The mining industry is extremely controversial. Resource extraction holds many negative environmental effects in addition to an overwhelming amount of economic benefits. Weighing these benefits often puts industry in conflict with the public, with governments forced to mediate the mining licensing process. Public participation is the means to ensure that the people's interests are voiced in order to limit the monopoly of power corporations would otherwise hold. The report provides an in-depth analysis of the two countries' dissimilar mining licensing processes, inspects the amount of public participation involved in those processes, and finally demonstrates findings through specific case studies relevant to each countries' licensing system. Through this comparison it becomes clear that the presence of the public participation is not enough to ensure that people's voices are heard.

Because African immigrants are often lumped into the same category as African Americans, there has been very little research conducted on the health outcomes of African immigrants. This has resulted in an ideology of promoting preventative medicine versus treatment.  This study, based on self-reported information, will ask the question: what are the differences in susceptibility to hypertension and other cardiovascular disease-related risk factors among different African immigrant groups in the Pacific Northwest, specifically those from Somalia, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. The hypothesis of this study is that Ethiopian and Nigerian immigrants are at a lower risk of hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases as compared with Somali immigrants because of differences among their country of origin's health care systems. To be able to answer this question, I examined and evaluated the recent historical backgrounds of these three countries by conducting literature review. I also used surveys to collect data and critically analyzed and grouped the responses according to key words and comment phrases to test the correlation of the responses to the main research topic. I expect that the results will paint a mixed picture about African immigrants’ health outcomes, specifically rates of hypertension and cardiovascular disease, as region of origin confers major health effects on immigrants. This research will shed light on the differences among African immigrant groups separate from the African American population.

The low educational attainment of students of Mexican origin in the United States is a growing concern. Research identifies parental involvement (PI) as an important asset to student success and defines it as parents’ active participation in their children’s education at home and at school. Little research addresses the ways Mexican parents help their children during their K-12 education and college-going process, however. To address this gap, this research attempts to understand Mexican parents’ involvement and other factors first year Mexican-American college students perceived as important in shaping their educational success. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17-college freshman that identified themselves as Mexican, first-generation, low-income, and migrant/seasonal farmworker background. Based on students’ responses, Mexican parents provide deliberate exposure to agriculture work in order to direct their children towards an educational path. They also provided emotional support and encouragement to their children. Findings indicate that Mexican parents are involved in their children’s education, but in a different form than described by the initial models and definitions of parental involvement. Based on these findings, a new model of parental involvement can be created – one that recognizes Mexican parents’ contributions and guides schools to better work with parents in their efforts to increase the proportion of Mexican origin students going to college.

Past research has shown that figures of authority, media representation, emotionality, and perceived outcome of an event can all play a role in confounding eyewitness recall. The current research tested the effects of post event information and encouraging/leading statements on eyewitness event recall. Participants watched a short video clip, after which they filled out a questionnaire to assess their recall of the event. Results confirmed that leading questions and post event information confound eyewitness recall. These results have implications for both the ethical use of eyewitness questioning methods and the validity of using eyewitness testimony in the courtroom.