Social Sciences

I worked on the research project “Coding Media Coverage of Presidential Campaigns” with Professor Stephen Medvic as a Hackman research assistant. The question behind the project was “How effective are presidential campaigns in the US?” Professor Medvic had conducted weekly surveys of election analysts during the 2008, 2012 and 2016 campaigns asking them to select the candidate who had run a better campaign in the previous week. Weekly campaign performance should influence a candidate’s standing in the following week’s public opinion polls; however, we had to control for media coverage in order to verify that positive or negative coverage of the candidates was not the real driver of poll results. My responsibility during the project was to read through all the front-page articles from the New York Times for every day during the campaigns in all three years and code the tone of coverage for each candidate.

The project focused on Unit 731, a special Imperial Japanese Army which built one of the largest biological warfare centers around the world and conducted lethal human testing to develop bacterial weapons during the Second Sino-Japanese War of WWII in Northeast China(previously known as Manchuria). I examined Unit 731 in its historical context by traveling to China and Japan to visit exhibition halls, sites, and public libraries to get detailed knowledge on this issue. Throughout my research, I confirmed that this special unit, led by General Shirō Ishii, had conducted bacterial tests using plague and cholera to examine their lethal effect on humans. Using these test results, this special unit developed the first model of biological weapons and used them during WWII on a relatively small scale. After the Japanese surrendered, they destroyed most evidence before they left and most top officials were exempted from the trial later."

The F&M Global Barometer of Gay Rights (GBGR) and the F&M Global Barometer of/Transgender Rights (GBTR) provide quantitative insights into the current state of human rights internationally. We applied the GBGR and GBTR data to 12 case studies: Senegal, Tanzania, Zambia, Tunisia, Macedonia, Moldova, Barbados, Ghana, Burundi, Brazil, India, Indonesia, creating “human rights country profiles for each country. We used the case studies of these twelve countries to delve deeper into how the F&M GBGR and GBTR arrive at a score for a given country. We were able to explore the complexities of the gay and transgender rights situations in each of the twelve countries in order to gain a nuanced understanding of the score that represents them in the F&M Global Barometers of Gay and Transgender Rights.

This research tracks and explores the U.S. economic policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the federal level. This project focuses on the major “bailout” programs created in the CARES Act for businesses and corporations, health care providers, states and local governments, and individuals. The project aims to understand who got what money and how that money was distributed. This project looks at how vulnerable populations in particular were impacted by the pandemic response stimulus programs and examines how risk is shifted differently among different bailout programs. This project also studies the current impact of these programs alongside the impact of various bailout programs following the 2007–2009 Great Recession.

This research project seeks to understand the various policy efforts towards COVID-19 that played out within the U.S. Initially, I looked at the mitigation policies and reopening procedures of a variety of states, but my research eventually shifted to analyzing the reopening process that played out within Pennsylvania. Specifically, I looked at three counties in Pennsylvania that defied the governor’s stay-at-home orders and reopened early; my aim was to get a better sense of the political discourse surrounding COVID-19 that occurred on the local, state, and federal level within these counties. By analyzing the social media pages of the political actors involved in the reopening decisions of these counties, as well as testimonials from local business owners, I was able to find common narratives among those who pushed to reopen early and develop a better understanding of the back-and-forth that played out in Pennsylvania’s contentious reopening process.

As a Hackman summer scholar, I assisted Professor Singer with her preliminary research on the intimate markets of human breast milk sale and donation. Initially, I gained an understanding of how sociologists frame the theoretical understandings of intimate markets and risky exchanges relevant to Professor Singer's research. Primarily, I helped collect data from relevant websites by collecting, labeling, and storing producer posts for future coding. I also helped to design a survey in order to collect qualitative data from the people using online markets to sell their breast milk to others. My experience gave me insight into the sociological research process and various forms of data collection.

This project forms part of the Economics Department’s initiative on “Inequality, Poverty, Power and Social Justice,”. It was built on the groundwork begun last year to develop a social justice index (SOJI) for Lancaster City and County. In order to create a way to benchmark economic and social progress in Lancaster, the project focused on clarifying and sharpening the conceptual basis for the index , and narrowing down social indicators to measure social injustice across many dimensions like gender, race and national identity in Lancaster. This involved researching qualitative and quantitative measures of social inequality and collecting and analyzing city, county and statewide data. It also included discussing how to create a numeric index. From here, the initiative hopes to build off of the preliminary analysis conducted this year to find a way to develop an index to measure progress towards a more equitable Lancaster.

This past summer, I worked with Professor Maria Mitchell researching a legendary 1982 World Cup semi-final between France and West Germany. The game is considered historic by soccer fans not only because it was the first World Cup match to be decided by penalty shots. The semi-final also attained its status from a violent collision between a German goalie and a French center who was left with serious injuries. Following the game, anti-German sentiments rose in France and tensions between the two countries ran hot, eventually leading to both countries’ leaders issuing statements regarding the game.

I identified and interpreted both English and German language sources that discussed the game and its stars. In particular, in order to document reactions to the game and its political effects, I examined archived issues of Der Spiegel from the 1980s through the 2010s.

This Marshall Project explores female youth soccer development opportunities in England, where soccer (football) is a historically male-dominated sport. Throughout England, soccer clubs, with support of the national governing body, the English Football Association (FA), train youth to play at professional or national levels in the future. Females, however, do not enjoy the same access to youth development opportunities as males. In 2015, the FA formed the Regional Talent Club (RTC) system, granting soccer clubs across England FA funds to establish female youth development programs. I assessed two RTCs through interviews with coaches and administrators and observations of club practices and operations to discover how the FA’s investments are impacting English women's soccer opportunities. My study found that persistent economic and resource disparities, especially regarding facility access and full-time coaching, served to maintain female marginality in soccer.

In 1860, Albert Edward (later Edward VII) was sent on what is now seen as a “goodwill” mission to North America. However, the reasons as to why the Prince went on the trip are not usually specified. Research shows that Great Britain sent the young Prince for two reasons: to soothe tensions between Britain and the United States caused by a naval conflict two years earlier and to halt the Prince’s dalliances. After touring Canada, Albert reached the United States and was welcomed by the people from Michigan to Maine. He attempted to avoid visiting the South as the country was on the brink of Civil War. He would become the first monarch to visit the United States since the country gained independence in 1776.

This project particularly focused on international involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992), and the years leading up to the period. Through accessing State Department documents made available under the Freedom of Information Act and the National Security Archive, I gathered information on the issue of human rights of El Salvador and the activities of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. The treatment of US foreign nationals in El Salvador, human rights policy, and pressure in the cold war environment helped shape US policy. The research uncovered details regarding how the US viewed and responded to the conflict through multiple administrations. International involvement was not just confined to the US, it fit neatly into the international struggle between the “second world” communist states and the “first world” capitalist and democratic states. Sources suggested that the Chinese Republic and European leftist groups took their ideologically respective sides in the conflict.

My assistantship with Professor Willard was dedicated to exploring the “global village” concept by the famous media theorist, Marshall McLuhan. We used the Voyant search engine for “digital term mining,” which allowed Professor Willard to locate where McLuhan first developed “global village” in his seminal Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. While digital term mining can easily be done by pressing “command + F,” the Voyant “trendline” tool allows researchers to mine thousands of pages in minutes. Through term mining, Professor Willard discovered that McLuhan created his concept by defining its analog in context, which he claimed was “the tribe.” This pivotal discovery allowed Professor Willard to narrow down her focus and to analyze other academic and advertising narratives about “tribal” cultures. The research unveiled the contexts of McLuhan’s investment in Eurocentric notions of the “primitive tribal man,” as he drew on Western assumptions about indigenous cultures during his time.

In Guadalajara, from the late 1800s to mid 1900s obstetrics became more salient with the growing knowledge of and concern for public health. This was especially true amongst lower class women due to the high infant mortality rates. The growing connections between the Hospital Civil and the Universidad de Guadalajara contributed to the shift in obstetrics towards a more medicalized environment, thereby differing from its traditional approach of relying heavily on midwives. This came to be with a series of administrative changes and repairs in the obstetrics departments of institutions as shown in primary sources such as multiple digital archives from the Hospital Civil and Universidad de Guadalajara. Still, midwives continued to play a big role in obstetrics for the lower class despite its push toward a more medicalized approach; former Mexican first lady, Aida Sullivan acknowledges their importance in her book, Madre Mexicana along with providing advice on puericulture.