Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Stable Science and Fickle Bodies: An Examination of Trust and the Construction of Expertise on r/SkincareAddiction(2023) DeCusatis, Cara Maria; Sauter, M.R.; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While there is considerable research on the topic of trust when it comes to health information or news media, there is less work examining how trust and expertise are conceptualized for information that may straddle both subjective and objective approaches to knowledge. In this thesis, I use the subreddit r/SkincareAddiction as a field site to examine how users construct skincare expertise and position skincare expertise in relation to formalized bioscience and experiential knowledge. Building on Science and Technology Studies’ theories of lay expertise and embodiment, I investigate how users interpret, share, and enact skincare and subreddit competence, discern trustworthy information, and negotiate the boundaries of science. Through a grounded theory analysis of subreddit posts and comments, I argue that r/SkincareAddiction users engage in forms of boundary work to preserve the expertise of medical professionals and the perceived infallibility of science. I argue that such delineations both uphold formalized systems of expertise and make space for alternative, community-specific forms of skincare expertise. This community-specific expertise is reified through community norms and agreed upon beliefs, such as the understanding that “your mileage may vary” and “everyone’s skin is different”. I situate these community beliefs within feminist understandings of embodied knowledge and argue that these beliefs are what afford users participation in “expert” conversations from which they might otherwise be excluded.Item The Paradox of Expertise: U.S. Abortion Law from 1973-2022(2023) Farhat, Aya H; Parry-Giles, Shawn; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the last fifty years, abortion rights in the United States have gone from being criminalized in most states, to being legal on a federal level, to being regulated through individual state legislatures. In 1973, the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade granted fecund persons a federal right to abortion for the first time in this nation’s history. To do so, the Supreme Court conceived of abortion rights within a rhetoric of expertise. The Court relied on legal, medical, and personal conceptions of expertise as knowledge, procedure, and deference to ground abortion rights in a precedent of privacy tied to the trimester framework. Since its codification, multiple cases at the Supreme Court and lower court levels have challenged the precedent established in Roe. These challenges have worked to both protect and constrict fecund persons’ abortion rights to various degrees. Each of these post-Roe cases have reconfigured the triangulation of expertise to make sense of abortion rights in their particular political and temporal moments. For instance, the landmark abortion case Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) sought to reinforce the precedent in Roe by clarifying its legal and medical inconsistencies with the undue burden standard. Thirty years later, the Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) decided such inconsistencies warranted returning the abortion decision back to the states. The ability for abortion rights to undergo such a significant shift legally exposes the rhetorical paradox of expertise. The last fifty years of abortion law indicates the inability of legal and medical knowledge and procedures to consistency define the boundaries of legal abortion. But it also shows how the Court has deferred to these expert institutions time and time again to first expand, and then constrict, fecund persons’ personal expertise over the abortion decision. The Paradox of Expertise explores the complex triangulation of expertise in abortion law through an analysis of three pivotal U.S. Supreme Court cases: Roe (1973), Casey (1992), and Dobbs (2022). In each of these cases, the justices interpreted this triangulation in differential ways to shift the boundaries of legal abortion. In Chapter One, I explore how Roe read the legal-medical history of abortion to authorize the trimester framework and regulate fecund persons’ abortion rights and expertise. By regulating abortion through the trimester framework, the Court entangled legal, medical, and personal expertise in a complex web that ultimately privileged legal and medical expertise throughout a fecund person’s pregnancy. In Chapter Two, I analyze Casey to show how the Court responded to the ambiguities presented by the trimester framework. In Casey, the Court reinterpreted the precedent in Roe to affirm abortion rights under an undue burden standard. Because the Court failed to define this standard in a consistent manner, future courts continued to battle over the ambiguities of abortion law. In Chapter Three, I examine the decision in Dobbs to show how such legal battles over expertise allowed the Court to reinterpret abortion history and warrant returning the abortion issue back to the states. But because the Dobbs Court failed to clarify the past inconsistencies in abortion law, state legislators, medical physicians, and fecund persons struggle to make sense of the legal, medical, and personal barriers to abortion access in the present moment. Today, the current landscape of abortion politics is still mired in the paradox of expertise that foreshadows the long road ahead for pro-abortion advocates and those seeking abortion access and care.Item INVESTIGATING DIFFERENCES IN STRUCTURAL KNOWLEDGE AND METACOGNITIVE PROCESSES AMONG LAY HELPERS ADVANCED STUDENTS AND SENIOR PROFESSIONAL THERAPISTS(2011) London, Kevin; Kivlighan, Dennis M; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Therapist expertise is associated with the use of complex knowledge structures and metacognitive processes. A cross sectional ex-post facto design assessed differences in structural knowledge and metacognitive processes between lay helpers, advanced students, and senior professional therapists. A card sorting task involving 19 therapist intentions was used to assess the following structural knowledge indicators: minutes to complete a card sort, number of card sort categories, and card sort score. Metacognitive processes were assessed using an adaptation of the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory and the Self-reflection subscale of the Self-Reflection and Insight subscales. An inverse U shaped relationship was found in where compared to lay helpers and senior professional therapists; advanced student's had higher card sort scores, indicative of greater consistency with a sample of experienced therapists. Compared to lay helpers and advanced students, senior professional therapists used significantly more time to sort therapist intentions and sorted intentions into a greater number of categories. Relative to metacognitive process, advanced students and senior professional therapists reported significantly greater knowledge of cognition than lay helpers. Also, advanced students also reported greater self-reflection than both lay helpers and senior professional therapists. Discriminant analysis assessed the potential for a linear combination of structural knowledge indicators and metacognitive processes to differentiate participants by level of therapist development. Self-reflection and card sort scores discriminated advanced students from senior professionals, whereas knowledge of cognition and minutes to complete the card sort discriminated experienced professionals from lay helpers. Multidimensional scaling analysis was used to assess the optimal structural configuration of the pooled card sort data and yielded a 4 dimensional solution of the 19 therapist intentions. Results were consistent with Skovholt and Ronnestad's (1992) model of therapist professional development. Results also supported the attenuating effect of ill defined problems on problem solving ability of highly experienced individuals in their respective domain. The study concludes with implications for training, therapy, and research.Item INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN DOMAIN-SPECIFIC BELIEFS ABOUT WRITING, WRITING SELF-EFFICACY, WRITING APPREHENSION, AND WRITING PERFORMANCE IN UNDERGRADUATES(2010) Sanders-Reio, Joanne; Alexander, Patricia A.; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Writing has been called the "neglected `R'" in the traditional trilogy of reading, `riting, and `rithmetic (National Commission on Writing, 2003). Writing performance continues to languish, despite societal expectations that students should be able to write clearly and precisely. Sociocognitive theory predicts that writing beliefs are related to writing performance. Much research has focused on writing self-efficacy beliefs and their link to writing apprehension and writing performance, while research exploring another type of belief, domain-specific beliefs about writing itself, is sparse. This study examined the relations between these beliefs about writing, writing self-efficacy, and writing apprehension, and their links to writing performance. This research was a three-phase study. Phases I and II involved instrument construction and validation, while Phase III examined the relations among the research variables. Two hundred eighty-seven Hispanic women students completed a test battery in class measuring demographics, beliefs about writing, writing self-efficacy, and writing apprehension. Writing performance was measured separately on an authentic writing task, a take-home paper, by both an overall grade and six component grades. Inter-rater agreements on these grades ranged from r = .83 to .91. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that beliefs about writing independently predicted writing performance and that some beliefs about writing (e.g., Good writers adapt their message to their readers) are adaptive and associated with strong writing performance, while other beliefs about writing (e.g., Readers are impressed by big words) are maladaptive and relate to weak writing performance. In addition, apprehension about making grammatical and other mechanical errors had a stronger negative effect on writing performance than the more traditional concept of writing apprehension, which concerns sharing one's writing with others and having it critiqued. After controlling for domain-specific beliefs, writing self-efficacy weakly predicted writing performance as well. These results support the need for future research examining the relations among the research variables and writing performance in samples that are more balanced with respect to gender and ethnicity, and with other writing tasks. Because beliefs about writing demonstrated the largest beta weights in the regression equations, these beliefs may have the most promise for promoting both writing research and practice.Item Understanding the Class Enemy: Foreign Policy Expertise in East Germany(2009) Scala, Stephen J.; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study makes use of reports, resolutions, analyses, and other internal documents as well as oral history interviews in order to detail the construction, functioning, and output of foreign policy expertise in the GDR. Subordination to the practical needs and political-ideological requirements of the leadership of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) represented the defining feature of East German foreign policy expertise. Yet its full politicization, which was essentially complete by the late 1960s as the SED succeeded in establishing a comprehensive system of foreign policy expertise tailored to meet its particular vision, entailed the maintenance of a degree of professional and intellectual autonomy--the GDR's Aussenpolitiker, or foreign policy professionals, were expected not only to comply with the political and ideological postulates espoused by the party leadership but also to deliver sound, specialist analysis of international relations. The persistent tension between these contrasting objectives was directly reflected in the output of East German experts, who in the conditions of diplomatic isolation prevailing until the early 1970s formulated a GDR-specific conception of international relations that fused clear identification of East Germany's realpolitical interests with the Marxist-Leninist notion of foreign policy as a form of class struggle. Following foreign policy normalization in the first half of the 1970s, however, increasing specialization and professionalization matched with a dramatic increase in East German experts' exposure to the capitalist West, including integration into a transnational network of foreign policy specialists, allowed the specialist element of expertise to gain preponderance over the dogmatic-ideological element. The great challenge to the international position of the Soviet Bloc and the GDR represented by the "second Cold War" in the first half of the 1980s then prompted East German experts to abandon simplistic adherence to Marxist-Leninist foreign policy dogma in favor of prioritization of the concrete realpolitical interests of the GDR. In the process, the GDR's experts formulated a body of non-dogmatic foreign policy thought that mirrored the Soviet New Thinking without taking on its comprehensiveness or overt rejection of inherited postulates.