Ecological imbalances have manifested as environmental, social, and political concerns worldwide. Simultaneously, technology, a continued rise in urban cities, innovation, and instant gratification place a disconnect between a majority of people and the workings of nature. Much research seeks to understand the demographic and internal factors, and implicit and explicit attitudes, that attribute to environmental knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of everyday citizens in an effort to make leaps in sustainable development. Former and recent findings illustrate the reality that positive sentiments toward the environmental movement are common, yet behavior and activism is difficult to achieve. For this research project I explore environmental knowledge, attitudes, and everyday behaviors among first year and last year University of Washington students utilizing survey research and a focus group approach. More particularly, I explore the strength and power of normative influences that develops over this traditional four-year span. Seattle, a distinguished hub of sustainable values and actions, reflects environmentally-supportive intentions and behavior among its residents, with a novel capability to inspire visitors and newcomers with its visible and verbal support. These findings will contribute to the growing understanding of environmental awareness and activism, in addition to evaluating and mapping out the power of social influence within environmental contexts.

Mass incarceration has disproportionally impacted communities of color over the past 41 years. Indeed, policies that are currently operating as a result of the “War on Drugs” have created large racial disparities in drug convictions. For an example, despite research suggesting that Blacks and Whites use marijuana at similar rates, Blacks have been convicted at a higher rate. Many proponents of criminal justice reform argue that just as certain policies have led to the creation of racial disparities in drug conviction, the creation of new policies and laws might also be able to reduce or eliminate these disparities. For this research project, I use longitudinal data of all Washington State convictions between 2000 and 2015 and ordinary least squares regression analysis to examine the association between the 2012 decriminalization of marijuana in Washington State, I-502, and in drug conviction rates by race. I also include a series of controls including: year of conviction, sex, county and prior convictions to test the robustness of this association. In particular, I am interested in understanding if racial disparities in drug convictions decreased post the implementation of marijuana legalization in Washington state. My results suggest that marijuana legalization leads to decreased disparities in drug conviction rates for Blacks. The overall lower conviction rates for all types of drugs may have been produced by the lessening of police contact with Blacks in Washington State for suspicion of marijuana possession.

Today's contemporary debate over the broken immigration system in the United States has placed politicians and policy makers at every level of government in a legal gridlock. It is estimated that 11 million undocumented immigrants reside in the U.S., and that at least a fifth of these are young people who have lived in this country since childhood. Of these 2.1 million youth nationwide, about 65,000 graduate from U.S. high schools every year and an even smaller percentage of these students go on to pursue a college education. President Obama's enactment of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012 and its expansion in 2014 provided undocumented youth who meet certain criteria with deporation relief and temporary work permits, and with that a potential new outlook on their future prospects. Although there is a growing body of literature on undocumented youth's self-perceptions in American society and the challenges they face in their transition into adulthood, there is little academic work that focuses on undocumented students who have entered college environments. For this research project, I intend to capture the experiences of undocumented college students as they navigate through the university landscape. This process will include an ethnographic survey and semi-structured interviews with 18-30 undocumented university students at the University of Washington. My sampling strategy will involve contacting pro-immigrant groups, organizations, and clubs on campus to establish a pool of potential subjects in addition to snowball sampling. The results of these in-depth interviews and surveys will provide a unique insight into the lives of students and will contribute an additional narrative that will expand the body of knowledge on the subject at hand. The impact of DACA will be explored as well as its implications on undocumented students' educational trajectories and future aspirations. 

Mass shootings are a growing public health and social policy concern in the United States. Mass shootings are defined by the Gun Violence Archive as four or more shot and/or killed in a single event, at the same general time and location, not including the shooter. Most media accounts attribute this phenomenon to lack of access to mental healthcare leading to untreated mental illness of the shooter and/or poor gun legislation leading to easy access of firearms. For this research project, I explore additional social factors which may help to determine variation in mass shooting across states. Using data from the United States Census Bureau, Uniform Crime Report, Kids Count Data Center, the Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Gun Violence Archive, I will be utilizing ordinary least squares regression to examine the role of poverty, social disorganization, gun legislation, and mental health spending to explain variation in the number of mass shootings across states during the period of 2010 to 2015. The results of these findings will provide a greater understanding of the contributors for mass shootings, further existing research, and assist policy makers in the reduction of future incidents.

Despite recent growth in the rate of bachelor’s degree attainment for Latino/a college students, from 8 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2014, Latino/as remain in the lowest division least likely to earn their four year degree. Latino/a college students face many academic related barriers to obtaining a bachelor’s degree, such as prior academic college preparation, socioeconomic barriers, and cultural/social capital. This study is the examination of the cultural differences between many Latino/a home and community lives compared to the setting in a college or university. For example, many first-generation Latino/a students’ experience a setting where they rely on family and community to navigate difficulties. However, in college these aforementioned students are away from this support and may not be prepared for the challenges higher education brings. We are conducting semi-structured interviews for elaborate answers that may potentially highlight transitional ordeals. The sampling technique we are using is convenient sampling. Participants are recruited from a multicultural center “Chicano/a Latino/a center” in the Compton Union Building of Pullman, WA. The population we are targeting is first generation Latino/a college students from Washington State University in their first or last year of undergraduate career. Influenced from previous research, we are specifically examining what disparate experiences are happening when transitioning from their accustomed culture to an individualistic college campus. Our expected results are that students will be discouraged by unfamiliarity and the new challenges faced in another environment. Specifically, problem-solving skills and avoidance of challenges may differ from the collectivist and individualistic environment. We expect to find this transition to impact first-generation Latino/a college students. Our potential implication of this study is a development of a program, prior to college or in their first year to help these students become familiar with the individualistic environment.

Public investments in children are thought to benefit society by producing a healthy and productive workforce. However, in the race to produce competitive workers in the new international market, differing political approaches can result in variations in expenditures and disparities amongst children. In this research I analyze how overall childhood well-being differs between red states (states that voted for the Republican presidential candidate in two out of the last three elections) and blue states (states that voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in two out of the last three elections) to see if political ideologies are related to child outcomes. I also consider whether any differences between red states and blue states vary significantly for black and white youth. I look at three dimensions of childhood wellbeing: (1) health (infant mortality, percent immunized and Medicaid expenditures), (2) educational achievement (high school dropout rate and education expenditure per pupil), and (3) economic security (percent of population below the poverty line, and state expenditure on welfare programs) to determine which political orientation is associated with better conditions for youth. I expect Blue states, or Democratic leaning states, to yield better scores of adolescent wellbeing due to their advocacy for a larger social safety net. Previous research has shown that blacks typically have worse health, lower educational attainment and less economic security than do whites. Therefore, I expect blacks to fare more poorly than whites on the barometer of child well-being. I extend previous work by considering racial differences within a political orientation. Preliminary results have shown somde childhood wellbeing indicators to significantly favor whites in Blue states over Whites in Red states, however this difference was not signficant for Blacks. I have no hypothesis regarding whether the relationship between political orientation and child well-being differs significantly by race. I anticipate that my research will contribute to a more in-depth understanding of how different political outlooks influence the nation’s one of the most vulnerable populations--children. With the upcoming 2016 presidential race, this research is especially relevant.

As social media platforms become more prominent in daily interpersonal interactions, there are also increasing developments of online communities associated with several mental health issues, some of which include mental health surrounding disordered eating patterns. Patterns of disordered eating include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder, orthorexia, and others. Prior research indicates that pro-eating disorder messages are increasingly prominent on social media sites including Facebook and Tumblr, and note the negative effects of this content in terms of self-image within those exposed to this content. However, little research has been conducted on the effects of online communities established with the purpose of providing support for internet users living with disordered eating patterns. This research surveys the opinions of Tumblr users who follow blogs providing support for those suffering with eating disorders, such as “Eating Disordered Confessions” (eatingdisorderconfession.tumblr.com). The survey used includes questions about participants’ opinions about available treatment options for disordered eating, whether they believe that they display some sort of disordered eating, if this has been influenced by the use of Tumblr, and several other questions that serve to indicate the extent of the disordered eating patterns of the participants. The responses to these questions are compared between groups separated by indicated amounts of time that the participants spend on Tumblr. Results from this research can help to inform the role of social media sites for helping or harming individuals suffering from stigmatized mental health disorders.

There has been growing policy and research attention to undocumented populations in the United States. Recent statistics indicate that there are currently 42.5 million foreign-born persons living in the United States, of which 11.2 million are undocumented. Immigration enforcement plays a huge role in the lives of undocumented populations and their families. Enforcement may impact immigrants’ health and social well-being in important ways. Indeed, undocumented families experience “extrafamilial acculturative stress,” a term used to describe the fear of deportation which leads to stress and compromised well-being. Documented immigrants in places with high concentrations of undocumented immigrants may be exposed to stress by being connected to undocumented immigrants. They also may experience discrimination by being assumed as having undocumented status. These stressors may impede immigrant populations from accessing health care and obtaining education and employment. For this research project, I have examined some of the implications for immigrants who live in states with a high concentration of undocumented immigrants. More specifically, I examined the association between the concentration of an undocumented population in all 50 states and the well-being of immigrant populations including access to health care, graduation rates, and unemployment rates. I used data from the Pew Research Center to estimate the unauthorized immigrant population as well as the foreign-born population in 2012 and adjusted for the total population. I gathered state-level well-being measures of foreign-born populations from the Kids Count organization and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. I drew data from the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research to create control measures capturing economic conditions and other demographic characteristics of the state. My analysis used multiple linear regression models to analyze the relationship between the concentration of undocumented immigrants and documented immigrants’ well-being.
 

Understanding the sources and salience of gender stereotypes in society is of huge interest to social scientists as well as the broader public.  Indeed, a large body of research has been devoted to examining gender stereotypes represented in different forms of media particularly digital and print media.  A burgeoning body of research has begun to examine gender stereotypes in video games.  There are 155 million Americans who play video games and four out of five U.S. households own a device used to play video games.  Therefore, gender stereotypes portrayed in video games may be an important way in which people understand gender.  In this research project, I examine trends of female gender stereotypes in both actions and appearances in top rated PC and console games from 1996 to 2015.  I use data from a video game review aggregation website to find the top ten rated games of each year and randomly select four from each year.  I code each game on the stereotypes shown through the actions and appearances of the female characters to determine the overall trends in gender portrayals throughout the years.  This study will help us to understand how women are represented in a wide-reaching media outlet and whether video game companies are displaying more, less, or the same amount of stereotypes in their games over the years.

Many people say that voting is the duty of every American citizen. Despite this, voter turnout rates are endemically low; according to the US Census Bureau, turnout rates reached 60% in 2004, a time of peak political dissent and an unpopular war. Many political scientists and sociologists have sought to understand these falling turnout rates but have failed to incorporate intersectionality theory in their analyses. While racial background and socioeconomic standing are individually linked to a lack of political participation, a failure to examine how these demographic features affect one another results in a far less rich understanding of the non-voter. This study uses interview data to examine how people of various racial and class backgrounds make sense of their self-selection out of the political process. The results of this data will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the non-voting population and will offer guidance to organizations seeking to increase voter turnout rates.