In the United States of America, the nonprofit sector has grown substantially over the last five decades. Despite this, social issues like houselessness appear to be as pervasive as ever. This research seeks to analyze the relationship between the growth of nonprofits focused on the housing crisis and the unhoused population. I hypothesize that the growth of housing-focused (HF) nonprofit organizations will not result in lower numbers of homeless individuals. My underlying theory is that nonprofits, constricted by the structure of the sector, are frequently unable to address structural causes of houselessness. The reliance nonprofits have on wealthy donors is a primary factor. This power dynamic is part of a greater system often referred to as the nonprofit industrial-complex. The growth of HF nonprofits is collected using Candid and measured using nonprofit revenue data from the Internal Revenue Service. Houselessness is measured using data from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. To test this hypothesis, I run a multivariate regression analysis between my two variables across two cities: Seattle, Washington and New York City, New York from 2012 to 2020 (a nine-year period). I control government funding, housing costs, poverty and unemployment. I expect to find increasing numbers of unhoused individuals despite HF nonprofit growth. This research does not advance a casual relationship, but contributes to the theoretical discussion as to whether nonprofits create transformative social change and provides rigorous empirical evidence supporting this theory.

 My research paper investigates whether the Supreme Court is influenced by public opinion. It is important to be aware of whether the Court is inclined to uphold laws that have been passed by legislative majorities or overturn them. Is the Supreme Court restrained or does it have a tendency for judicial activism? The question that guides my work is: During the period of approximately the last six decades, has the Supreme Court been influenced by public opinion when deciding politically important (i.e., salient) cases? My theory is that the Supreme Court is influenced by public opinion when deciding cases that are salient due, in part, to the Court’s inherent political nature. Justices ascend through a partisan appointment process that is predicated on the sharing of power between the President and the Senate. Consequently, justices and their institution cannot uncouple from the political ecosystem. Specifically, I posit that fear of non-implementation constrains a justice’s decision-making. Non-implementation would occur if the Court’s ruling was not enforced by either a lower court or a non-judicial authority. And the potential consequence of recurring non-implementation is to degrade the Court’s legitimacy. To test my hypothesis systematically, I will use multivariate regression analysis to examine the relationship between the ideological direction of Supreme Court case decisions and prevailing public opinion, while accounting for the influences of other factors. My analysis incorporates data from (approximately) 5,000 individual Supreme Court cases, extending from 1958 to 2018. I predict that public opinion does influence Supreme Court decision-making when rulings will ‘resolve’ the national debate around issues that have significant public policy implications.

This paper uses national data collected through China’s population census to estimate the effect of housing prices on fertility rates between 2000-2020 across 31 provincial-level administrative regions in mainland China. I theorize that higher housing price would lead to a decrease in fertility rates. I take housing price as a proxy for the overall costs of living. As houses become more expensive, younger generations are forced to save money for years to afford buying a house. When individuals’ income remains unchanged, higher housing prices lower people’s purchasing ability. This lowered purchasing ability leaves people less financially capable of raising a child and results in individuals being less willing to have a child. This paper employs a multivariate regression model and controls for other relevant variables. I expect to find that with the continuous increase in housing price, there is a steady decrease in fertility rates in each administrative region. Furthermore, since a more rapid rise in commodity prices is associated with fast economic development especially in Beijing and Shanghai, the fertility rates in these two regions would be the lowest, corresponding with a weak per capita purchasing power of individual households. This analysis of the relationship between housing price and fertility rate is important because it explains why there is a fertility decline despite robust economic growth in a developing country. This paper calls for changes in maternity policy to accommodate possible decline in workforce and productivity in China and its aging society in the next 20 years.

The Supreme Court of the United States is required to interact with outside actors as it fulfills its duty of interpreting the law. These actors, including interest groups and the Solicitor General, often provide the Court with information regarding the political and social effects of their decisions. Throughout the past century, the relationship between interest groups and the Supreme Court has changed due to increased ideological and political polarization across the country. These increases have escalated the amount of partisan-oriented amicus curiae, or friend-of-the-court, briefs submitted to the Court. As the Court receives more information from partisan-oriented organizations, I hypothesize that the litigant that receives the most amici support will also receive the support of the Court. This hypothesis stems from the Court’s historical agreement with the desires of public opinion, due to its lack of enforcement power, causing the Court to rule in favor of the amicus groups that are believed to mirror public interests. Amicus briefs, historically meant to provide factual information, have begun to reflect the effects of partisan polarization by working to persuade the Court to decide in a particular direction. By assessing the influence of amicus briefs on the Court’s civil rights decisions following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, my research highlights the effects that both liberal and conservative-oriented interest groups have on civil rights jurisprudence. My research separates civil rights cases into 11 issue-areas, including discrimination, prison rights, and women’s rights. By conducting a multivariate analysis, I account for the effects of amicus briefs and several control variables, including the president’s and Congress’s ideologies, on the Court’s decisions. My preliminary results build on research conducted in the late 1990s by indicating the decreased efficacy of amicus briefs and increased effects of partisan ideology and public opinion on the Court.
 

Recent years have seen a great expansion in the public consciousness of human impacts on global environment, as well as wider acceptance of the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Although individual willingness to take pro-environmental action is a crucial component to real progress on the climate dilemma, it is a phenomenon whose antecedents are complex and diffuse. While much of the literature on this topic focuses on the identity characteristics which may account for individual pro-environmental behaviors, in this research project I build on research in environmental psychology and other disciplines to hypothesize that spending time in nature impacts the pro-environmental behaviors of individuals. I argue that, because it facilitates deeper connection and measurable psychological changes toward cooperative behaviors, time in nature is likely an influence on future actions on behalf of the natural world. I further theorize that although time in nature may impact Democrats and Republicans differently, there is an effect regardless of partisanship. To test this hypothesis, I employ a multivariate regression analysis which tests the relationship between time spent in nature and pro-environmental behaviors while controlling for possible confounding variables including income, education, gender, and partisanship. To investigate the effects of partisanship, I also run a model testing whether time in nature influences the behavior of Democrats and Republicans differently. I expect to find in each case that the relationship between time in nature and pro-environmental behaviors is statistically significant. Such findings could serve to emphasize the importance of access to natural spaces for the future of environmental attitude formation and activism.

The national sense of uncertainty and chaos surrounding the Coronavirus pandemic has been compounded by the spread of COVID-19 misinformation on social media. This has fostered an Infodemic as users struggle to separate fact from fiction in their news feeds and develop conflicting perceptions of reality. This project studies the relationship between the exposure to COVID-19 (re)tweets with misinformation or questionable levels of veracity and governmental trust during the Coronavirus pandemic. I create a continuous User Engagement Index to compare the differences in user engagement for COVID-19 twitter posts that were created/shared by influencers on the right, who tend to be problematic as they have a history of sharing or dog whistling COVID-19 misinformation, to influencers on the left who tend to post neutral content in terms of veracity. Furthermore, I created an ordinal Public Confidence index in which I compare changes in the User Engagement index for posts from the right and left to changes in public opinion survey data to gauge the levels of trust in government institutions. I conduct two separate multivariate regression analyses to evaluate the relationship between the User Engagement Index and a Public Confidence Index. I then assess whether the spread of COVID-19 (re)tweets that are likely epistemically problematic negatively impacts an exposed user’s trust in government. I theorize that exposure to misinformation fosters political cynicism and epistemic confusion, which both fuel a decline in public trust. The findings of this study will help us better understand the cultivation of polarized perception gaps that may inhibit collective action and a unified response during times of crisis and uncertainty. This erodes trust and undermines democratic governance and institutions.

Spinal cord injuries (SCIs) produce motor impairments that have devastating consequences for the independence and quality of life of affected individuals. These impairments result from the weakening of connections between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord. Therefore, there is an ongoing need to develop interventions that strengthen corticospinal connections post SCI. Our laboratory focuses on a hybrid intervention that combines intraspinal neuromodulator delivery with use-dependent physical rehabilitation, which increases motor performance after SCI. However, the mechanisms behind this recovery remain relatively unexplored. Our project aims to address this knowledge gap by using evoked potentials (EPs) as biomarkers to quantify the strength of neuronal connections. EPs represent electrical responses in the brain to stimuli. Following a stimulus event, measuring the EP amplitude allows us to assess the strength of neuronal connections. For our experiment, we will implant chronic cortical and spinal microwire arrays in adult rats with chronic cervical SCI and conduct weekly recording sessions before, during, and after a 6-week therapy period. We will then compare changes in the size of EPs recorded during these sessions. We will also assess motor recovery through behavioral scores on a forelimb reach-and-grasp task, which the cervical cord injury directly impairs. We hypothesize that our interventions will strengthen corticospinal connections damaged by the injury, as manifested in a correlation between an increase in EP amplitudes and changes in motor performance. Ultimately, results from our experiments will help us understand how physical rehabilitation and targeted delivery of neuromodulators mediate recovery of the damaged central nervous system. We also hope our project will inform future rehabilitation strategies targeting SCI.

The purpose of this study is to test the relationship between xenophobic rhetoric and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) political mobilization. The COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in China, has led to undeserved blame and hatred towards Asian Americans during COVID’s early stages. As a result, discrimination against Asian Americans had increased by over 150 percent during the pandemic’s first year. I theorize that the increase of xenophobia will fuel mobilization based on feelings of victimization. Expectations from the study stem from a theory of mobilization that AAPI members will strive for political action instead of a withdrawal from politics when racial targeting is solely Asian-oriented and relies on negative, inaccurate stereotypes. In order to test the effects of discrimination, I will employ regression models to examine whether xenophobic tweets from former President Donald Trump lead to increased mobilization and solidarity among Asian-Americans in online settings from late 2019 until the suspension of his Twitter account in January 2021. I expect to find that xenophobic tweets with high exposure levels to these tweets–measured by the number of likes and retweets–lead to increased popularity in Google-searching terms related to AAPI mobilization (e.g., Asian American Resources, Stop Asian Hate, etc.).

Colin Kaepernick kneeling on the football field in August of 2016 was not the first instance of athlete activism in history but was incredibly meaningful to our current politics. Two years later, in September of 2018, Nike released their Dream Crazy advertisement featuring Colin Kaepernick. Evidence shows that this campaign had significant economic consequences for Kaepernick and Nike, leading one to believe that there could have been political consequences as well. Therefore, I ask: to what extent did Colin Kaepernick’s campaign with Nike mobilize public support for and against racial justice in the United States? I hypothesize that there is a positive relationship between exposure and donations; as exposure to the campaign increases so do donations to both racial justice efforts and counter-racial justice efforts. I reason that people’s actions are grounded in emotions and morals; with the polarization of the United States growing, a political act like Kaepernick’s taps into people’s allegiances and identities and they will act accordingly. To test this hypothesis and answer my research question I have gathered Google search term data from August 2018-October 2018 to gauge how much attention the Nike advertisement got. Then I gathered donation data from seven political campaigns representing the left and right sides of the political spectrum from August 2018-October 2018 as a measurement of political activism. The campaigns were chosen based on their salience on each side of the Black Lives Matter conversation and include Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Preliminary results suggest that there may be a positive relationship between exposure and donations. This matters because it exemplifies the power that big brand names and celebrity athletes have on the political playing field. The consequences of this participation and influence are vast, it can create polarized divides and mobilize action.

 Twelve million US citizens are currently suffering from visual impairment, many of them with late-stage blindness, which is accompanied by a drop in visual acuity, and the inability to recognize faces (CDC, 2022). Currently, few electronic sight restoration devices (SRDs) exist as treatment options for late-stage impairment that are precise in targeting retinal cells. Current SRDs cannot selectively stimulate on and off-center retinal cells – instead, all cells are stimulated regardless of their biologically natural firing pattern. Our research aims to examine whether neural plasticity can aid in overcoming this distortion in sighted individuals, using dichoptic presentation of stimuli that roughly mimics this simultaneous stimulation of on- and off- cells. Specifically, we convolved Fourier filters (F, and it’s contrast reverse complement F′) with images that are contrasted reversed complements of one another (I and I′) to induce a similar coding distortion caused by SRDs. We hypothesized that, through perceptual learning, sighted participants who received training with these distorted stimuli would be able to adapt to these distorted on-and-off cell responses. To test our hypotheses, participants were assigned to one of two groups. While both groups performed an object discrimination task with the distorted visual input, the experimental group did 25 hours of video game (VG) training, while the control group (CG) completed 5 hours of the object discrimination task. Participants in the VG group played a game that is an adaptation of Fruit Ninja, and tested in the discrimination task every 5 hours of video game play. Preliminary results indicate that individuals assigned to the VG group displayed superior performance in the object discrimination task, compared to the control group. Our results indicate that individuals with SRDs may have the potential to learn to decode unnatural visual cell population responses, which could improve their visual perceptions and enhance quality of life.