angolia, Lyubov G. Sluder, Leslie R. Pagliari

Journal of Youth Development

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields have been traditionally entered by men, often establishing women as underrepresented in many of these fields. This research study focuses on participants at a STEM camp for middle- and high-school girls designed to introduce them to technology. The camp was held 4 times over 3 years, with many of the participants from rural areas, underrepresented by race and economic status. Sixty camp attendees completed pre- and post-camp surveys and are referred to as the intervention group. A control group of 200 middle- and high-school girls who did not attend the camp also took …

Importance Of The Access, Equity, And Opportunity Competencies Among 4-H Professionals, Matt Benge, Jeff Wayne Howard

Journal of Youth Development

The 4-H Professional Research, Knowledge and Competencies (PRKC) is a professional development framework that can be used to identify competency gaps and training needs of 4-H professionals. The PRKC consists of 6 competency domains, 1 being access, equity, and opportunity (AEO). A tailored design method was used to gather data and sort the respondents between rural and urban community type. 4-H Extension agents serving urban communities perceived 12 out of the 14 AEO domain components as more important than agents serving rural communities did. The 2 AEO domain components that were not significantly different in perceived importance were values, norms, …

Who Is Using Prep On-Demand? Factors Associated With Prep Use Modality Among Black And Hispanic/Latino Emerging Adults, Antonia E. Caba, Taylor Rathus, Esther Burson, Philip A. Chan, Lisa A. Eaton, Ryan J. Watson

Psychology: Faculty Publications

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is a highly efficacious HIV prevention medication, yet Black and Hispanic/Latino sexual minority men’s and gender diverse individuals’ (SMMGD) PrEP use is limited due to factors such as PrEP barriers and anticipated PrEP stigma. Although most individuals who use PrEP take it as a daily regimen, there is evidence that many SMMGD are interested in using “on-demand” (also known as event-driven or intermittent or 2-1-1) PrEP. We used stepwise multinomial logistic regression to explore factors associated with on-demand, daily, and no PrEP use among 820 Black and Hispanic/Latino SMMGD ages 18–29 in the United States. We found …

Racial/Ethnic And Gender Disparities Of The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic In Out-Of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest (Ohca) In Texas, Summer Chavez, Ryan Huebinger, Hei Kit Chan, Kevin Schulz, Micah Panczyk, Normandy Villa, Renee Johnson, Robert Greenberg, Veer Vithalani, Rabab Al-Araji, Bentley Bobrow

Student and Faculty Publications

INTRODUCTION: Prior research shows a greater disease burden, lower BCPR rates, and worse outcomes in Black and Hispanic patients after OHCA. Female OHCA patients have lower rates of BCPR compared to men and other survival outcomes vary. The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on OHCA incidence and outcomes in different health disparity populations is unknown.

METHODS: We used data from the Texas Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES). We determined the association of both prehospital characteristics and survival outcomes with the pandemic period in each study group through Pearson's χ

RESULTS: Black OHCA patients (aOR = 0.73; 95% CI: …

Development Of The International Spinal Cord Injury Basic Data Set For Informal Caregivers, Carol Haywood, Rebecca Martin, Kathryn Dent, M J Mulcahey

Student and Faculty Publications

STUDY DESIGN: Mixed-methods, including expert consensus for initial development and a multi-center repeated measures design for field testing.

OBJECTIVES: To develop an International Spinal Cord Injury Basic Data Set for caregivers of individuals with spinal cord injury/disorder (SCI/D) for use in research and clinical care settings.

SETTING: International, multi-disciplinary working group with field testing in five North American pediatric rehabilitation hospitals.

METHODS: The data set was developed iteratively through meetings and online surveys with a working group of experts in pediatric and adult SCI/D rehabilitation and caregivers of individuals with SCI/D. Initial reliability was examined through repeat administration of a …

Rumination As A Mediator Of The Association Between Racial Discrimination And Depression Among Black Youth, Donte L Bernard, Colleen A Halliday, Funlola Are, Devin E Banks, Carla Kmett Danielson

Student and Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: Racial discrimination constitutes a significant risk factor for depressive symptoms among Black youth. Rumination, a maladaptive self-regulatory stress response, is a notable pathway by which racial discrimination contributes to depressive symptoms among racial/ethnic minority adults. Yet, examinations of the mechanistic nature of rumination in the context of racial discrimination among racial/ethnic minority youth remain limited. The present study investigated rumination as a mediator of the association between racial discrimination and depressive symptoms among Black youth.

METHODS: Data for the current study were drawn from baseline questionnaire responses of community recruited Black pre-and-early adolescents (N = 158, 53% female, M …

Genetics And Epigenetics Of Self-Injurious Thoughts And Behaviors: Systematic Review Of The Suicide Literature And Methodological Considerations, Salahudeen Mirza, Anna R Docherty, Amanda Bakian, Hilary Coon, Jair C Soares, Consuelo Walss-Bass, Gabriel R Fries

Student and Faculty Publications

Suicide is a multifaceted and poorly understood clinical outcome, and there is an urgent need to advance research on its phenomenology and etiology. Epidemiological studies have demonstrated that suicidal behavior is heritable, suggesting that genetic and epigenetic information may serve as biomarkers for suicide risk. Here we systematically review the literature on genetic and epigenetic alterations observed in phenotypes across the full range of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITB). We included 577 studies focused on genome-wide and epigenome-wide associations, candidate genes (SNP and methylation), noncoding RNAs, and histones. Convergence of specific genes is limited across units of analysis, although pathway-based …

Mesenchymal Stromal Cells For The Treatment Of Alzheimer’S Disease: Strategies And Limitations, Shobha Regmi, Daniel Dan Liu, Michelle Shen, Bhavesh D Kevadiya, Abantika Ganguly, Rosita Primavera, Shashank Chetty, Reza Yarani, Avnesh S Thakor

Student and Faculty Publications

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a major cause of age-related dementia and is characterized by progressive brain damage that gradually destroys memory and the ability to learn, which ultimately leads to the decline of a patient's ability to perform daily activities. Although some of the pharmacological treatments of AD are available for symptomatic relief, they are not able to limit the progression of AD and have several side effects. Mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs) could be a potential therapeutic option for treating AD due to their immunomodulatory, anti-inflammatory, regenerative, antioxidant, anti-apoptotic, and neuroprotective effects. MSCs not only secret neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory factors …

Concerns About The Use Of Polygenic Embryo Screening For Psychiatric And Cognitive Traits, Todd Lencz, Maya Sabatello, Anna Docherty, Roseann E Peterson, Takahiro Soda, Jehannine Austin, Laura Bierut, David Crepaz-Keay, David Curtis, Franziska Degenhardt, Laura Huckins, Gabriel Lazaro-Munoz, Manuel Mattheisen, Bettina Meiser, Holly Peay, Marcella Rietschel, Consuelo Walss-Bass, Lea K Davis

Student and Faculty Publications

Private companies have begun offering services to allow parents undergoing in-vitro fertilisation to screen embryos for genetic risk of complex diseases, including psychiatric disorders. This procedure, called polygenic embryo screening, raises several difficult scientific and ethical issues, as discussed in this Personal View. Polygenic embryo screening depends on the statistical properties of polygenic risk scores, which are complex and not well studied in the context of this proposed clinical application. The clinical, social, and ethical implications of polygenic embryo screening have barely been discussed among relevant stakeholders. To our knowledge, the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics is the first professional …

Lawbreaker: An Approach For Specifying Traffic Laws And Fuzzing Autonomous Vehicles, Yang Sun, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun, Yuqi Chen, Zijiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) must be tested thoroughly before they can be deployed in autonomous vehicles. High-fidelity simulators allow them to be tested against diverse scenarios, including those that are difficult to recreate in real-world testing grounds. While previous approaches have shown that test cases can be generated automatically, they tend to focus on weak oracles (e.g. reaching the destination without collisions) without assessing whether the journey itself was undertaken safely and satisfied the law. In this work, we propose LawBreaker, an automated framework for testing ADSs against real-world traffic laws, which is designed to be compatible with different scenario …

Two Singapore Public Healthcare Ai Applications For National Screening Programs And Other Examples, Andy Wee An Ta, Han Leong Goh, Christine Ang, Lian Yeow Koh, Ken Poon, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This article explains how two AI systems have been incorporated into the everyday operations of two Singapore public healthcare nation-wide screening programs. The first example is embedded within the setting of a national level population health screening program for diabetes related eye diseases, targeting the rapidly increasing number of adults in the country with diabetes. In the second example, the AI assisted screening is done shortly after a person is admitted to one of the public hospitals to identify which inpatients—especially which elderly patients with complex conditions—have a high risk of being readmitted as an inpatient multiple times in the …

Building Up A Culture Of Respect, Siow-Heng Ong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Recently, we have become more acutely aware of a variety of undesirable workplace circumstances and practices in Singapore. personal time; discriminatory workplace practices against members of various categories of minority groups; and bias against women staff.

Local, Yet Global: Implications Of Caste For Mnes And International Business, Hari Bapuji, Snehanjali Chrispal, Balagopal Vissa, Gokhan Ertug

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Caste is an informal institution that influences socioeconomic action in many contexts. It is becoming increasingly evident that international business research, practice, and policy need to programmatically address caste. To facilitate this endeavour, we review the limited research in IB that has addressed caste, and theorize caste as a distinct informal institution by distinguishing it from systems of stratification like race, class, and gender. In addition, we propose a parsimonious framework to highlight the implications of caste for Indian and non-Indian MNEsin their Indian and global operations. In doing this, we focus on implications with respect to the internal organization …

Code Choice And Stance Taking By Two Mahragānāt Performers: A Case Of Social Identity Construction In Egyptian Public Discourse, Yasmine Abusamra

Theses and Dissertations

Mahragānāt [festivals] is a relatively new genre of Egyptian street music that broadly represents working-class values and culture. Performers are aware of their unprivileged origins and feature the concerns and interests of Egyptian slums in their songs. Their vocals are linguistically fixated on local urban realities of the working class and often express loyalty to singers’ neighborhoods. This qualitative study explores code choice in selected songs of two artists, Muhammad Ramadan and Ahmad Ali, and its relation to social class. Both performers overtly promulgate their unprivileged urban origin and employ their lyrics to reframe and negotiate their position in society …

The Role Of Village Savings And Loan Associations In Poverty Graduation Programs: A Process Analysis, Noha Abdel Hamid

Theses and Dissertations

Ten percent of the global population live in extreme poverty under $1.90 a day. To combat chronic multidimensional poverty, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC)created the Graduation Approach, which consists of a Big Push effect implemented through a series of interventions including asset transfer, mentoring, saving groups and a series of service provisions, to push ultra-poor households to exit poverty sustainably. Implemented so far in over 50 countries, the model has shown positive results even after ten years of the first interventions. Sawiris Foundation for Social Development partnered with BRAC and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Laboratory (J-PAL) to …

A Daily Diary Investigation Of The Fear Of Missing Out And Diminishing Daily Emotional Well-Being: The Moderating Role Of Cognitive Reappraisal, Andree Hartanto, Joax Wong, Verity Yu Qing Lua, Yue Qi Germaine Tng, K. T. A. Sandeeshwara Kasturiratna, Nadyanna M. Majeed

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

With modern societies becoming ever-increasingly interconnected due to technology and media, we have gained unprecedented access and exposure to other people’s lives. This has resulted in a greater desire to constantly be socially connected with the activities of others, or the fear of missing out (FoMO). While much of the present available research has established the association between FoMO and diminished emotional well-being, little has been done to identify protective factors that can help one cope with the negative psychological consequences of FoMO. Utilizing data from a 7-day diary study of a large sample of young adults (N = 261), …

Making Singapore A Regional Centre For Philanthropy, Kim Kit Ow, Vincent Ooi

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The article highlights the strong ecosystem in Singapore where charitable initiatives are supported and encouraged, and builds on DPM Lawrence Wong's recent comments that the Government is reviewing its tax incentive schemes to encourage increased philanthropic giving.As a starting point, we suggest three simple ways in which tax incentives could be enhanced:1) increasing the enhanced tax deduction for donations from the current 2.5 times the amount of qualifying donations to 3 times for certain causes where there is a significant amount of public spending;2) extending the period for which tax deductions for donations can be carried forward for from the …

Use Of The Social Cognition And Object Relations Scale-Global To Evaluate The Impact Of Parental Divorce On College Students’ Interpersonal Functioning, Rachel Davenport

Theses and Dissertations

Research has shown parental divorce to have long-term impacts on various domains of children’s interpersonal functioning, extending into young adulthood and beyond. The purpose of this study was to assess the potential impacts of parental divorce in college students using the Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale-Global (SCORS-G) with narratives derived from the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). SCORS-G variables of interest included composite, factor, and dimension scores. Two additional measures of rejection sensitivity, which has been shown to be impacted by parental divorce, and perceived social support, which may mitigate maladaptive outcomes in interpersonal functioning, were also examined. The primary …

Profile Of Service Use And Barriers To Access To Care Among Brazilian Children And Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorders, Beatriz Araripe, Cecilia Montiel-Nava, Daniela Bordini, Graccielle R. Cunha, Gabriela Garrido, Sebastián Cukier, Ricardo Garcia, Analía Rosoli, Daniel Valdez, Sheila C. Caetano

Psychological Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Delayed diagnosis and a lack of adequate care for people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are related to worse outcomes and quality of life. This study aimed to identify the profile of service use, barriers to access care, and factors related to those barriers in Brazilian families with children with ASD. A total of 927 families with children with ASD (3-17 years) from five Brazilian regions completed an online version of the Caregivers Needs Survey. Results showed that the most used services were behavioral interventions and pharmacotherapy, while the most used professionals were neurologists, nutritionists, speech therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and …

When Tensions Become Opportunities: Managing Accountability Demands In Collaborative Governance, Seulki Lee

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Accountability in collaborative governance comprises a tangled web of vertical and horizontal accountability relationships. While different accountability mechanisms are apparently complementary, they also clash with each other, producing serious accountability tensions. This study explores how actors in collaborative governance experience and manage conflicting accountability demands in the context of a Korean interorganizational network. Using qualitative data based on in-depth interviews with 32 personnel across 10 organizations and document analysis, the study identifies different types of accountability tensions and actors’ strategic responses to them. The analysis reveals that accountability tensions vary across the sources of the demand, and they are more …

Looking Beyond The 'Middle Class' For Other Chinas, Qian Forrest Zhang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

There are high hopes for China’s middle class. Thanks to their rising disposable income, this group of Chinese is expected to unleash a consumer revolution in the domestic market. However, I argue that the ‘middle class’ as a concept provides at best a partial understanding of the Chinese consumer population; at worst, it can even provide a misleading perspective that brings us to erroneous conclusions about its profile and size. Instead, I propose the notion of ‘three Chinas’ as an alternative way to make sense of China’s consumers. ‘First China’ comprises residents in medium and large-sized cities, ‘Second China’ consists …

Structured Reflection Increases Intentions To Reduce Other People’S Health Risks During Covid-19, Jairo Ramos, Marrissa D. Grant, Stephan Dickert, Kimin Eom, Alex Flores, Gabriela M. Jiga-Boy, Tehila Kogut, Marcus Mayorga, Eric J. Pedersen, Beatriz Pereira, Enrico Rubaltelli, K Sherman David, Paul Slovic, Västjäll. Daniel, Leaf Van Boven

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

People believe they should consider how their behavior might negatively impact other people, Yet their behavior often increases others’ health risks. This creates challenges for managing public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined a procedure wherein people reflect on their personal criteria regarding how their behavior impacts others’ health risks. We expected structured reflection to increase people's intentions and decisions to reduce others’ health risks. Structured reflection increases attention to others’ health risks and the correspondence between people's personal criteria and behavioral intentions. In four experiments during COVID-19, people (N = 12,995) reported their personal criteria about how …

From Pulau To Pulo: Archipelagic Perspectives On Southeast Asian Chinese Ethnicity From The Philippines And Indonesia, Josh Stenberg, Chien-Wen Kung, Charlotte Setijadi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Southeast Asia is an important region for working through ques-tions of Chineseness. It is, however, a notoriously heterogeneous region, and conclusions derived from some parts of it can be of limited applicability elsewhere. This special issue offering empiri-cally-grounded, multi-disciplinary research engages with and expands on existing scholarship on Southeast Asia’s Chinese. By focusing on Indonesia and the Philippines, the articles in this special issue investigate diverse models of being Chinese in Southeast Asia and depart from the familiar paradigms offered by Singapore and Malaysia, where ethnic Chinese populations are in the highest proportions and hold significant political power, and where …

Section 377a Repeal: How To Handle Disagreements, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In a commentary, Professor David Chan (SMU Behavioural Sciences Initiative Director and Lee Kong Chian Professor of Psychology) discussed the repeal of Section 377A of the Penal Code and proposed adopting five practical approaches for a more constructive discussion on the emotive issue.

Low-Rank Panel Quantile Regression: Estimation And Inference, Yiren Wang, Yichong Zhang, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we propose a class of low-rank panel quantile regression models which allow for unobserved slope heterogeneity over both individuals and time. We estimate the heterogeneous intercept and slope matrices via nuclear norm regularization followed by sample splitting, row- and column-wise quantile regressions and debiasing. We show that the estimators of the factors and factor loadings associated with the intercept and slope matrices are asymptotically normally distributed. In addition, we develop two specification tests: one for the null hypothesis that the slope coefficient is a constant over time and/or individuals under the case that true rank of slope …

An Electrophysiological Examination Of Attentional Biases To Emotional Faces In Depression And Social Anxiety, Nathan M. Hager

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Cognitive theories have proposed that major depressive disorder (MDD) and social anxiety disorder (SAD) involve attentional biases toward and away from specific environmental stimuli. Research has often examined these biases in response to emotional facial expressions, but evidence of attentional biases is mixed. An event-related potential called the N2pc offers advantages over other measures of attentional bias and may clarify conflicting findings. Studies on the N2pc and social anxiety have found consistent results, but there is little work examining depression. Previous N2pc studies are limited by the types of emotional faces they use and by comparing attention for emotional faces …

Accounting For Toponyms With Multiple Classifiers In Colonial Valley Zapotec, Jasper E. Nash , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

Toponyms are place names which have certain common linguistic properties across languages. Toponyms are typically formed by the combination of descriptive morphemes and noun classifiers (Ursini 2017). Southern Zapotec (SZ) languages are primarily spoken in the Southern Sierra Madre region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Southern Zapotec toponyms appear to have similar structures compared to those in the four languages analyzed by Ursini (2017), with spatial classifiers and descriptive morphemes merging to create a phrase which carries spatial features. Beam de Azcona (2012) categorizes Southern Zapotec toponyms according to whether there are no classifiers, one classifier, or multiple classifiers, as well as …

Viable Verbs And Adjectives For Mandarin Reduplication, Carrie Zhang , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

In Chen Wang’s 2021 paper, the verb mingbai is used an example to prove his claim that for an AB word that could “be used potentially as either a verb or an adjective, its ABAB form tends to be verbal while its AABB form tends to be adjectival,” a claim that is also substantiated in Huang et. al (2009). As far as mingbai goes, this trend appears to be true, but does it apply to adjectives such as xuxin as well? This brief paper tests whether the claim about Chinese reduplication patterns holds true for other AB phrases, and looks …

Translation Al Mercato Del Pesce: The Importance Of Human Input For Machine Translation, Emma Y. Schechter , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

This thesis investigates translation of Italian idioms and metaphors into English, and the difficulties encountered by Machine Translation in this process. I use a framework of foreign concepts to explain many of the difficulties, as well as interviews with native Italian and English speakers to provide further context for the cultural knowledge encoded in figurative language. I conclude that in Machine Translation a consistent human input interface as well as a continuous training in language corpora is crucial to improve the accuracy of translated metaphors and idioms, using Italian to English translation as a case study.