Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Barriers And Bridges To Intimacy: A Constellation Of Same-Sex Female Couples’ Experiences, Struggles And Strengths, Jenna K. Bennett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intimacy is central to romantic relationships, however, this aspect of experience has been largely unstudied in female couples. Further, few studies have looked at how minority stress and internalized homophobia impact these women’s experiences of intimacy. With a sample of 19 women, through self-report measures and a semi-structured interview, experiences of intimacy, the factors that impact intimacy, barriers to intimacy, and how couples bridge these barriers were explored. Quantitative analysis revealed an association between internalized homophobia and relationship satisfaction. Qualitative thematic analysis indicated that this group of women had a robust range of explicit and implicit experiences of intimacy. Further, …

The Online Impossible Anagram Task: Development And Testing Of A Novel Online Cheating Paradigm, Emily Joseph

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For the past fifteen years, the Russano et al. (2005) cheating paradigm has dominated research in the forensic psychological literature. While this paradigm successfully activates theoretical mechanisms for ethical decision-making, applying the methods for online data collection is cumbersome and retains a confound inherent in the design. Alternative cheating paradigms from both the psychology and economics literatures were evaluated for their suitability for an online cheating paradigm. The impossible anagram task was selected as most likely to elicit the same internal and external cost-benefit analyses online as the Russano et al. (2005) cheating paradigm does in-person: self-concept maintenance, ethical dissonance, …

The Effect Of Speaking Rate On Vowel Variability Based On The Uncontrolled Manifold Approach And Flow-Based Invertible Neural Network Modeling, Jaekoo Kang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Variability is intrinsic to human speech production. One approach to understand variability in speech is to decompose it into task-irrelevant (“good”) and task-relevant (“bad”) parts with respect to speech tasks. Based on the uncontrolled manifold (UCM) approach, this dissertation investigates how vowel token-to-token variability in articulation and acoustics can be decomposed into “good” and “bad” parts and how speaking rate changes the pattern of these two from the Haskins IEEE rate comparison database. Furthermore, it is examined whether the “good” part of variability, or flexibility, can be modeled directly from speech data using the flow-based invertible neural networks framework. The …

Telehealth Caregiver Training: Treating Food Selectivity Without Extinction, Christina M. Alaimo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Telehealth behavioral interventions are becoming increasingly necessary given limited accessibility for in-person services; while there is a growing evidence-base for these interventions, there are few applications for pediatric feeding disorders. Those studies that have evaluated telehealth feeding interventions have done so only after children received some form of in-person services. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a telehealth caregiver training package to teach caregivers to implement an alternative to escape extinction feeding intervention in their home to treat their child’s food selectivity. All three caregivers demonstrated high levels of correct performance following training and all children demonstrated increases …

The Effects Of Constant And Descending Criterion-Level Frequencies On Skill Acquisition Outcomes, Anna Budd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Higher levels of performance during skill acquisition predict higher levels of response maintenance, but less is known about how many observations of high levels of performance are needed to produce this effect of criterion levels. Across two experiments, we analyzed multiple criterion-level frequency values, or the number of observations of criterion-level performance during teaching. In Experiment 1, we taught children with disabilities target skills to 90% accuracy using constant criterion-level frequencies: one day versus three consecutive days. Across three participants and five comparisons, participants required fewer sessions to meet the terminal acquisition performance criterion when the frequency value was set …

Three Essays On Exchange Rate Models And Their Applications, Azza A. Mansour

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1: This chapter attempts to identify the determinant of exchange rate pass-through into producer and destination prices using highly disaggregated firm-level data of importers and exporters of the Egyptian economy from 2009 to 2013. The main findings assert the hypothesis of complete exchange rate pass-through into destination prices at the lowest level of significance for the average exporting firm that is also importing. Furthermore, the firm with the highest import intensity has a lower percentage of pass-through into destination prices, indicating that the marginal cost channel plays a more significant role in determining the speed of the exchange rate …

Covid, Immigrant Nonprofits, And Online Services: A Case Study Of An Esol Program In Queens, Sabrina Lara

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The coronavirus pandemic has presented challenges to both the public and private spheres of life. For public facing staff in nonprofit organizations, there has been a need to adapt service delivery from in-person to online services. This transition has presented benefits and challenges for participants, especially immigrants who regularly depend on nonprofits for different service needs, as well as nonprofit staff. This case study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement, an immigrant-serving nonprofit organization in Queens, New York, and it analyzes how they addressed the transition to fully online service delivery. This organization …

The Influence Of Evidence-Based Sex Discrimination Policies On Women’S Perceptions Of Organizational Climate, Sexism, And Identity Safety, Maya A. Godbole

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sexism has proven to be a stubborn barrier to women’s participation and advancement in workplaces and academic institutions (Rosette, Akinola, & Ma, 2017). Importantly, sexism in organizational settings has endured despite the implementation of federal, state, and organizational policies that prohibit discriminatory behavior. One reason for this may be that because organizational policies are typically written for the purpose of complying to federal and state laws, they do little to foster psychological safety among employees and address the “chilly” organizational climates that enable sexism. To that end, the current research aimed to (a) develop novel, evidence-based sex discrimination policies and …

From An Art To A Science: Features And Methodology In Computational Authorship Identification, Jonathan I. Manczur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nearly thirty years ago, the United States Supreme Court revaluated the criteria for accepting forensic science and expert testimony, challenging Forensic Linguistics to assert itself as a reputable science. Much work has been produced in the interim to that end, but much still needs to be accomplished to satisfy the judicial standards. Computational linguistics has the potential to provide that necessary analytical framework. This paper’s intent is two-fold. First, there are two competing theories on the proper features necessary to identify an unknown author. Four features were drawn from the syntactic computational linguistics tradition and four from computational stylometry to …

The Lopez Effect Remixed: The Significance Of Mattering Through A Hip-Hop Lens In Education And Beyond, Kashema Hutchinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this dissertation is to examine the theoretical frameworks of mattering (Rosenberg & McCullough, 1981; Schlossberg, 1989; Love, 2018) in traditional and non-traditional spaces through a Hip-hop lens. When mattering is applied to marginalized groups, it centers them to a certain extent. In my dissertation, I examine how Dr. Nadia Lopez, the former principal of junior high school, Mott Hall Bridges Academy (MHBA), employed mattering in her holistic approach to education. Her dedication to her students, faculty and staff went viral on the popular blog Humans of New York in January 2015. Lopez’s commitment is to “open a …

Put Yourself First (In A Sexy Way): Postfeminist Beauty Messaging And Resistant Media Texts, Margarita Artoglou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The makeover montage trope is one of the most recognizable in media content aimed at young women, sending the message that social status and acceptance are only a new outfit and face of makeup away. While this trope and its message have been heavily critiqued by scholars, the message that beauty—and all its social benefits—can be achieved through consumerism has not disappeared, though the means by which this message is conveyed has changed. As a result of companies co-opting feminist rhetoric, conforming to standards of beauty has been recast as a “choice” one makes for herself, often wrapped in the …

The Objective Function: Science And Society In The Age Of Machine Intelligence, Emanuel D. Moss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Machine intelligence, or the use of complex computational and statistical practices to make predictions and classifications based on data representations of phenomena, has been applied to domains as disparate as criminal justice, commerce, medicine, media and the arts, mechanical engineering, among others. How has machine intelligence become able to glide so freely across, and to make such waves for, these domains? In this dissertation, I take up that question by ethnographically engaging with how the authority of machine learning has been constructed such that it can influence so many domains, and I investigate what the consequences are of it being …

The Impact Of Local Demographic Change In The Contemporary United States, Christopher Maggio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Growing racial/ethnic diversity has undoubtedly made a major social and political impact in many localities across the United States in recent times. Various studies have addressed local reactions to this demographic change, most commonly highlighting backlash among the White population. This dissertation takes an in-depth look at the impact of these demographic changes on several key outcomes: the 2016 presidential election, White attitudes toward immigration policy, and perceptions of racism among racial/ethnic minorities that may emerge as a result of White backlash. These studies are careful to examine particular subsamples that may be more or less susceptible to backlash or …

The Effect Of Psilocybin On Personality, Ravital Labua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As classic psychedelics are increasingly legalized and reintroduced into the psychotherapeutic frame, a deeper understanding of their effect on personality and overall wellbeing - as well as their clinical contraindications and potential pitfalls - will prove essential. As a result, this study represents a preliminary investigation into the effect of psilocybin exposure on a range of personality constructs.

Methods: Data was collected through a collaboration with The Psychedelic Society, an organization that legally administers psilocybin truffles in the Netherlands to self-selecting retreat attendees who have been screened for mental health disorders in accordance with Johnson et al.’s (2008) widely accepted …

Afterlives Of Discovery: Speculative Geographies In The Colombian Political Landscape, Heidi A. Rhodes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers how the temporal remains of the Age of Discovery and its doctrine persist in a racial-geographical ranking of human and non-human, terrestrial and planetary life and worth. Across this work, I interpret a series of historical moments and their objects of speculative geographic cultural production: a state mapping program, a painting, a biomedical project, a de-monumenting protest action. As repositories of codified belief and repertoires of Discovery’s political and affective modes of racialized domination, I read these materials from the Colombian archives of coloniality and liberalism to illuminate their implications for Colombia’s national becoming as a liberal …

Treatment, Diagnostic, Demographic, And Historical Factors Affecting Mental Health Diversion Outcomes, Amanda L. Reed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The deinstitutionalization movement, which began in the 1950s and culminated in the closure of most psychological institutions by the 1980s, promised to usher in a new era of community mental health (Torrey et al., 2010). While the movement, which began largely due to advances in psychological treatment and the exposure of widespread abuses in asylums, was well-intentioned, it ultimately created new problems for people experiencing mental illness. Many of the programs designed to handle the influx of newly-released patients were never fully funded or well-received (Human Rights Watch, 2003). The criminal justice landscape also changed dramatically around the same time, …

Dream City: Post-Millennials And Millennials Navigate School, Work, And Housing In New York City, Omar Montana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the experiences of the “Post-Millennial” (those born after 1996) and “Millennial” (those born between 1981 - 1996) generations, as they pursue their dreams of studying, working and living in New York City. According to Karl Mannheim’s (1923) classic formulation, a “generation” can be perceived as a particular type of social location typified by common “patterns of experience and thought”. Through seventy-five in-depth interviews, the qualitative data revealed a social location characterized by a common pattern of “time is money” – as the German theorist Georg Simmel (1903) postulated more than a century ago – and stress as …

Lexical Stress Realization In Mandarin Second Language Learners Of English: An Acoustic And Articulatory Study, Boram Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigated the acoustic and articulatory correlates of lexical stress in Mandarin second language (L2) learners of English, as well as in first language (L1) speakers. The present study used a minimal pair respective to stress location (e.g., OBject versus obJECT) obtained from a publicly available Mandarin Accented English Electromagnetic articulography corpus dataset. In the acoustic domain, the use of acoustic parameters (duration, intensity, F0, and vowel quality) was measured in stressed and unstressed vowels. In the articulatory domain, the positional information from tongue tip (TT), tongue dorsum (TD), upper lip (UL), lower lip (LL), and jaw (JAW) were …

A Student Conduct Administrator’S Journey To Wellness, Corie Amanda Marie Mccallum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation research chronicles my experiences with emotions and learning as a student conduct administrator throughout the arduous process of investigating, becoming, and transforming by engaging sociocultural theory. Grounded in Authentic Inquiry (Tobin, 2006), this research centers my lived-experience and nuances the role of emotions in student affairs and especially student conduct practices. Throughout this dissertation I address themes surrounding reflexivity (Bourdieu, 1992), emotions (Turner, 2002) (Collins, 2004), and self-care. Each chapter is interpretive and impressionistic and represents my thinking as a researcher and conduct administrator. Throughout the chapters I narrate salient events and experiences in my student conduct practice …

Evaluation Of The Potential Of Automated Sem-Eds Analysis For The Discrimination Of Inorganic Soil Particles, Anna S. Duggar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Soil, that complex mixture of minerals, organic particles, chemicals, and anthropogenic materials, is ubiquitous and easily transferred, which gives it forensic relevance. Forensic soil analysis has traditionally included the identification and comparison of both organic and inorganic components, the inorganic portion being most commonly examined by light microscopy and other instrumental techniques. Predominantly, the inorganic materials in soil are naturally-occurring minerals, contributed as grains from the surrounding bedrock, which gives a soil its regional character. That parent material then undergoes physical, chemical, and anthropogenic changes producing wide geographic variation within a single region. This variation forms the basis for potential …

Psilocybin Newspaper Coverage – Sentiment And Frequency (1989-2020), Dax Oliver

Publications and Research

A growing body of medical research has focused on the chemical compound psilocybin in recent years. However, this research is not merely a scientific issue but also a social and political one. In the 1960s, psilocybin and other psychedelics were often ingested outside of research settings. This alarmed many people, resulting in severe legal restrictions on psilocybin research. Today, many psilocybin advocates hope that it will avoid the negative public sentiment of the 1960s. To help gauge public sentiment about other psychoactive compounds, some studies have examined newspaper coverage. The present study hoped to build a similar gauge with newspaper …

Emergency Procurement And Responses To Covid-19: The Case Of Singapore, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

As one of the busiest trade and travel hubs in the world, Singapore quickly became the worst affected of all countries by COVID-19 in the very early stages of the pandemic. For example, on 5 February 2020, two weeks after the unprecedented lockdown in Wuhan by the Central Government of China, Singapore had the highest infection rate (24 cases out of a population of 5 million) in the world, higher than China (20,502 cases out of a population of 1.5 billion).1 Alongside the health emergency, Singapore also had to cope with another emergency as countries around the world, in a …

Choice Of Law For Formation Of Contracts: Solomon Lew V Kaikhushru Shiavax Nargolwala, Adeline Chong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis Comparing Integrated And Malaria-Only Social And Behavior Change Programming In Nigeria: Initial Costing Data, Avenir Health

Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights, and Choices

Breakthrough RESEARCH is conducting an effectiveness evaluation of social and behavior change (SBC) programming implemented by Breakthrough ACTION in Nigeria, comparing an integrated SBC program in Kebbi and Sokoto states with a malaria-only SBC program in Zamfara state. Using these results on impact, a cost-effectiveness analysis will determine which approach is more cost-effective in achieving improvements in health. This report presents estimated costs for the initial stage of the project, from April 2018 through December 2019, in the three northern states where the study is being conducted.

Subnational Map Of Poverty Generated From Remote-Sensing Data In Africa: Using Machine Learning Models And Advanced Regression Methods For Poverty Estimation, Lionel N. Hanke

Master's Theses

According to the 2020 poverty estimates from the World Bank, it is estimated that 9.1% - 9.4% of the global population lived on less than $1.90 per day. It is estimated that the Covid-19 pandemic further aggravated the issue by pushing more than 1% of the global population below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day (WorldBank, 2020). To provide help and formulate effective measures, poverty needs to be located as exact as possible. For this purpose, it was investigated whether regression methods with aggregated remote-sensing data could be used to estimate poverty in Africa. Therefore, five distinct regression …

Medication Assisted Treatment: Examining Enrollment And Demographic Factors Of Treatment, Antwana Letoya Drayton

Theses and Dissertations

Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) has been a long-standing epidemic concern related to the continuous growth of variations of the substance and its’ potency. Due to the versatility of the substance to be both an illicit drug and also a prescription medication, the interest in controlling and monitoring its’ use creates a greater public health concern. Treatment overtime has been revitalized to directly address the social, biological, and physiological difficulties of patients with OUDs. Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) has been explored and has become one of the most widely used plans for treatment of Substance Use Disorders (SUDs) related to pain …

Adaptability As A Moderator On The Impact Of Childhood Sexual Abuse And The Development Of Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms, Courtney Marie Kalmanson

Theses and Dissertations

Globally, it is estimated that 11.8% children experience Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA) prior to the age of 18 (Stoltenborgh et al., 2011). However, the current prevalence rate of CSA is far underestimated due to the fear, shame, and denial that the victim experiences. Similarly, many survivors of CSA experience post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) following the experience of CSA, which may develop into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) over time. Furthermore, some children may adjust well despite the traumatic experience, suggesting resiliency. Much of the research on CSA focuses on the link between CSA and development of psychopathology, including but not limited …

Employment Changes During Covid-19, Mathieu Despard, Sam Bufe, Stephen Roll, Katie Kristensen

Social Policy Institute Research

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. unemployment peaked at 14.4%. While some workers have returned to payrolls, others have been left behind. This brief examines the nuances of employment changes over the course of the pandemic and the impact of those changes on household financial well-being. Our study finds that the proportion of employees who were laid off peaked in the spring of 2020 and has only recently returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Meanwhile, self-employment rose during the pandemic by 42% between the springs of 2020 and 2021. In households where someone lost a job during the pandemic, rates of financial …

The Victims’ Voices: A Routine Activity Approach To Jail And Prison Victimization, Victor St. John

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study explores the occurrence of victimization while incarcerated in American jails and prisons. Consistent with the Routine Activity Approach – which explains that victimization occurs due to the convergence of a suitable target and a motivated offender in time and space, and the absence of a capable guardian, handler, and place manager –, this study investigates the applicability of the approach within the correctional setting, namely the influence of place management, access to informal guardians, and the victims’ perception of correctional officers’ capability on preventing victimization (the formal guardian). A mixed methods design was employed, analyzing 87 semi-structured interviews …

Semantic Network Activation Contributes To The Relationship Between Mood And Inhibition, James S. Maniscalco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prior research has identified several relationships between mood and executive functions. Very broadly, these findings generally suggest that positive moods are associated with enhanced cognitive performance, particularly in working memory and learning. However, recent studies note that there are some instances in which negative moods may benefit select executive skills, such as those involved in divided attention and inhibition. In sum, these findings indicate that positive moods favor top-down, heuristic, or relational processing, whereas negative trait moods favor bottom-up, detail-oriented processing. However, a clear mechanism by which these effects occur has yet to be identified.

The most compelling theories that …