College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/8
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Factors Contributing to the Experience of State Loneliness(2020) Rinderknecht, Robert Gordon; Lucas, Jeffrey W; Doan, Long; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I examine the factors that contribute to the experience of loneliness in daily life (i.e., state loneliness). In the first study, I propose that being alone is most likely to lead to feelings of loneliness when a person is expected to be social, relative to moments when there is less of an expectation to be social. In the second study, I propose that how people engage with others has implications for how lonely they will feel in a situation, and that the importance of how they engage with others will partly depend on the kinds of people present in the situation. In the third study, I propose that engagement with romantic partners will be less beneficial for avoiding state loneliness when experiencing work-schedule conflict, due to the detriment such conflict may have on relationship quality. The lack of research on state loneliness is related to the difficulty of collecting data during or near the moment in which it is experienced. In this dissertation, I overcome this challenge by developing a platform that allowed participants to conveniently provide the time-diary data utilized in all three studies. In Study 1, I found, as expected, that participants felt loneliest when isolated during normatively social times. Unexpectedly, normatively social activities and locations did not associate with the strongest feelings of state loneliness. Results for Study 2 came out largely as expected—engaging in a shared task (active engagement) associated with lower rates of state loneliness relative to mere co-presence (passive engagement), and the benefit of active over passive engagement was strongest among weak ties and, unexpectedly, family members. Lastly, as expected, results from Study 3 show that work-schedule conflict associated with heightened loneliness when engaging with romantic partners. Unexpectedly, this appears to be less related to relationship quality between romantic partners and more related to the association between work-schedule conflict and participants reporting being generally lonely. Results from these studies show how factors ranging from broad cultural beliefs to small changes in engagement influence the experience of loneliness throughout a day, while unexpected findings highlight the need for further research.Item Effects of Participant Displeasure on the Social-Psychological Study of Power on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk(Sage, 2019) Rinderknecht, Robert GordonRecall-based power priming is a popular research design that is widely disliked by Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers. This article assesses the potential consequences of such displeasure through a conceptual replication of Fast et al. on MTurk. Specifically, this article assesses the extent to which recall-based priming can elicit a sense of high power and positive emotion. Findings indicate that being primed with a sense of high power through recall does not elicit the expected positive change in emotion. Findings also indicate that recall-based priming is a less effective manipulation of power than an alternative priming method with which participants were more willing to participate. Unlike the recall-based prime, this alternative prime also replicated Fast et al.’s original findings. These results are attributed to the incompatibility between feeling powerful and participating in a disliked study design. Findings highlight the importance of addressing worker displeasure in power research, and this article suggests how displeasure can be avoided as well as how such displeasure may be a detriment to other areas of research.