Social Sciences – Page 11 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Social Sciences

A Systematic Examination of Race in Health-Focused Human-Computer Interaction Research

The human-computer interaction (HCI) community has a long tradition of health-related research. Epidemiological and public health research has revealed widespread racial disparities in healthcare. We conducted a systematic review of HCI research on race and healthcare, to identify common themes and gaps within health-related HCI research. Beginning with an initial set of 418 articles drawn from two major HCI venues, we applied a set of exclusion criteria resulting in an eventual dataset of 24 articles. We conducted a thematic analysis, with a special focus on examining how race is understood and operationalized. We found considerable variation in definitions of race across articles, with some focusing on skin color, others on socio-cultural differences, and still others not providing any explicit definition of race. This variation was further reflected in common research practices such as the method used to identify participants’ race and the level of specificity used in categorizing participants’ race and ethnicity. We also found that some articles posed racial issues as an area of future work, without including them in their current investigation. We discuss implications for health-related HCI research, including the need for race-consciousness in research design and for specificity in defining race.

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Studying the Role of Feedback and Assessment in Teacher Preparation

While student-teachers are regularly observed and evaluated by their mentor teachers and university field supervisors, there is little data about how feedback differs across field placement schools, where student-teachers complete their in-classroom experiences, and how these differences may contribute to their development. Schools with poor working conditions may provide less infrastructure and support for teachers in their mentorship which we expect to be reflected in the quality of their feedback to student-teachers. This study considers the content and quality of feedback given to student-teachers and evaluates how the quality of feedback varies depending on the location of their field placement. By considering the open ended component of evaluations provided to student-teachers from Tennessee Technical University at their field placement schools, we were able to qualitatively code for factors of quality and content. Analysis has not yet been completed so there are currently no results to evaluate, but we expect to see that feedback will be of higher quality in schools with lower teacher turnover rates, which is representative of better working conditions. The results of this study will inform standards of written feedback for evaluators and will be used to aid in the preparation of more effective teachers in Tennessee.

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Residential College Podcast Audio/Video History Project

I am working as the assistant producer of the Residential College (RC) Podcast. I assist in interviewing people – collecting qualitative research – and editing the audio. I also produced a video that highlighted the experience of RC students (mostly first-years) during Covid and showed my visual research of the spaces in which this new kind of college experience takes place. I led the production of the podcast episode focused on the experience of queer individuals at U of M and in the RC. In general, we work to make podcasts about either current events or the history of the RC. These podcast episodes provide students with more information and a variety of perspectives. This is designed to provide listeners with new ways of understanding the events that they have experienced and a better understanding of how these events affected individuals in different ways. The production of each podcast begins with identifying what information would be valuable to the community as a whole and identifying people who have first-hand experience or are experts. We collect qualitative research by interviewing a wide variety of people, from staff to students to teachers. We record narration to connect the pieces and edit the audio for brevity and clarity. After a review process, we publish the episode online. My main conclusion from doing the research involved in these podcasts is that the RC has a rich history and a wealth of information to share with a genuinely interested audience.

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Archaeology of Jebel Barkal Website Creation

Jebel Barkal is a UNESCO World Heritage site in northern Sudan. The Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project at the University of Michigan was looking for an effective way to share its archaeological findings with a range of audiences and found that creating a website would meet these needs. We surveyed different archaeological project websites to determine which features would work well for the project’s needs. This also helped us to determine what website builder would be utilized, as they all have different offerings for features you can include. In addition, we looked into how the websites looked aesthetically to figure out what would appeal most to different audiences, the general public, teachers, students, scholars, and eventually people in Sudan (in an Arabic version). From our previous research we found that the features most important to us were a research portal, one section with older research from the previous director, Tim Kendall, one from the current director, Geoff Emberling, and a news feed/blog to keep visitors up to date with the findings at the site and intrigue possible sponsors to want to donate. We also found that for aesthetic purposes, making sure text passages are not too long and that there are images included helps to keep the user connected to the topic but not overwhelmed. Lastly, formatting of the website was discussed frequently as some audiences have different access to computers and phones; we found that websites generally need a universal format that will look good no matter what device they are displayed on. In conclusion, it will be possible to create an engaging website for this project that will have research available for professionals and researchers to use, but also be useful to the general public with shorter summaries of the research.

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Archaeology of Jebel Barkal (ancient Nubia)

Gebel Barkal is an archaeological site in Northern Sudan along the Nile River that was a capital city and temple center of ancient Kush (Nubia). The site was first excavated in 1916-20 under the direction of George Reisner, an archaeologist based at Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A University of Michigan project is beginning to work at the site with both excavation and conservation, working with the local community to create lasting connections surrounding this site. I have been working to to transcribe George Reisner’s field diaries from 1918 to 1920. By using older information of past seasons (or excavations), my mentor and his colleagues can inform their excavation and gain insight on the best ways to excavate and, in turn, preserve the site.

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Religiosity or Socioeconomic Status: What Predicts Forgiveness Among Couples?

Two of the arguably influential factors that shape a person’s perspective on life are religiosity and socioeconomic status, which can be examined through income or education. While many researchers have examined the effect these two factors may have on a person’s outlook and patterns towards forgiveness, not much research has been conducted to compare whether religiosity or socioeconomic status have a greater influence on a person’s willingness to forgive a loved one, such as their spouse. This study will use multivariate regression to examine participant responses from the Detroit Community Study. Data were collected via a telephone survey focused on three racial and ethnic groups prominent in the metro-Detroit area: Arab Americans, African Americans, and Non-Hispanic White Americans (N=907). The analysis will focus on those in the sample who are married/partnered (N=415) and report on the likelihood of forgiving their significant other following an incident in which their spouse/partner hurt them. Given that financial strain represents a major complication between couples, this study hypothesizes that socioeconomic status will have a greater influence than religiosity on the likelihood to forgive a spouse/partner. The results of this study will clarify factors important to relationship outcomes and offer direction for future studies that aim to better understand predictors of forgiveness among couples.

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The Role of Sociopolitical Factors on Syntactic Alignment

Priming has been widely known as an automatic process, occurring without conscious guidance or intention. This automatic priming mechanism provides a basis for syntactic priming, through which people repeat the syntactic structure that they have just heard. This study investigates the factors that affect syntactic priming, and specifically we focus on how sociopolitical factors affect the degree of priming. Participants were presented with a speaker who read sentences that had core liberal or conservative values. They were then required to describe novel illustrations that could be described using double object or prepositional object sentence structures. Results are still pending on this experiment, but we expect that sociopolitical factors will play a substantive role in increasing or decreasing the priming, depending on how much the participants agreed with the speaker.

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Implications of Grammaticality on Code-Switching in Spanish-English Bilinguals

The Hispanic population is projected to compromise 29 percent of the total US population by 2060 (Colby & Ortman, 2015). Consequently, the Spanish language is finding itself in the spotlight more often than ever before. Understanding how Spanish-English bilinguals communicate can help inform teaching methods for language-learners and curb social taboos that impact Hispanic populations. This study aims to understand the effect of social and grammatical factors on code-switching in Spanish-English bilinguals. Through the use of Qualtrics surveys, bilinguals of varying proficiency levels rated sentences based on how “good” they sounded. They were shown an image and four corresponding sentences: two that were code-switched where one was grammatical and one ungrammatical, and two non-code-switched sentences where one was grammatical and one was ungrammatical. As predicted, ungrammatical sentences were rated more poorly than their grammatical counterparts. While its cost was not as great as that of the grammaticality of the sentence, sentences that contained a code switch were rated more poorly than those that did not. This could be chalked up to the fact that there is a negative connotation associated with code-switching in regions of the US; those that code-switch may face social isolation or pressure against their language use. Understanding this concept through data will allow us as a society to better address this stigma. The data also gives us a more comprehensive understanding of how bilinguals communicate. This can be used when developing more applicable teaching approaches for those that are learning Spanish or English as a second language.

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Grassroot Protests during the Presidency of Donald Trump: America’s Growing Dichotomy

“Party in the Streets: Grassroots Protests during (and Beyond?) the Presidency of Donald Trump” is a political science based research project. The work done for this project will help to contribute to Dr. Michael Heaney’s next book, America under Democracy. This project examines the connections between protests and social change, with a specific interest in the areas of Women’s March, protests and rallies under and after the Trump presidency, and protests surrounding COVID-19. This project focuses on studying different protests and movements to see how they relate to political parties and the approval of different presidencies. Overall, this project seeks to answer the questions: will different parties adopt different movements? How has this tactic of taking issues to the streets expanded under recent leadership?

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What are the Implications of Believing that there is no Truth?

In this research project, we aim to answer how nescience””or the belief that the truth is unknowable””can affect one’s general outlook. Little research has been done on this topic before, but we hypothesize that believing there is no truth can have a negative effect on other important views, and may be linked to distrust in academics, belief in conspiracy theories, among other things. This may cause those with higher nescience to make less informed decisions, particularly in politics. The way we intend to investigate this is through a survey which combines multiple personality scales, allowing us to compare levels of nescience with other character traits. Scales include Belief in Conspiracy Theories, curiosity about science, intellectual humility, and anti-intellectualism, as well as our own scale to measure nescience.

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