Social Sciences – Page 17 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Social Sciences

The Effect of Chinese-English Bilingualism on English Literacy Development

The current study examines the impacts Chinese bilingualism has on children’s English literacy development. Chinese-English bilingual and English monolingual children ages 5-13 were assessed with standardized language tasks aimed at reading comprehension and syntactic abilities in both English and Chinese. A total of 27 Chinese-English bilingual children and 27 English monolingual children participated in our study. The Chinese-English bilingual children were administered in both English and Chinese while the English monolingual children were administered in English. Families of Chinese-English bilingual children received a $30 gift card and English monolingual children received a $15 gift card; a parent report was sent to each family regarding their children’s performance on the tasks. We hypothesized that Chinese-English bilingual children would perform better on morphological awareness tasks than English monolingual children. The findings of our research might inform theories of bilingualism and literacy instruction practices on linguistically diverse children. There was a stronger correlation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension, proving that cross-language transfer impacts children in literacy development. Chinese-English bilingual children didn’t demonstrate any deficits compared to monolinguals when learning two languages.

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Elections Around the World: The Constituency Level Election Archive

Throughout the world, there are various countries that have constituency-level elections, and there is endless data coming from these elections. Elections in many countries go back hundreds of years in history, and though all of this data already exists and is recorded, it can be very fragmented, and can be difficult to use for research. Through the Constituency Level Elections Archive (CLEA), a comprehensive election database with election data from all around the world, we strive to establish a centralized database that contains reliable and consistent election data. CLEA’s first election dataset release was in 2008, and has been updated every year since its inception. CLEA data is collected and preserved meticulously through collaboration of professors, graduate students, undergraduate students, and other research associates. The data is consolidated through collecting election data directly from repositories of different countries, and then recording the data necessary for our research purposes – region, country, constituency information, number of seats and who gets elected to them, votes and names for each candidate, each party, as well as information about voter turnout. Through collecting, consolidating, and preserving this election data, CLEA is able to make it publicly available to anyone who needs it at no cost. Through this easily accessible public good, multitudes of audiences will be able to use the data for research, education, and policy-making to understand important topics and create change in global society.

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Sexual Scripts and Casual Sex

My project studies casual sex as it relates to many things, among them, orgasm, gender, and sexual scripts. Women and men learn sexual scripts from media and from prior experience. They enact sexual scripts according to the type of sexual situation they are in. Casual sex situations have their own sets of scripts and norms, including norms about which partner is likely to orgasm and the types of sexual activities the partners engage in. Different scripts may lead to different outcomes of the sexual encounter, such as greater regret, more perceived stigmatization, or more sexual satisfaction. In this study, we use an online survey to investigate people’s experiences with casual sex. We report on patterns found among different sexual scripts.

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Mapping the Effect of Disaster-induced Displacement on Social Behavior: The Case of Hurricane Harvey

Motivation/problem statement With the growing influence that social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have on the political ideologies of an individual, our project aims to see if we can track regional political trends through these platforms too. In addition to this we are also looking at ties between climate change based migration and shifting political majorities in the counties around Houston, Texas after Hurricane Maria in 2017. The team at Christopher Fariss’s lab consists of eight urop students who are in a wide variety of schools, from computer science to art, working together in the first year of a multiyear/on going project concerning how social media plays a factor in regional political majority and the impact that climate change has on coastal communities.

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Business + Tech

Despite the University of Michigan Ross School of Business being one of the best undergraduate business schools in the nation and offering prestigious opportunities for students, it lacks the necessary technological education for the future of the world in business. This project is designed to create and nourish a place in Ross, and later to the university as a whole, that combines the concepts of business and technology, uniting them to better prepare students for their corporate futures that will require tech literacy. An opportunity through Business + Tech to enhance student’s opportunities within technology is the annual Ross Datathon which gives students a large dataset and requires them to best optimize the data to the specific problem at hand. In order to gain interest in Datathon, however, corporate sponsors must be present to share their insights and organizations must have options for engagement. This project culminated in the outreach of 240 business individuals and over 100 corporations. Among these companies, 6 formed official partnerships. Additionally, Datathon gave partnerships to 13 business and tech oriented clubs to further engagement among the U of M community. As of February 26th, Datathon had a total registration of 140 students both undergraduates and graduates alike.. Tech at the Ross School of Business has a long journey ahead before it can compare to other top notch universities with business schools like UVA, NYU, and UPenn. Business + Tech and the connections formed these past two semesters will help guide technology to be more than just a project based opportunity but be implemented into classes.

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How white employers perceive same-race referrals: The role of perceived in-group favoritism

Racial inequality and discrimination are still pervasive in the U.S. labor market. Prior research finds that employers discriminate against black and Latino jobseekers without referrals, but we know less about how race affects how employers evaluate jobseekers’ same-race referrals. Many jobseekers find employment through referrals and existing networks, both of which are typically the same race as the applicant. To address this gap in literature, we conducted a survey experiment where we tested the differences in how employers evaluate the same-race referrals of White, Black, Hispanic and Asian job applicants. The analyzed data come from an empirical experiment conducted in the United States. White individuals (n = 635) with hiring and/or supervisory experience in their workplace were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk to participate in a survey experiment. Respondents were assigned a random racial group (Black, White, Hispanic, Asian) and were asked whether individuals of these racial groups prefer to refer individuals of their same race, or the best qualified job applicants. Respondents were then asked to explain their choice in their own words and their responses were coded into a fairly small number of categories. We found that while approximately half of the sample stated that black and Hispanic employees prefer to refer applicants of their same race than the “best qualified” applicants, and approximately 1/3 reported the same for Asian employees, only 16% stated that whites prefer to refer white applicants rather than the best-qualified applicants. We also analyze the open-ended responses to examine mechanisms underlying these racial differences.

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Towards a comprehensive taxonomy of the cells of the retrosplenial cortex

The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) is critical for both navigation & memory but impaired in Alzheimer’s disease. Despite this important role in health and disease, the cellular correlates that enable the RSC to perform these functions are not well understood. Recently, our lab has identified two types of principal neurons in the superficial layers of the RSC: low rheobase (LR) and regular spiking (RS) neurons. LR cells are believed to be important for navigational processing, while RS cells are thought to be involved in the processing of fear memories, among other functions. However, a detailed and extensive morphological analysis of different cell types across all RSC layers is still lacking. Here, we bridge this gap by defining morphological profiles of retrosplenial cells based on high resolution confocal images of individually-labeled neurons. This morphological analysis is then tied to the physiological properties of each labeled cell. Our data reveal important morphophysiological differences across cell types that can shape the specific computations each type of neuron can perform to support the distinct functions of the retrosplenial cortex.

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Determining Reliability of Google Earth Audits in Assessing the Effects of Built and Social Environments on Stroke Risk

Stroke is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. The REasons for Geographic And Racial Differences in Stroke – Built and Social Environment study’s ultimate goal is to try to determine whether the type of neighborhood or general environment, also known as built and social environment (BSE), one lives in will give them a higher risk of stroke or not. Thousands of neighborhoods across the United States were audited in Google Earth to determine whether specific BSE amenities could lead to higher stroke risk. Set questions based on what was available in Google Earth for each location were answered on the REDCap program. This data was used to perform inter-rater reliability (IRR) tests examined in this presentation. This analysis used data from 226 audits conducted by two independent raters. Cohen’s kappa (K) was used to estimate agreement, as an indicator of the reliability of audit items. BSE measures evaluated include presence of driveway, building height (in feet and number of stories), and number of trees. Presence of driveway had the highest agreement (K= 0.77), followed by building height (feet) (K= 0.77), building height (stories) (K= 0.51), then number of trees (K= 0.41). Until all audits are complete, concrete results for the project cannot be provided. Nevertheless, IRR tests have rendered verification that audits for many items are reliable. Items found to be reliable will be used in future analyses to examine the association between BSEs and stroke risk.

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Detroit Contractor Ecosystem

Bridging Neighborhoods (BN) was formed to support the optional relocation or retrofitting of houses for the residents of the Del Ray neighborhood due to the construction of an international bridge between Canada and the United States. To conduct activities, BN relies upon attracting local contractors and subcontractors to the program so the residents can opt into the relocation or retrofitting process with confidence. My role is to research contractor programs and outreach strategies in thirty cities nationwide and assist in reaching out to contractors and subcontractors in Detroit. These tasks were achieved through internet research and calling 150+ potential contractors for the 2021 Construction Conference. The purpose of this research is to highlight contractor programs or outreach strategies that the City of Detroit can implement in the future, and the outreach calls have increased the number of contractor connections BN possesses.

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Business + Tech Initiative

There is currently a large divide between the integration of technology and business among students enrolled in universities across the country. As a result, through the leadership of entrepreneur Phillip Brabbs and a team of MBA students and undergraduate researchers, the Ross Digital + Tech Initiative was born. The goal of the Initiative is to align and integrate Digital Business activities to develop business leaders for a digital world; influence digital business practices through data and research, and build connections with industry and policy to shape the future of business. The approach to expanding the Initiative deals with aligning and integrating the Digital Business content, stakeholder engagement and brand in a reinforcing way to amplify and expand the Ross Digital Business reputation through synergies across the 3 areas. The areas span across topics including tech literacy, tech mastery, and tech competency. This study utilizes bi-weekly meetings with fellow tech scholars, weekly meetings with MBA mentors, and bi-weekly all-hands meetings to ensure cohesiveness across the project. Along with that, by utilizing applications such as Basecamp and Excel, we are able to organize data, stay in communication, and create content for the online database. This study is just the beginning of a long journey to equip leaders with tech to build a better world. Although no immediate conclusions have been drawn, long-term goals for the future of the Initiative range from the continued execution of annual Datathons to launching a Tech Founder Speaker Series to establishing the Ross Tech Scholar Program.

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