College of Behavioral & Social Sciences

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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..

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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Using Risk to Assess the Legal Violence of Mandatory Detention
    (MDPI, 2016-07-05) Koulish, Robert
    Immigration mandatory detention is a particularly harsh example of the structural violence embedded in immigration enforcement. It deprives liberty without bond for immigrants with prior crimes, and assigns many individuals to the harsh conditions associated with unnecessary and even wrongful detention. Mandatory detention has been justified on the grounds that mandatory detainees are a danger to public safety. This article puts to the test this presumption of dangerousness among mandatory detainees, and finds, to the contrary, that immigrants with prior charges or convictions are no more dangerous than any other category of individuals in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. Using the risk classification assessment (RCA) tool, which the author is the first to obtain through the Freedom of Information Act, the article contributes to the growing criticism of mandatory detention, providing evidence that many of those in mandatory detention should probably have never been detained.
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    Perfectionism and eating disorder symptoms: An analysis of the protective effects of ethnic identity in female Latinx college students
    (2023) Cerrato, Stephanie; O'Neal, Colleen; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Disordered eating in college student populations is highly prevalent. Even so, eating disorder research has largely centered on risk and protective factors relevant to White women, while neglecting to focus on the experiences of people with marginalized identities. The current cross-sectional study a) assessed the relation between evaluative concerns and strivings subscales of perfectionism on disordered eating symptoms in Latinx college women, and b) determined if a high sense of ethnic identity may moderate this relation such that as ethnic identity increases, the effects of perfectionism on disordered eating symptoms decreases. Latinx women from a Mid-Atlantic university (n = 113) completed self-report questionnaires of perfectionism, ethnic identity, and disordered eating. Results revealed that evaluative concerns was a positive predictor of dietary restraint, shape and weight over-evaluation, and body dissatisfaction. Moderation results were non-significant.
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    Essays on Migration and Health
    (2013) Knaup, Amy E.; Betancourt, Roger; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Migration is often thought of as a risky endeavor in which a migrant trades a known low return for an unknown but potentially higher return. However, migration has been empirically linked to insurance mechanisms through remittances. Chapter 1 unifies the risk-taking and insurance-seeking behaviors of migration into a single framework by framing the migration decision as one of income diversification in which multiple agents within a household to decide whether or not to migrate. Each migration strategy (no migration, partial migration, and full household migration) has its associated risks which are weighed against the returns the household could gain through choice of that particular migration strategy. I test the framework by estimating the probability of each migration strategy for Indonesian households during the period 1993-1998. The framework performs reasonably well in the case of urban households. However, the framework's predictions do not hold as well for rural households, which may be linked to the fact that they function within a larger insurance network than the nuclear family. In Chapter 2, I find that the response of return migration to GDP per capita can differentiate migrants who are seeking increased consumption for their household (i.e., consumption-oriented migrants) from migrants with intentions to invest at origin (i.e., investment-oriented migrants). Each type of migrant should have differential responses to GDP per capita at destination and may have differential responses to GDP per capita at origin. Using data on Mexican households between 1992-2002, I show that migrants returning from the USA exhibit characteristics of consumption-oriented migrants and migrants returning from internal locations exhibit characteristics of investment-oriented migrants. Chapter 3 is a published work in collaboration with Sandra Decker, Jalpa Doshi, and Daniel Polsky which uses Medicare claims data linked to two different surveys--the National Health Interview Survey and the Health and Retirement Study--to describe the relationship between insurance status before age 65 years and the use of Medicare-covered services beginning at age 65 years. Although we do not find statistically significant differences in Medicare expenditures or in the number of hospitalizations by previous insurance status, we do find that individuals who were uninsured before age 65 years continue to use the healthcare system differently from those who were privately insured.
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    Essays On Labor Economics: Human Capital Risk And Labor Market Outcomes And Learning By Doing In Medicine
    (2006-06-06) Tristao, Ignez Miranda; Rust, John P.; Sanders, Seth; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation consists of two essays. In the first essay I show that there are substantial differences in unemployment durations and reemployment outcomes for workers coming from different occupations. I argue that this variation can be explained by differences in occupational employment risk, arising from two sources: (1) the diversification of occupational employment across industries; and (2) the volatility of industry employment fluctuations, including sectoral co-movements. I define and estimate a measure of occupational employment risk (OER), which I relate to unemployment durations and wage losses. My results indicate that unemployed workers in high employment risk occupations, as defined by the OER measure, have 5 percent lower hazard ratios of leaving unemployment to a job in the same occupation and have 5 percent higher wage losses upon reemployment than workers in low OER occupations. Among occupational switchers, workers in higher OER occupations have 11.5 percent higher wage losses than workers in lower OER occupations. In my second essay, I and my co-authors estimate the effect of physician's experience on health outcomes. It is a common belief that experience can improve the level of skills, which suggests that there may be some learning by doing with practice. Economists have tried to empirically determine the existence of learning by doing in the medical area, because of its important policy implications. However, it is difficult to define and measure health outcomes since they are affected by patient selection and underlying conditions, making it hard to disentangle learning by doing from other effects. In this paper, we use a 'clean-cut' medical procedure that allows us to overcome those confounding issues. We use refractive eye surgery, an operation with a well-defined eligibility criterion and objective measures of previous condition and posterior outcome, which depend minimally on post-surgical care. The data used in the study is a two-year longitudinal census of refractive surgery patients collected by us from individual patients' chart. We find that the learning is coming more from the improvement in the surgical center's ability to translate the surgical plan into the desired eyesight correction rather than from the accumulation of the physician experience.
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    Narrative and Selfhood in the Antidepressant Era
    (2006-05-30) Stepnisky, Jeffrey Nicholas; Ritzer, George; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation is a study of the relationship between antidepressant medications, self-understanding, and the narrative construction of self. The analysis relied upon two kinds of empirical data. First, advertisements for antidepressants in popular magazines, television, and online promotional websites were collected. Second, interviews were conducted with 23 people who were taking or had taken antidepressant medications. It is argued that antidepressants are components of the larger social processes of risk, biomedicalization, and individualization. In contrast to a narrative view, which conceives selfhood as a dialogical and embodied achievement, the antidepressants participate in a set of discourses that sustain atomistic conceptions of the self. The analysis emphasizes the personal agency that antidepressant users bring to bear upon their use of antidepressants. Chapter one is an introduction to theories of risk, individualization, and narrative as well as the ways in which narrative and selfhood are potentially transformed through the use of antidepressants. Chapter two offers an analysis of three theoretical conceptualizations of the relationship between biomedicine and selfhood: naturalism, poststructuralism and the narrative-hermeneutic perspective adopted in the dissertation. Chapter three analyzes the advertising materials emphasizing the manner in which relationships are constructed between selfhood, biology, and antidepressant medications. Chapters four, five, and six introduce interview materials in order to examine: a) how people learn to use antidepressants and in doing so come to split-off and manage unwanted elements of their selves, b) the ways in which the popular discourse of authenticity (being a "real" self) is transformed in the encounter with antidepressants, and c) the manner in which the antidepressants are taken up in social institutions such as the family. The dissertation concludes with a reflection upon the implications of a shift from a form of selfhood composed in narrative and relationship, to a form of post-social selfhood composed through the use of technologies such as antidepressants.
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    The Private Life of Public Health: Managing Chronic Disease in an Era of Neoliberal Governmentality
    (2005-04-11) Glasgow, Sara Mae; Pirages, Dennis C.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) such as heart disease and cancer account for over half of the global mortality burden, and are the leading cause of death in every region of the world except Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this, they remain off the analytical radarscope in political science. This silence has been coupled with the tendency of public health researchers to frame NCDs as apolitical--largely a product of an individual's risk behaviors. Such an accounting depoliticizes NCDs, as well as public health approaches to their analysis and prevention. This project's central aim is to introduce a political analysis of chronic disease, demonstrating that public health approaches to NCDs exhibit political rationality. To that end, I explore several questions. How are NCDs accounted in behavioral terms, and how are their risks constructed as apolitical in the public health discourse? Additionally, if public health is presented as a domain of neutral science, how is it that its practices increasingly display market values, including a limited role for the state, a preoccupation with cost efficiency and choice, and the cultivation of the entrepreneurial self who sees her health as a site of investment? To answer these, I employ a discursive approach, specifically Foucault's framework of government rationality, or "governmentality." It is through the deployment of neoliberal governmentality in three spheres - knowledge, power, and subjectivity - that public health reveals itself not a neutral science, but rather one brimming with the values and logic of the private sector. I develop this argument through a critique of the discipline and practices of public health in three cases: the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden. Despite exhibiting historically different approaches to health and social welfare, all three show a marked manifestation of neoliberal rationality in public health approaches to chronic disease. The consistency of these findings, in addition to the more general features of the public health discourse, thus allow a conclusion that public health approaches to NCDs are not value-neutral, and are indeed a political phenomenon.
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    Evaluating cognitive sequential risk-taking models: Manipulations of the stochastic process
    (2004-08-23) Pleskac, Timothy Joseph; Wallsten, Thomas S; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation evaluates, refines, and extends to a new paradigm, a set of stochastic models that describe the cognitive processes of individuals while they complete multiple trials of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART; Lejuez et al., 2002). Wallsten, Pleskac, and Lejuez (2004) designed the models using prospect theory and a Bayesian learning process to better understand why the BART correlates so well with self-reported risky behaviors. The models differed in terms of the individuals' beliefs of the task's probabilistic structure and when option evaluations occur. The models revealed that although respondents use a Bayesian learning process to understand the task, they misunderstand the BART's stochastic process as stationary. Results also indicated that individuals' attitudes toward outcomes are, in part, a source of the BART's success. From these conclusions a new task was developed that allows manipulations of both the actual stochastic structure and the individuals' level of knowledge regarding the structure. Participants (N = 71) completed four different conditions of the task. Fitting the various cognitive models to each individual's data revealed that only a subset of the models correctly distinguished between the stochastic processes underlying the different conditions. Incorporating prospect theory's weighting function and a trial-dependent bias component into the models accounted for performance differences between conditions. Of the assorted model parameters, only prospect theory's value function correlated with external self-reported risky drug use. The results also showed that the learning component of the original BART may cloud its association to risky behaviors. Implications in terms of gambling tasks and the cognitive models will be discussed.