Community-Engaged – Page 3 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Community-Engaged

COVID-19 and the Community

The goal of this research project has been to collect stories about the health experiences of people living in Washtenaw County, Michigan during the time of COVID-19. We used document analysis, semi-structured interviews, structured observations, and statistical analysis to understand how people in Washtenaw discuss the health, social and economic problems stemming from the pandemic as well as the ways in which they attempt to confront and solve these problems. We are using this data to advise policy decisions in Washtenaw County.

Architecture of Dwelling: Considering Design, Social Relations, and Policy in Single and Multi-Family Housing

Supportive housing is a cost-effective combination of affordable housing with services that helps people live more stable, productive lives. Having such housing options are vital especially in cities undergoing rapid re-development because rising property values displace low-income households from their homes and sources of income. New Hope Housing is a non-profit organization that aims to provide such housing to individuals and families. A case study by the Urban Land Institute offers a comprehensive analysis on one of New Hope Housing’s apartments, highlighting the unique structure of their development model and operating timeline. Building on an integrated approach between a debt-free development model and single room occupancy (SRO) design, this research project looks for solutions to how SROs can re-define housing and positively impact the neighborhoods surrounding low-income housing.

News Media and the Impact of Historical Stereotypes on Black Female Political Figures

Historically, Black women in the U.S. have been largely disadvantaged in part due to the role of their dual race-gender identity. Whether on magazines, television shows, or music videos, controlling images and discourse have been used to preserve hegemonic power through stereotypes. There are three central stereotypes, rooted in America’s systemic, prejudice systems, that American modern media have created to spur perceptions of Black women; the “mammy”, “jezebel”, and “sapphire”. In our project, we set out to answer the following research question: Do black women experience more negativity in news segments than their white female counterparts?. We expect the aforementioned historical tropes to shape and impact how Black women are discussed within modern day news. In order to answer the proposed research question, we conduct a manual sentiment content analysis of roughly 1700 television news transcripts extracted from ABC, NBC, FOX, and MSNBC from the past three years. Currently, nearly 77% of all Americans receive their news by watching television. Based on the recurrent perpetuation of the aforementioned stereotypes across modern-day media, examining the role of these stereotypes in news is an important step in mitigation and intervention. Knowing that stereotypes exist and are perpetuated in the media, our research project uses this framework to examine the frequency and impacts of these historical stereotypes on discussions surrounding Black female political figures in news.

To Make the Slave Anew

To Make the Slave Anew: Art, History, and the Politics of Authenticity is a book that aims to discern how our modern understanding of slavery and the life of the slave came to be. It explores the memory of slavery and racism in the United States through the lens of music, visual studies, literature, ethnography and folklore. Each chapter achieves this by studying various figures, events, and pieces of work that impacted the cultural conception of slavery by including pictures of art and excerpts from literature, scholarly work, journals, etc. Through the exploration of various methods of cultural memory, To Make the Slave Anew argues that our contemporary perceptions of slavery are based on more recent””largely late nineteenth and early twentieth century””myths regarding the life of the slave and slavery in the South. With recent questions on the memory and relics of racism and slavery in the United States gaining more attention, To Make the Slave Anew offers a way of understanding how society comes to remember such concepts, and how those memories can shift with time.

Women’s Wave: Participation and Success by Candidates in Congressional Elections, 2014 to 2020

Despite the plethora of analysis on individual candidates of all political affiliations in national elections, it is unknown which identities are most salient in determining the successes or failures of congressional candidates. This study has examined the success of women in elections. We investigated whether female candidates present themselves as activists, which we defined as taking part in protests, volunteering for a cause, or founding a group to solve an issue. This study recovers biographical, financial, and experiential information on every documented Congressional candidate in the election years 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020. An analysis of these candidates reveals characteristics of importance when predicting the outcome of an election: 1) affiliation with the main political parties; 2) campaign expenditures; and 3) experience as an activist. The results expressed by this study highlighted attributes to pay attention to in future election years when predicting wins for female candidates.

The effect of a decedent’s mental health status on protests following police killings

In 2015, 1,146 Americans were killed by the police, and some of these killings were followed by protests. It is important to investigate why some killings led to protests while others did not. The existence of a protest could be due to numerous factors, such as location, the age of the decedent, the existence of cell phone footage, etc. Specifically, this research investigates whether people are more likely to protest a police killing if the decedent had mental health issues. In order to answer this question, we gather data on each police killing in 2015 using Google search, local newspapers, and social media. This data included whether the decedent had a history of mental health disorders, whether they were behaving erratically at the time of their death, and whether there were any protests following their death. Then, a random sample of 701 of the deaths was taken to investigate whether the decedent’s mental health affected the existence of a protest. We will use the R statistical software and t-tests to determine whether a decedent’s mental health status affects the existence of protests. We expect that there will be more protests if a decedent has mental health issues. These results will reveal more information about protests following police killings in the United States, an important topic because protests have the potential to alter the aftermath of a killing and lead to a heightened awareness of social issues.

Studying the Impact of Mentor Feedback on Preservice Teacher Satisfaction

Feedback has been pointed out as a prerequisite for professional growth for experts and novices alike. In the education field, researchers have argued that preservice teachers, or student teachers, need high quality feedback to become exemplary teachers for their future students. One of the goals of the Mentors Matter initiative was to study what constitutes quality feedback during clinical placements from mentor teachers and university supervisors. In our project, we coded 4,010 comments to 394 student teachers for the content and quality that student teachers received as part of their clinical assessments. In our presentation, we will discuss how comments on Teacher Attributes (TA), Connections across Observations (CaO), Data Driven Feedback (DDF), and Actionable Recommendation (AR) relate to student teachers’ satisfaction with their clinical placements. Our results can help establish a guideline for having mentor teachers and university supervisors to provide high quality feedback to student teachers to train and prepare stronger teachers.

Online Homophobic and Racial Discrimination and Cardiovascular Health among Young Sexual Minority Men: Preliminary Evidence

Background Much research documents the deleterious impact of discrimination on health outcomes of minority populations. In particular, emerging evidence suggests that experiences of discrimination can lead to physiological dysregulation which, in turn, can lead to poor cardiovascular health outcomes among racial/ethnic minorities. However, experiences in online environments (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) have been underexplored in the research literature despite the fact that they are pervasive among young adults. In particular, young sexual minorities may experience discrimination online due to their racial/ethnic identity and/or sexual minority identity. This, in turn, may impact processes of mental and physiological health among this population. The current study seeks to bridge the gap in the literature by exploring the association between experiences of homophobic and racial discrimination online and cardiovascular health among a sample of young sexual minority men (YSMM).

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.

Reporting the Lakes

Great Lakes Now is a news source and division of Detroit Public Television. It covers issues that affect the Great Lakes and the 40 million people that live within the watershed. GLN produces a monthly show in addition to articles covering topics like water quality, public policy, environmental justice, economic development, and resource conservation. We focused specifically on drinking water quality and infrastructure in the Great Lakes region, tracking water advisories in Indigenous communities and water infrastructure projects in cities from Detroit to Cleveland. Stories like these support GLN aims by increasing public knowledge of the lakes and furthering interest in protecting them.

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