College of Letters and Sciences: Social Sciences

The following are abstracts from projects funded in 2001 to the present.

Anthropology

  • This project is an archaeological analysis of a site known as Ruby Cave. Analysis will include radiocarbon dating, photographs and a visit to the site.
  • I am proposing to visit archaeological sites in Mexico to study Mayan influences on the cultures of Central Mexico
  • Examine prehistoric shell bead currency exchange systems in California by further developing a method for sourcing marine-shell beads to Northern and Southern California production centers.
  • Samples from hearth features will be collected during the excavation of two abandoned Inughuit winter houses at Etah, Northwestern Greenland. They will be analyzed using archaeomagnetism to determine when the hearths were produced and whether the hearth features are contemporaneous.
  • I am seeking the PUF to travel to southern Russia to obtain data to complete my research project during the summer of 2006 for the honors thesis.

Communication

  • My mission is to increase awareness and knowledge about anorexia nervosa, bulimia, obsessive exercising, overeating, and binging among undergraduate students of UC Davis. I want to encourage organizations such as the Student Health Center, the Administration, and Women's Resource Center to provide outlets for those individuals seeking help, guidance and information about proper nutrition, exercise, and media's influence on self-image. I want to increase awareness by __% during the 2003-2004 academic school year. The latter will be determined by a pre-test survey.
  • This project is a part of a larger vision in which we are interested in analyzing the relationship between nontraditional students and the implications for curricular response. Specifically, this project involves gathering interview data and synthesizing the responses in meaningful ways.

Economics

  • My purpose for writing this honors thesis is to explore the healthcare systems currently in use in other countries, most notably, those of northern and western Europe and Japan. Specifically, to develop the reader's understanding of private and public healthcare and the consequences of the two. Much of the levels. However, while economic arguments for many aspects of socialized medicine are strong, some healthcare systems deemed highly social have experienced substantial problems in certain areas. My hope is to expound on the various facets of public healthcare, in the process, creating a more mature comprehension its virtues and drawbacks.
  • In this honors thesis project, I investigate the economics of independence for today's overseas territories. I plan to use panel data of numerous economic indicators in both remaining overseas territories and newly independent small-island states, since the 1950's, and to analyze the gathered data with advanced econometric models.
  • For the past fifteen years, inflation in Colombia has been slowly and painfully falling from 20% per year to the current rate of 6%. My honors thesis will attempt to determine the methods used by the bank to lower the inflation rate as implied in its policy actions, compare these methods with the bank's official stance, provide analysis about how successful they were, and trace those events from 1991 to the present. To accomplish this, I propose to travel to the Colombian central bank in Bogotá, Colombia, to collect data in support of my economic honors project. the objective of the trip is to utilize the resources of the bank's library and draw upon the expertise of the central bank's researchers in compiling the thesis.

History

  • Investigation of the ways the Spanish were writing about and depicting the Sephardic Jews, those Jews of Iberian origin exiled during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, five hundred years after their departure. I will be looking at many old periodicals, newspapers, official accounts and books from the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in order to document this information. The great majority of the information will be in Spanish and will be coming out of Spain, and is therefore relatively hard to retrieve. I have seen that much of the bound versions of Spanish newspapers are kept in other libraries and research centers, namely NRLF and UCB collections, among others and I am requesting travel money to get to these sites since I am interested in looking through entire paper collections which would often be impossible to have sent.
  • This project will help answer questions regarding the process of Americanization of seventeenth century English Settlers through study of archaeological artifacts and historical documents.
  • An inquiry into the problems of female appetite in early modern England, focusing especially on cultural prescriptions for proper eating and perceptions of the female body.
  • A seven to ten day trip to Charleston, West Virginia to conduct research at the West Virginia State Archives. I will use this research to write a thesis paper on the creation of the state of West Virginia for the History Honors Program.
  • Travel to the University of Ibadan, Nigeria to use the private collection of papers of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. The collection will enable me to further study a Nigerian women's movement and complete my undergraduate history thesis.
  • An examination of archival materials including Cuban periodicals and oral histories so far as to further understand the extent of anti-Semitism in late 1930's Havana.
  • Using the newly-available records of the Old Bailey, I am studying the dynamics of relationships between servants who stole from their employers and examining the breakdown of trust.
  • This project will bring to light African contributions to contain livestock disease in the agricultural industry of South Africa's Cape Colony as it expanded from 1880-1910.
  • I propose to spend two days in the United States Library of Congress National Archives accessing and copying primary source documents necessary to complete a History Senior Honors Thesis on the negotiation of collective identity at National Socialist sites.
  • This project will discuss the culture of hybrid and conflicting identities in the work of Middle Eastern Diasporic artists residing and working within the United States from 2003 to the present, with a particular focus on gender and diasporic identity.

Linguistics

  • This project will examine the relationship between human sexuality and speech to discover how a sense of gay identity is expressed by lesbian/gay youth.

Political Science

  • I plan to study how the differing social policies and differing social realities present in East Asia and Latin America contributed to their economic growth (over the period of 1975-2000).
  • A look at ethnic dance in the everyday lives of village people in Ghana and Burkina Faso, West Africa. This study attempts to understand some of the reasons ethnic dances are so important in these people's lives. The end result will be a written report, a photo-collage, and the creation of a dance piece.
  • An empirical analysis of the three competing methods of state judicial selection and the quality of the judges produced by each.
  • Language as a Factor of Govenmental Participation and Efficacy among Hispanics

Psychology

  • I will be testing the hypothesis that low self-esteem is related to delinquency. I will be looking at multiple facets of self-esteem and their relations to delinquency. I will also be exploring potential moderators of this relations, such as gender and age. The proposed study will follow-up students who participated in a previous, cross-sectional study of self-esteem and delinquency.
  • The project will investigate the effects of manipulated self-esteem on an individual's decision-making and behavior in social affiliation and group formation. The student researcher will conduct an experiment using textile colors to determine where a participant will navigate whether (a) towards an individual wearing the same textile color as the participant does, (b) towards an individual wearing a different textile color, or (c) in an unpredictable way. Before exposing the participants to the affiliation-decision task, the researcher will manipulate the participant's self-esteem by decreasing, maintaining, or increasing positive self-concepts through a mathematical-computation task. Participants will also be asked to complete pre- and post-math task surveys.
  • I will test whether emotions expressions are more accurately identified when recognition occurs through automatic vs. deliberate, controlled processes.
  • Functional MRI will be used to investigate the neural substrates moderating rule storage and retrieval in the context of domestic and non-domestic traffic signs.
  • Simulating amnesia will affect memory and later recall of a crime event. The rehearsal conditions will have differing effects on memory and recall.
  • I will perform an experiment to find out if newspaper readers are less likely to believe unnamed, unattributed sources than identified sources.
  • An examination of the sharing of novel food items, by adult titi monkeys with infants, as a possible methods to teach proper diet choices.
  • Rattlesnake subjects are exposed to two different tail motions paired with noxious sand blasting to determine if evocativeness of these movements can be reinstated following experimental habituation.
  • The main goal of this study is to examine factors that influence impression formation during interracial interactions.
  • Determine if the brain is able to efficiently process and derive summary statistic of extremely complex stimuli such as emotional faces.
  • Investigating the causal relationship between shame and depression using a sample of women who recently had an abortion Sociology
  • I would like to do a research project through surveys and indepth interviews. I am interested in the relationship between the Hmong family and early marriages.
  • The Educating the Humane Child (EHC) Project, targeting at-risk elementary students, would develop age-appropriate curriculum units for instructors and design curriculum materials that may be used to educate at-risk children and their caregivers about animal care and advocacy, and to introduce them to philanthropy. the project will culminate in EHC: Cruelty-free Curriculum Resources for Educators (CCRE), documenting the process and my analysis that will be distributed to educators and researchers in hard copy form and via the internet.
  • I want to examine how police, demographics, and the media combine to influence the actual and perceived experiences of racial profiling by young adults in New York City. A New York Times Poll, done in January of 2000, attempts to uncover the racial tensions between minority communities and New York City police. My data will consist of this New York Times Poll along with my own analysis of newspapers and television archives. I want to accomplish three things: 1) determine the demographics of racial profiling in NYC 2) determine the rates of perceived racial profiling (those who believe it is widespread) and 3) determine if the media could be an external factor that influences perceptions of racial profiling. this project has some broader implications. for one, it could uncover generalizable demographics of racial victimization. Secondly, it could show the influence of media within community perceptions of racial tensions.
  • This research will examine the popular images of femininity, sexuality, and beauty presented to adolescent females in prom magazines compared to the actual expectations and experiences of these girls at the prom. I will use methods of "content analysis" for the prom media combined with ethnographic work (personal interviews, observation) of the girls I am studying.
  • Recent reports claim that African education is in crisis primarily due to mismanagement and a misallocation of funds. However, there are other sociocultural and historical factors involved, including the systematic exclusion of African traditions, and languages from the curricula. In 1969, A. Kondi reported resistance to formal education due to the latter sociocultural factors in his study of education in Bassar, Togo. I will build on Kondi's work through a longitudinal study designed to investigate the contemporary transformation of education in Bassar today. I will conduct household surveys and in-depth interviews with village leaders and school directors to determine if there continues to be resistance to western education in Bassar and the primary causes of this resistance. Even if no resistance is found, the results of my study will help identify the main sociocultural factors behind the educational crisis in Togo.
  • I hypothesize that freshman students' opinions may change during the first year of school and that the college environment may have a liberalizing effect on college students. I will examine this question by studying freshmen students' views on a variety of topics at two separate periods in time.
  • This study focuses on interviews with graduating high school students in order to find out how they make decisions about whether or not to continue their education after high school.
  • This study will examine the position of ceramics in the stratified fine art world and ceramic artists' perceptions of gender and stratification within ceramics fields.
  • Examine the effectiveness of the alternative schools within a school organization on student investment, participation and matriculation at Berkeley High.
  • This study will reassess Rockquemore and Brunsma's (2002) sociological theory of biracial identity formation among undergraduate students.

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