5,810 research outputs found

    Diversity and Health: Three Essays Exploring Social Context and Outcomes

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    As the world becomes more diverse and more integrated, examining how racial, political, and food diversity influences individuals’ consumption, behaviors, and health becomes more paramount than ever before. The United States grows more racially diverse with large racial and ethnic shifts on the horizon regarding the proportion of the population. With the U.S. population expected to become more diverse, individuals’ political affiliation becoming more prevalent to personal identity, and food security becoming more problematic; we examine how racial, political, and food diversity influences individuals’ consumption and preferences with the intent to understand what changes in health and preferences may occur. These essays contribute to the literature in a novel way by understanding how the local racial, political, and food environments impact individual consumption and behavior choices. Additionally, these papers novel approaches yield strong evidence that these different measures of diversity play an important and larger role in individuals’ daily lives then realized. We utilize a cutting edge propensity score matching technique to understand the impact of the food access program WIC (Women, Infants, and Children Supplemental Health Program) in “WIC Participation and Relative Quality of Household Food Purchases: Evidence from FoodAPS” essay. In this essay, we show the health benefits participants in WIC receive when participating in the p rogram. Second, we leverage a special type of survey called a List Experiment to understand respondents’ social desirability bias given their political environment in the essay titled “Social Desirability Bias and Polling Errors in the 2016 Presidential Election.” In this essay, we show that people respond differently to the question of whether they support a particular presidential candidate when they are given the opportunity to directly or indirectly express this support. Lastly, we explore how local racial diversity directly impacts an individual’s healthy food consumption in the essay titled “Diversity and Health: Exploring Local Racial Diversity’s Impact on Health Through Food Consumption”. This final essay attempts to ascertain the associative effects of racial diversity on an individual’s healthy food consumption. This result shows the dramatic impact racial diversity has on healthy food consumption by improving individuals’ food intake, but concentrated on certain races. Overall, this dissertation shows the dramatic influence social and environmental context has on individual outcomes via health and preferences

    Structuring the decision process : an evaluation of methods in the structuring the decision process

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    This chapter examines the effectiveness of methods that are designed to provide structure and support to decision making. Those that are primarily aimed at individual decision makers are examined first and then attention is turned to groups. In each case weaknesses of unaided decision making are identified and how successful the application of formal methods is likely to be in mitigating these weaknesses is assessed

    Linguistic Alternatives to Quantitative Research Strategies Part One: How Linguistic Mechanisms Advance Research

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    Combining psycholinguistic technologies and systems analysis created advances in motivational profiling and numerous new behavioral engineering applications. These advances leapfrog many mainstream statistical research methods, producing superior research results via cause-effect language mechanisms. Entire industries explore motives ranging from opinion polling to persuasive marketing campaigns, and individual psychotherapy to executive performance coaching. Qualitative research tools such as questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups are now transforming static language data into dynamic linguistic systems measurement technology. Motivational mechanisms, especially linguistic mechanisms, allow specific changes within a motive’s operations. This includes both the choices the intervention creates and its end-goal. Predictable behavior changes are impossible with popular statistical methods. Advanced linguistic research strategies employ motivational change methods with state-of-the -art language and communications modeling

    Implicit Measures of Attitudes and Political Voting Behavior

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    Implicit measures have contributed to the prediction of behavior in numerous domains including the political realm. Some theoretical arguments suggest that implicit measures are unlikely to substantially improve the prediction of political voting behavior. Other arguments are more optimistic, especially regarding the prediction of undecided voters' behavior. Here, we review the evidence regarding the extent to which implicit measures improve the prediction of political voting behavior beyond explicit self-report measures. Results reveal that implicit measures are often statistically significant predictors. However, the inclusion of an implicit measure leads to modest or even no improvement of the overall accuracy of the original prediction. We conclude that implicit measures are likely to be practically relevant for predicting voting behavior only if researchers can identify new approaches. Related findings in political psychology may pave the way as they demonstrate that implicit measures can contribute unique knowledge not accounted for in other ways

    A Lexically Driven Taxonomy for Political Campaign Interactions on Twitter

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    Political candidates continuously develop new techniques for communicating to their targeted publics effectively through social media. One way to do so is through Twitter. This exploratory study maps Aristotelian rhetorical appeals to electoral tweets issued in the 2016 presidential election. Using automatic and human coding, the study proposes four different types of Twitter rhetorical appeals. Results show 58.8% of tweets issued during the presidential election are captured by the rhetorical taxonomy. The findings also show that the primary appeals both candidates use in both mass and salience did not always influence intention to vote. Finally, there are correlations between contextually relevant appeal use and an increase in public intention to vote. The appeal with the strongest positive correlation between changes in public opinion and rhetorical appeal use is the deliberative appeal, suggesting politicians need to focus on crafting messages foreshadowing the future. The major contribution of this study is in showing how a traditional persuasive framework can be applied to explain a modern political communication medium’s impact in influencing public opinion
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