It is well established that formerly incarcerated individuals face stigma upon their return to society, negatively impacting reintegration efforts and life outcomes. Existing literature highlights the significance of stigma in influencing reentry outcomes, emphasizing gender-specific challenges faced by formerly incarcerated individuals, but fails to quantitatively study how these gender stereotypes impact public stigma. Although some research does address variations in the formerly incarcerated population and their influence on public opinion, these studies rarely focus on gender. My study directly explores how gender and stigma interact throughout reentry, by quantitatively investigating public perceptions of formerly incarcerated individuals in Washington State. I develop vignettes about hypothetical formerly incarcerated individuals that vary key facts between participants to examine the extent to which gender, offense type, and post-release behavior influence the public stigma of incarceration. Respondents are randomly assigned these vignettes to evaluate their varying perceptions, unveiling whether gender leads to differential perceptions and therefore, differential treatment in the daily lives of formerly incarcerated individuals. My preliminary expectations are that the public will value relationship-building (a traditionally feminine ideal) more for formerly incarcerated women than for formerly incarcerated men. Additionally, I hypothesize that respondents will exhibit a greater willingness to interact with formerly incarcerated women as compared to their male counterparts, due to negative stereotypes about male aggression and criminality. The implications of this research extend to a broader understanding of the obstacles faced by individuals with criminal records in achieving successful rehabilitation. My analysis will help create more targeted and effective reintegration support policies by uncovering how public stigma impacts the reentry outcomes for women differently than for men. Addressing these dynamics is crucial for fostering inclusivity and dismantling barriers that impede the social and economic participation of formerly incarcerated individuals.

The National Associations of the Deaf astimates there are 308,648 deaf and hard of hearing D/HH students in the US, 79.2% of D/HH students attend mainstream school. D/HH students tend to stuggle academically and socially in high school which leads to low self-esteem. This project uses a Critical Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) ethic, framework, and methodology to put power of research and advocary into the hands of the D/HH youth at a PNW high school. YPAR is an epistemological framework in response to the historical dehumanization of marginalized communities. It democratizes ad decoonizes research by privileging the knowledge production of vulnerable communities and foregrounding justive and change. In practice, YPAR develops research skills of typically non-academic co-researchers who drive the research question, design, and analysis. The aim of this project is to guid the students and build their skills to name the challenges they face as minoritized D/HH students, to collect and analyze relevant data, and to use the data to drive policy. the signifiicance of this project is the methodology thatdemands youth voices to be centered in policy making and cultural change. The expected results are findings that speak to the challenges of D/HH students at a PNW high school. The hope is for the D/HH students to present their finingds to policy and decision makers. There is limited research on D/HH students using YPAR methodology and this research will add the perspectives of D/HH students of the discourse.

Religious nationalism is receiving growing attention because of its current influence in democracies, but it manifests itself differently across countries. Previous research has identified socio-historical characteristics that impact the salience of religion as a factor in an individual’s conception of national identity. However, scholars of these studies have mainly used International Social Survey Programme data to analyze European nations. My study uses World Values Survey (WVS) data from 1981 to 2022 to evaluate democracies from a global perspective. I conduct a multilevel analysis to determine the salience of contextual characteristics that prime religion to be used as a vector through which nationalism is mobilized among individuals. Accounting for individual-level factors, I identify which country-level factors influence the relationship between religion and support for nationalism among individuals surveyed. I determine an individual’s support for religious nationalism using the beliefs and groups they express to support in the WVS. I then compare these results to events of national stress to determine if a relationship can be identified. My results suggest that religions favored in church-state relations are more likely to be included in conceptions of national identity. Additionally, affiliates of favored religions are more likely to support nationalism during times of outgroup threat, such as increases in immigration, socio-economic turmoil, and political/cultural shifts. By completing a global analysis of these phenomena, I am able to identify a more comprehensive pattern, something less expansive studies struggle to achieve due to hyper-partisanship debates that can overshadow case studies and regional analyses. Furthermore, by determining which socio-historical characteristics have the greatest impact on conceptions of a religious national identity, I provide a framework to develop a predictive theory on the circumstances under which a religion is not only primed to mobilize nationalist movements, but then comes to be employed to mobilize these movements.

Food insecurity is a global problem with one out of every six people in the United States relying on charitable food assistance organizations to meet their needs in 2022. However, organizations like food banks are underfunded and overwhelmed, relying on donors to continue aid. One food bank in the Seattle area received 70% of their donations from individual donors as financial aid, and a significant contribution comes from grocery stores in the form of food surplus. Previous research has shown that tax deductions motivate grocery stores to donate and limit food waste, however little is known about the care involved in the decision of selecting food to be donated. The quality and quantity of donations varies depending on the store and department. I explore how managerial discretion explains why different grocery store departments choose to donate food or throw it away. I conduct one-on-one structured interviews with three managers in four grocery stores in a Seattle neighborhood to find what factors influence the amount and quality of donations. Additionally, I uncover the internal and external constraints of managers in different departments. Managerial discretion has been studied in various firms yet it has not has not been explored explicitly within the context of donations. Similarly to charitable donations, which are scarce in the context of individuals making philanthropic decisions within organizations. I predict managers’ values and opinions on charity, the grocery store’s philanthropic organizational structure, and the perceived strength of the food bank-to-manager relationship will influence the quantity and quality of donations. I also predict that managers in stores with a higher philanthropic public image will contribute donations of higher quantity and quality. The findings from this study will help identify factors to increase the quantity and quality of donations so that stores can donate higher quality food.

In recent years, the Evangelical church in the United States has begun to see a decline in attendance which mirrors earlier declines in more mainstream denominations. Some who leave Evangelical congregations go on to host podcasts, write books, and speak at conferences about their experiences inside Evangelicalism and their journeys out of it. As they do so, these ‘Exvangelicals’ create meaning around their experiences, form new identities and communities around their newfound disbelief, and create spaces for, and inform the journeys of, other Evangelicals who are questioning their participation in the American Evangelical church. The intensity and frequency of the creation of new identities and communities around a former religious affiliation seems to be unique to Evangelicalism. This paper examines how and why these individuals come to leave Evangelicalism and create identities, media, and physical and psychological spaces oriented around that choice and considers whether the unique culture of American Evangelicalism may contribute to the likelihood of forming these communities. I conduct a qualitative analysis of 30 publicly available interviews of individuals who have left American Evangelicalism and now participate in public discussions of their exits. I expect to find common narratives around the strictness of family-of-origin religious experiences, feelings of betrayal or disillusionment, and similarly held political and social values among interviewees, as well as cultural and personality traits which may predict which individuals choose to become outspoken in the movement. It provides a better understanding of the newly formed and growing group of self-identified ‘Exvangelicals,’ their experiences, and the process of group identity they have undertaken, as well as describing the ways they connect and interact, and how they replicate aspects of the church they have left behind.

Media coverage of the National Hockey League (NHL) has brought public attention to many accounts of physical and sexual violence, hazing, and illicit drug use by players and coaches over the past 20 years. My research investigates the institutional mechanisms the NHL, its teams, and the players union use in response to cases of criminal behavior by their athletes. I ask how consequences for player criminality vary by type of crime, status of player, and player network. I compiled a dataset of all incidents covered in the news or social media between 2009 and the present, and then identified the response type through qualitative coding and comparison. Given prior theorizations of men’s collegiate athletics as crime-facilitative environments based on low punishment risk and high temptation to participate in criminal deviance, I expect to find that fine-related punishments are levied more frequently against high-status NHL players and high level player networks than are playing-time related penalties, protecting their ability to continue contributing to a franchise’s game performance. I also predict violent crimes will more frequently include playing-time related penalties, with League Commissioner approval more consistently mandated. I anticipate the team sub-organization to most frequently levy punishments for player criminality. This research introduces a more comprehensive examination of NHL player criminality, extending beyond existing approaches of case-based analysis. Importantly, this allows for future comparison to leagues such as the National Football League and its handling of player criminality over time. More broadly, I clarify the consistency with which deterrence measures are employed by the organization, contributing to the body of literature analyzing private organizations and their governing power over employees.

Existing studies show the importance of migration in ensuring both the livelihood and safety of migrants around the world, and that factors such as ethnicity and caste have a significant impact on an individual’s ability to migrate. My study aims to further explore the association between caste/ethnicity and the order of starting, intermediate, and most recent destinations a migrant passes through. To do so, I perform a sequence analysis on places traveled to by participants of the Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS) dataset. CVFS focuses on the Chitwan Valley region in Nepal, a country that hosts a variety of ethnic groups and has a wide range of destinations that its inhabitants migrate towards, with a much higher rate of human migration than other countries of similar population size or GDP. Using the dataset, I also search for common factors between caste groups, such as the kinds of intermediate locations they may travel to before heading to a more permanent destination, and how long certain castes take to migrate either due to legal issues, their own caution or the resources available to them. I expect people of lower caste to face more difficulty in migrating due to how caste profoundly influences social life in the region. This transforms how we view the impact of caste or ethnicity on migration, not just isolated to the Chitwan region but across any region involving the migration of multiple ethnic groups. It is also relevant to note that sequence analysis has little pre-existing use in migration sociology, especially when focusing on migration across multiple continents. Therefore, this study presents a new method of studying migration along with a better understanding of what goes on between the assumed starting and most recent point of a migrant’s journey.

The climate crisis is predicted to increase the occurrence of extreme weather events such as heat waves and polar fronts, which will disproportionately affect vulnerable populations such as people experiencing homelessness (PEH). As climate change increases social and economic instability, policymakers need to be informed on how to effectively protect the interests of our most vulnerable populations. Building off of studies that have analyzed the impact of heat and cold on hospitalizations among PEH, I examine the health effect of extreme weather events in King County, San Francisco County, and Los Angeles County. Temporary emergency shelters are one of the main strategies used to protect the wellbeing of the PEH population during extreme weather events. Moreover, I intend to determine the effectiveness of emergency shelters in reducing the impact of extreme weather on the death toll and/or health complications of PEH. Utilizing data on health impacts among PEH, daily maximum/minimum temperatures, and cooling shelters, I will use regression models to determine the relationship between maximum/minimum daily temperature and health outcomes and if cooling shelters reduce negative health impacts during extreme weather events. I expect to find a positive relationship between extreme temperatures and hospitalizations, as prior studies have observed, but that this relationship will be weaker on days on which cities open emergency shelters. However, it is plausible that because emergency shelters have restrictions on access, limited bed capacity, or inadequate public outreach, the impact of emergency shelters on hospitalizations may be insubstantial. My results will contribute to a growing body of literature that points to a relationship between extreme weather and poor health outcomes for PEH. This evidence will have implications for the importance of allocating funding towards the shelter system and other social service efforts, while clarifying the effectiveness of the emergency shelter system.

Individuals released with a felony conviction are almost always required to serve a period of Department of Corrections (DOC) mandated supervision that can range anywhere from 12-36 months. This period of DOC supervision is often referred to as "parole," "community corrections," "community custody" or "community supervision." For the purposes of this study, I utilize the term "community corrections" in direct comparison to parole. At its inception, community corrections was offered as a rehabilitative back-end alternative to incarceration. Today, rehabilitation has been replaced by control and surveillance. As of December 2023, 24,804 individuals were under the control of community corrections in Washington State (DOC publication). This population accounts for almost 65% of the total number of individuals currently controlled by Washington State's Department of Corrections (DOC publication). Despite the far-reaching consequences of community corrections, the experiences of the individuals under its control have long gone underreported. In this study, I explore how individuals navigate the challenges of community corrections. I will collect data from a series of 10-12 qualitative interviews with individuals who have experienced community corrections following a felony conviction. While I am currently in the process of finishing my interviews and conducting my full analysis, one initial finding reveals that individuals navigate the challenges of community corrections by building tools of resilience. Existing research explores the various challenges present in the lives of individuals on community corrections. Few, however, demonstrate the resiliency of these individuals. This research has the potential to amplify the voices and experiences of individuals who are surviving, and in most cases thriving, in spite of an institution whose primary purpose is to send individuals back to prison.

Using data from the United States Sentencing Commission (2014-2022), this study analyzes the impact of a defendant's gender in the sentencing of federal homicide cases. Previous research shows that female defendants experience leniency in criminal sentencing compared to male counterparts. However, studies also suggest harsher punishments are given to female defendants when the crime is violent. This may be influenced by the social construct of gender, where traits including aggression and violence are perceived to be inherently male, and male violence is often expected and excused. Focusing exclusively on federal homicide cases from fiscal years 2014-2022 (N = 3017), I ran linear regression analyses controlling for legal and extralegal factors to analyze the effect of gender on sentence length. I hypothesize that in the case of federal homicide, male defendants will receive shorter sentences compared to female counterparts. This study focuses how gender influences sentencing outcomes in federal courts. It is crucial to understand how gender influences judicial sentencing in order to promote a just legal system.