Designing LLM-Agents with Personalities: A Psychometric Approach

This research introduces a novel methodology for assigning quantifiable, controllable and psychometrically validated personalities to Large Language Models-Based Agents (Agents) using the Big Five personality framework. It seeks to overcome the constraints of human subject studies, proposing Agents as an accessible tool for social science inquiry. Through a series of four studies, this research demonstrates the feasibility of assigning psychometrically valid personality traits to Agents, enabling them to replicate complex human-like behaviors. The first study establishes an understanding of personality constructs and personality tests within the semantic space of an LLM. Two subsequent studies---using empirical and simulated data---illustrate the process of creating Agents and validate the results by showing strong correspondence between human and Agent answers to personality tests. The final study further corroborates this correspondence by using Agents to replicate known human correlations between personality traits and decision-making behaviors in scenarios involving risk-taking and ethical dilemmas, thereby validating the effectiveness of the psychometric approach to design Agents and its applicability to social and behavioral research

Settler Colonization and Language Contact: How they Shaped Old English

This thesis examines the way in which Germanic dialects, which were brought to Britain by settlers in the post-Roman period and which ultimately evolved into Old English, came to predominate in the southern and eastern parts of the island over a stretch of roughly two centuries spanning the fifth to the seventh. It uses theories of language contact and creolization to explain why Celtic languages left very little influence on Old English, despite the fact that Celtic speakers came into contact with the Germanic speakers and were incorporated into their communities. Evidence is provided by linguistics (including toponymy), history, archaeology, and recent breakthroughs in archaeogenetic research. The latter in particular has firmly established that mass migration from the North Sea coast areas of the European continent to Britain was the primary reason for cultural change. To support the argument, paper also examines analogous scenarios of language contact with better historical attestation

Invisible Wounds and Sibling Dynamics: A Narrative Study Investigating the Influence of Juvenile Incarceration on Black Family Life

This dissertation, Invisible Wounds and Sibling Dynamics: A Narrative Study Investigating the Influence of Juvenile Incarceration on Black Family Life, explores how juvenile incarceration reshapes emotional life, sibling relationships, and family dynamics by centering the experiences of non-incarcerated Black siblings. While prior research has extensively examined the effects of incarceration on youth and their parents, this study turns attention to siblings—who often occupy the longest and most developmentally significant familial roles—yet remain largely overlooked in research, practice, and policy. Drawing on narrative life history interviews with 40 Black individuals across the United States whose siblings were incarcerated as youth, this study examines how incarceration reconfigures family roles, alters perceptions of justice and state legitimacy, and influences long-term identity and behavioral outcomes. It traces how siblings’ emotional responses, caregiving responsibilities, and relational bonds are shaped by their proximity to carceral institutions and the systemic pressures that follow. The first paper, Sibling Bonds and Carceral Disruption: A Narrative Study on the Impact of Juvenile Incarceration in Black Families, identifies three types of sibling relationships that emerge in response to incarceration: enduring, forged, and damaged. These bonds reflect how incarceration can both deepen emotional ties through solidarity and loyalty, or fracture them through silence, guilt, and abandonment. This paper highlights siblinghood as a crucial relational space where the effects of state punishment are absorbed, negotiated, and remembered. The second paper, Trapped in a Bubble: The Unintended Consequences of Parental Protection in Families Impacted by Incarceration, examines how parental strategies intended to preserve family stability—such as emotional redirection, overprotection, and role enforcement—often produce unintended harm to non-incarcerated siblings. Five themes emerged across participants’ narratives: diverted attention, psychological splitting, parentification, emotional isolation, and role ambiguity. These findings suggest that caregiving under conditions of carceral stress can complicate developmental processes and suppress emotional expression. The third paper, The Radicalizing Effect of Mistreatment: How Sibling Incarceration Shapes Life Trajectories, analyzes how siblings’ exposure to legal and institutional harm—through arrests, courtroom proceedings, and prison visits—catalyzes long-term shifts in worldview and decision-making. Participants described moments of disillusionment and betrayal that spurred both withdrawal from institutions and commitment to justice-related careers. This paper theorizes these shifts as part of a broader process of meaning-making in response to systemic mistreatment. Together, these three papers demonstrate that juvenile incarceration functions not as a discrete event, but as an enduring, relational disruption that alters the emotional, developmental, and institutional trajectories of siblings left behind. The dissertation contributes to social work by expanding family systems and ecological models to account for sibling experiences; to criminology by reframing legal cynicism, system avoidance, and institutional disengagement as relationally grounded responses; and to sociology by extending theories of secondary prisonization, social bonds, labeling, and strain to include the role of siblings. Ultimately, this work argues for greater recognition of siblings as central actors in the aftermath of incarceration and as key informants in understanding the multigenerational effects of carceral harm

Grasping Number: Investigating Children’s Understanding of Number Gestures and Their Role in Number Word Learning

The ability to understand and use symbolic number is fundamental to mathematical and cognitive development. Prior research has focused extensively on the developmental trajectory of children’s number word learning, but less is known about how children learn and integrate other number representations, including number gestures, into their emerging understanding of number. Number gestures share properties of both nonsymbolic and symbolic representations, making them a potentially valuable bridge between nonsymbolic quantities and symbolic numbers. Despite this, we know little about their role in number acquisition. Across three studies, I examine children’s number gesture knowledge, its relationship to number word learning, and the underlying mechanisms that support children’s early understanding of these representations. In Study 1, I examine whether subset-knowers more accurately map number gestures to both nonsymbolic quantities and number words than number words to quantities. Results indicate that children possess an understanding of how cardinal number gestures relate to quantities and number words that could allow these representations to serve as an intermediary between quantities and number words. In Study 2, I test whether prompting children to produce a number gesture prior to labeling the set size with a number word improves their number word accuracy. Findings show that gesturing supports verbal number learning, particularly for numbers beyond children’s knower-levels, providing some of the first causal evidence for the role of gestures in numerical development. Finally, in Study 3, I explore why number gestures may be easier to learn than number words, assessing whether their item-based structure accounts for their advantage. Results show that children are better at matching number gestures to sets than sets to other sets, suggesting that they do not rely exclusively on the item-based nature of number gestures, and further supporting the hypothesis that the affordances of number gestures contribute to children’s early understanding of these representations. The results of these three studies, combined with prior research, suggest that number gestures are not just an alternative means for expressing number, but can also support the development of young children’s symbolic number knowledge. By revealing potential mechanisms through which gestures support number learning, this work contributes to a broader understanding of symbolic number acquisition. In addition, these findings have educational implications, highlighting the potential for number gestures to serve as an intuitive and widely available tool for early numerical instruction and learning

An Apophatic Approach to Lutheran Catachesis

No abstrac

The Political Influence of Public Housing Policy Programs on Electoral Outcomes in Singapore: A Case of Clientelism and Democratic Backsliding?

Singapore's HDB provides public housing for its people and is the congee of socio-political stability in the nation. Affordable housing has not only guaranteed home ownership for the bulk of the population but also has historically been an instrument of political governance. Public housing in a larger mechanism serves to reward the PAP with established advantages and further induce distorting political dynamics in the country. The paper purports to see to what extent HDB upgrading programs influence voting behavior and whether they constitute a form of clientelism or political coercion. The study places Singapore in the larger spectrum of hybrid regimes, where state resources are habitually used for consolidating political control. Singapore's public housing system, under the purview of the Housing and Development Board (HDB), is famous for providing affordable housing to over 80 percent of the citizens. Instances of clientelism imply a strategic swapping of state benefits for political support, whereas electoral bribes can be deemed coercive or transaction-dominated methods of influencing voter choice. Labeling Singapore as a soft authoritarian regime indicates the country's singular mix of electoral formalities and tightly managed political competition. By analyzing upgrading programs under HDB within this setting, the research elucidates the informal creation of political legitimacy through mechanisms that do not require outright oppression but rather everyday tools of governance. This leads to a finer understanding of how modern-day states shape voter choice and entrench power differently-not outrightly violating democratic norms but subversively bending them from within

Forces of Nature: Muscular Christianity for the 21st Century

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The Ebbs and Flows of Vaccine Equity Research: Revealing the Hidden Architecture of Knowledge Evolution Through Multilayer Networks and Natural Language Processing

Global vaccine equity is a persistent challenge that goes beyond national borders and healthcare systems. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted significant dis parities in access to life-saving interventions. Yet we still lack an integrated under- standing of how vaccine equity research has reorganized thematically and methodologically over time, and how scholarly attention has shifted across populations, geographies, and analytic strategies in response to external disruptions. This study conducts a systematic analysis of vaccine equity research from 2001 to 2024, examining a total of 3,939 publications from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. A multilayer analytical framework is employed, which includes natural language processing (NLP) for topic modeling, fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) for systematic content extraction, and multilayer network analysis to capture complex, interdisciplinary dynamics across fourteen distinct analytical layers. Our findings reveal that systematic shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, reconfigure the structure of scientific inquiry by amplifying equity-centered agendas and redistributing methodological prominence across research layers. While convergence increased in procedural dimensions, conceptual novelty and cross-dimensional integration remained uneven. The study introduces a multilayer network framework for tracing scientific evolution in interdisciplinary domains. It offers design principles for research infrastructures that balance rapid response coordination with long-term epistemic diversity

The Presence and Formation of “Depoliticizing Political Habitus” in Chinese Millennial Bureaucrats

The thesis identified the presence of “depoliticizing political habitus” among Chinese millennial bureaucrats. Through interviews with millennial and senior bureaucrats in Northeastern China, onsite ethnography in a bureaucratic community, and layered content analysis, the thesis argues that the depoliticizing political habitus is a bureaucratic identity-based exclusionary political habitus that encompasses both conscious thinking and subconscious reactions to politics. The habitus demonstrated co-constitutions of depoliticizing-ness and politicalness. Depoliticizing-ness is intended to depoliticize the general masses. Politicalness means that millennial bureaucrats are constantly alarmed by politics in their minds and will prevent the political participation of the general masses at all possible costs. The depoliticizing political habitus lacked constructive linkage to coherent political ideologies or theories, regardless of liberal democratic or political meritocratic theories. The core value of the habitus is: Politics is only and will always only be the matter of political elites; Politics will never ever be the matter of the general masses. The thesis then examined the formation processes of the depoliticizing political habitus, indicating that symbolic and material differences are key factors. Through onsite ethnographic fieldwork in one gated bureaucratic community in China, the thesis concluded that the community serves as a reversed total institution for the socialization processes. The spatial segregation between millennial bureaucrats and the general masses strengthened socialization processes by exacerbating the symbolic distinctions between the two social groups. Finally, the actual experiences of serving as class cadres finalized the socialization of the habitus and contributed further to the depoliticizing-ness and politicalness of the habitus

Diversity and Cohesion: Exploring Employment as Mediator

Motivation: As the United States becomes increasingly diverse through immigration, understanding how demographic change affects community solidarity is a critical policy concern. While research documents associations between ethnic diversity and social cohesion, the mechanisms driving these relationships remain unclear. Problem Statement: This study examines whether employment mediates the relationship between immigration-driven demographic change and social cohesion. Specifically, it tests if increases in foreign-born population shares reduce natives’ employment opportunities, thereby lowering social cohesion. Approach: We combine data from the American Community Survey and the CPS-CEV supplement (2017–2023), analyzing 43,548 respondents across 12 metropolitan areas. Linear mediation models decompose total associations into direct and indirect (via employment) effects, with bootstrap confidence intervals and robustness checks (simulation-based GLMs, IPW, regression imputation). Results: Metros with significant foreign-born growth exhibit a binary cohesion effect of β = 0.002 (95% CI: –0.009, 0.012; p=0.917) and a continuous effect of β = 0.032 (95% CI: –0.001, 0.068; p=0.071). Indirect effects via employment are negligible (0.0001; 95% CI: –0.0003, 0.0005), representing <1% mediation. Conclusions: Employment does not meaningfully mediate demographic-change effects on social cohesion, challenging economic-competition explanations. Very small effect sizes suggest minimal practical significance; policies should consider alternative pathways like intergroup contact, cultural-bridge initiatives, or institutional responses