This study examines how undergraduate students majoring in humanities and social sciences navigate the institutional culture of higher education (HE) through a case study at the University of Washington. I identify two different logics within HE that contribute to its institutional culture — the industry logic and the social institution logic. The industry logic refers to the growing trend of business and industry orientations in HE — especially since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s. The social institution logic is the more traditional ideal of HE that aims to cultivate values of citizenship and morals. The goal of this study is to examine how undergraduate students understand and respond to changes in institutional culture. While the commodification of HE is well studied, scholarly attention neglects its evolution and fails to articulate students’ response to this shift. This study is inductive and qualitative — focusing on undergraduate experiences and how students give cultural meaning to their experiences under varying institutional culture. I will conduct 12 semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students majoring in humanities or social sciences to understand their college experiences. Though the anticipated results of the study have yet to be determined due to the inductive nature, I hope to examine how students reconcile their passions and actual experiences under institutional culture of HE. Any disparities observed between universities as institutions and students as agentic individuals might reveal the neglected demands within society. This research will provide insights to which kind of education system our society needs today, which will lead to better policies about the future development of HE.

Racial and ethnic minority groups are less likely to seek or have access to mental health support services. Despite an increase in the quantity of mental health services nationwide, disparities in usage across racial and ethnic minority groups still exist, leaving resources underutilized and many individuals with unmet needs. Previous studies highlight both structural and non-structural barriers, such as income and stigma, which prevent certain racial groups from fully utilizing health care services. Studies often overlook health outcomes associated with immigrant status and overgeneralize findings to all populations. While scholars have studied the structural barriers to accessing mental health care services, there is a need to understand the cultural contexts preventing racial and ethnic groups from reaching out to these services. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), this study examines differences in access to and utilization of mental health care services of U.S born and immigrant populations from the years 2010-2020. The NHIS allows for the control and determination of effects of both structural and cultural factors such as health insurance coverage, financial instability, racial and ethnic characteristics, and migrant status to further understand the dynamics of access to and use of mental health care services. Foreign-born individuals are expected to show lower access to health care resources with varying levels of moderate mental distress. These differences are expected to vary for those who have spent more time in the U.S with more access to resources and higher levels of mental distress. Understanding trends related to mental health care can help develop better public policy responses and improve the promotion of health care services. This study will help address why services are underutilized and how to minimize health service inequalities among racial and ethnic populations. 

Despite a rise in egalitarian views over the past decade, the trend has recently slowed down and scholars are struggling to understand why. Past research shows an unexpected trend of young millennials, specifically men, reverting to traditional gender norms. Childhood family instability is proposed as one possible explanation, but it has not been examined empirically. The goal of this project is to understand how one form of family instability, divorce, impacts men’s view on love, marriage, and gender norms. The research is driven by two questions. First, how does the experience of divorce affect a father's view on gender? Second, did the father’s post-divorce view on gender affect the son’s attitudes, and, if so, how were these attitudes transmitted from father to son? The data will be collected through individual semi-structured interviews with divorced fathers who had custody of their son and the sons of these fathers who are at least 18. The study expects that children of divorce will reject egalitarian views because they have observed their parents separate through their attempt to uphold egalitarian views. While this project only examines males, future research can expand this study through interviewing single mothers and their female children. This project will help address the puzzling phenomenon of why there is a declining trend toward egalitarian gender views.

Schools across the country struggle with the issue of meal debt and lunch shaming practices used to discourage the accumulation of negative meal balances. These practices include dumping students’ trays in the trash upon non-payment, requiring students to work off their debt, or publicly shaming them. Although lunch shaming was banned in Washington State in 2018, the impacts of this policy shift have not been studied. High-poverty schools shifted to government-subsidized universal school meal programs (USMP) to address students’ food insecurity. Studies show USMP significantly increase the meal participation of students who were already enrolled in free lunch programs. While scholars speculate stigma might explain this phenomenon, it has not been studied directly. This study explores the role of stigma in school meal participation by studying two populations; students who are considered non-poor with meal debt and students who are enrolled in free and reduced priced meal programs. This study considers the role of stigma as a barrier to school meal participation by studying meal debt and students at the eligibility margins in free lunch programs. This study addresses existing gaps in the literature through a combination of in-depth interviews and observations of schools ineligible for government-subsidized USMP. In-depth interviews with school administrators expand understandings of school-level cultures, mealtime procedures, and experiences with meal debt. Observations at a single school over a 2-month period reveal how students experience mealtime, how kitchen workers execute meal debt policies, and the dynamics between students, their peers, and authority figures in the lunchline. Findings show that stigma is reproduced in the lunch line and act as a barrier to student meal participation. 

A feature of the criminal legal system of concern to scholars is court-issued monetary sanctions — the fines, fees, and costs imposed on people convicted of crimes. Prior research suggests these debts exacerbate inequality and perpetuate disadvantages for the affected individuals, families, and communities. While previous studies have found that monetary sanctions negatively affect family members of the debt-burdened individual, the impact of these debts on parent-child relationships remains unexplored. Attempting to bridge this gap in knowledge, this study examines monetary sanction’s influence on the nature of parenting. Scholars understand parents play a vital role in shaping and providing emotional and material resources for their children. Given this, it is important to understand the impact of monetary sanction debt on parents’ ability to provide these resources and ultimately how monetary sanctions impact child well-being. Utilizing interview data from a previous multi-state study of over 200 individuals with legal debt and children, supplemented by an analysis of interviews of similar individuals, this study examines how stress and material deprivation resulting from monetary sanction debt reduce the emotional and material capacity of parents to address their child’s needs. Preliminary analyses show parents frame the impact of debt as generating financial and emotional stress for them, and they attempt to minimize its direct effects on their children. In some cases, it is clear that parents are unable to provide important resources for their children, and the stress of debt negatively affects their relationships. These preliminary results suggest one additional avenue as to how monetary sanctions affect individuals. As other researchers have discovered, the impact is not simply resident with the person in debt but has an additional negative reach that should be understood as we look to reform the practice of monetary sanctions.

Most of the current literature on relationships and marriage in the US overlooks the ethnic, religious, and generational variations within the black population. This study explores the nuance in views and attitudes among African American and African immigrant young women toward marriage, especially hypergamous and interracial marriages. This study follows a deductive approach through testing hypotheses developed through four existing theories. First, symbolic interactionism theory suggests African Americans and African immigrants hold different attitudes toward marriage because they developed different meanings of marriage. Second, social exchange theory posits that because people tend to marry those of similar social and economic backgrounds, interracial and hypergamous marriages represent a social exchange of status. Third, classic assimilation theory suggests as the generational status of African immigrants increases, they increasingly develop similar marriage views and attitudes to African Americans. Finally, segmented assimilation theory holds that Muslim African immigrants are selective in their assimilation, thus, would not have similar views to African Americans. This study uses qualitative data collected through interviews, and quantitative data from the public use microdata series, IPUMS USA. The mixed methods approach compares interview participants — black female college students — with the trends in the nationally representative microdata. The expected findings would confirm all of the aforementioned hypotheses. This study aims to enrich the current body of the literature and provide greater depth and breadth into the ethnically, generationally, and religiously diverse black population. A better understanding of marriage views and attitudes in the black community can help shape public policy that fosters more transitions into marriage. Moreover, marriage is among many predictors of the integration of immigrants. Thus, comparing immigrants to Americans can highlight how immigration may play a role in disruptions and delays in the integration process.

Despite the abundance of research surrounding the influence of organized religion on emotional well-being and the sense of community, women in Spanish-speaking Christian churches have been overlooked. In most churches, women are treated differently than men and are less likely to hold leadership positions, yet, previous research findings imply high religiosity is positively associated with well-being among women. However, Spanish-speaking religious communities have notably different cultures than the largely white church communities that previous studies focused on. My aim with this research is to understand how gender impacts the relationship between religion, emotional well-being, and sense of community outside the previously studied, predominantly white populations. The cultural differences between white and Spanish-speaking religious communities are numerous, these differences may lead to different outcomes. This study investigated whether the results of the previous studies would be the same within Spanish-speaking churches. This study used qualitative semi-structured interviews with women (lasting 15-45 minutes), in private settings within their churches. These interviews were transcribed and patterns that emerged among the women were coded. I selected churches using non-probability sampling and snowball sampling to recruit women within the identified churches. My hypothesis suggests that women within Spanish-speaking Christian churches experience a better state of well-being and a strong sense of community despite being treated differently than men. Understanding how religious institutions can have positive effects on marginalized identities allows for those institutions to be used as safe spaces where one might do outreach, engagement, and design interventions in ways that might be more effective than through other social institutions such as schools or hospitals.