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No Child Left Behind: The Education Policy’s Impact on the Incidence on Crime in the Unites States
Get PDFThis paper utilizes state level education data measuring public schools’ Adequate Yearly Progress to estimate the impact of the federal education policy, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), on crime rates in the Unites States. The study employs a fixed effects model and a lagged fixed effects model to evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation of NCLB on decreasing crime through improving the quality and number of educational years completed across the country. The main findings indicate that the policy was effective in decreasing overall property crime and motor vehicle theft. For property crime, the impact of school improvement takes the greatest effect after one and two years. The magnitude of the impact found is small but suggests a pathway for policy makers to further decrease crime by way of focused educational reform
The Number 80: A Simple Score or a Reference Point for DIII College Golfers
Get PDFThere is an abundance of existing literature which shows the presence of behavioral biases in professional sports. Researchers have used reference dependent preferences and loss aversion, to explain athlete the behavior of professional golfers. Existing literature showed that par of the hole (Elmore and Urbaczewski, 2019), par of the round (Pope and Schweitzer, 2011) and par of the tournament (Stone and Arkes, 2016) have all been identified as reference points for professional golfers on the PGA tour. In this paper, I analyze a new sample of golfers: DIII college golfers. I use a 4 part analysis to examine whether the reference dependent preferences model can help explain the behavior and performance of DIII male college golfers. I hypothesized that there exists a single reference point for DIII golfers which is greater than par. Furthermore, I hypothesized that golfers exhibit loss aversion as they change their behavior relative to the reference point
The Impact of Universal Motorcycle Helmet Regulation on Deceased Organ Donors
Get PDFAs of today, only one study (Dickert-Conlin et al., 2011) has analyzed the impact of a universal motorcycle helmet law on the number of donors who died from motor vehicle accidents (MVAs) and found that a universal law was associated with a significant decrease in MVA donors of approximately 10%. I update this study by using a difference-in-differences (DID) estimation procedure based on the methodological approach of Cheng & Hoekstra (2016) and by extending the time period analyzed to include the years 1994-2018. My estimations reveal that a universal law is associated with a decrease in MVA donors of roughly 12%, but that this result is not robust across different model specifications and time periods. I also find that a universal helmet law is associated with significant increases in both male and female MVA donors aged 11-17 and conclude from this unexpected result that my identification strategy--and that used by Dickert-Conlin et al. (2011)--is flawed. In addition, when I use motorcyclist fatalities as my dependent variable, I find that a universal helmet law is associated with a significant decrease in motorcyclist fatalities of roughly 24% in earlier periods, but that this estimate is not generalizable to later, more current, periods. Therefore, my paper disconfirms the robustness of results found by past studies, highlighting areas for future research
Measuring the Sexual Orientation Wage Gap within Racial Groups
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the differentials between race and sexual orientations in the distribution of income/salary and the amount or public assistance received. Using data from the U.S. Census from 2013-2017, I explore different alternatives for the sexual orientation wage gap: human capital differences, industry choice, numbers of hours worker per week and other labour market decisions. Depending on the outcome, I find that people of colour face primarily face a wage penalty. White workers face a wage advantage. However, the extent of the gap is dependent on the individual\u27s gender, racial and sexual orientation combination. To provide additional explanation, I use the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition to examine the distributions between each racial and sexual group. The results show that there is a definite wage gap between racial and sexual orientation groups, while workers of colour face the highest unexplained portions of that gap
The Blonde Welfare Queen and The Teen Maneater: Antifeminist Backlash in Citizen Ruth and Election
Get PDFAmerican Beauty Standards: “Paling” in Comparison to the White Norm
Get PDFAmerica has a culturally accepted norm of what makes someone beautiful. A standard that is hard to meet. Being light-skinned, blonde and blue-eyed is the benchmark of beauty, of what is most desirable. But is that really what it takes to be attractive in America? This research examines the relationship between race, birth-place, ethnicity and self-rated attractiveness. The General Social Survey (2016) provides the quantitative data for this study. While past literature explores the connections between identity, self-esteem, and attractiveness, it does not explore the intersection of different identifying characteristics. Group position and Colourism approaches provide the theoretical foundations for the hypothesis and the research conducted in this paper. These theories also help explain why certain physical attributes are more valuable in American society. So how does the privileging of White America, specifically when measuring beauty, influence one’s opinion of their own attractiveness? This study has 1,622 respondents—non-institutionalized, English or Spanish speaking adults, who live in the country. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine the individual and collaborative relationships between the variables. The results from this study concur with some of findings from the literature. Yet, they do not support the hypotheses. The results concluded that being Non-White had little influence on one\u27s self-rated attractiveness. Similarly, birthplace and ethnicity had no statistical significance. However, the controls, age and sex, are significant. This research explores the role identity plays in one’s view of their own beauty. Especially during a period of controversial leadership and drastic shifts in the social norms of society
Unwanted Sexual Behavior and Women\u27s Sexual Agency: Gendered Experiences of Pleasure in Casual Sex
Get PDFDescription: Dichotomous discourse surrounding sexual behavior frames sexual experiences as either consensual or non-consensual. This rhetoric suggests that all consensual sexual activity is desired sexual activity, and does not account for the effect of heteronormative sexual scripts and gendered power dynamics. What are the consequences of engaging in unwanted, yet consensual, sexual activity for heterosexual cis-women? In casual hookups, motivations to engage in sexual activities such as emotional commitment and reproduction are removed from the sexual equation, leaving sexual pleasure as the primary goal. However, in heterosexual sexual activity, women’s pleasure is often not prioritized. This reality creates a grey area of desire as it frames women as objects of men’s sexual pleasure, running the risk of creating unwanted, non-pleasurable experiences for women. How does engaging in unwanted sexual activity affect a woman’s expression of her sexual agency and self-prioritization of pleasure? I propose that engaging in unwanted sexual activity will result in the dissociation of sex and pleasure in any sexual context for women, including safe, non-partnered contexts. More specifically, using masturbation as an indicator of sexual agency and prioritizing personal pleasure, I hypothesize that women who engage in unwanted encounters will have masturbated less recently. This paper analyzes data from the Online College Social Life Survey (2005-2011). The results refute the hypothesis that women will have masturbated less recently if they engage in unwanted sex, suggesting that women who engage in unwanted sexual activity will actually have masturbated more recently
Community Size and Environmental Spending Views: Urban, Suburban, and Rural Attitudes on Environmental Protection and Improvement
Get PDFIs community size tied to attitude towards environmental spending? Previous research has shown that whether one lives in an urban, suburban, or rural setting affects one’s environmental spending views and behaviors. I propose that living in an urban setting causes one to believe that the United States government is spending too little on the protection and improvement of the environment. Using 1,240 responses from interviews conducted in the 2016 General Social Survey, regression analyses were conducted to determine the relationship between community size and environmental spending views while controlling for political view, family income, and years of education completed. The results from the bivariate analysis show no correlation between community size and environmental spending views, but a weak, positive correlation between political views and environmental spending views, suggesting that identifying as liberal is what drives environmental spending views. Additionally, bivariate results show a very weak, positive correlation between highest year of school completed and environmental spending views. In the multivariate results, this relationship disappeared, but political view remained a statistically significant variable on environmental spending views. These results do not support my hypothesis, though they challenge much of the literature on the subject. Future research should further explore sociological determinants of environmental spending views such as political view, and examine the waning of the community size effect
Searching for Silver Linings in Foreign Grounds: Children of Immigrants and Their Quest to Post-Secondary Education
Get PDFIn recent years there has been an increase of immigrants in the United States and upward mobility has become extremely challenging through secondary education. Higher education is deemed to be one of the most important factors associated with upward mobility and economic stability. While the achievement gap continues to widen, children of immigrants continue to struggle to assimilate and in gaining access to the white middle-class mainstream. Ultimately, the snowball effect of intergenerational low socioeconomic status rolls over on to the disadvantage immigrant children in the new generation. I propose that children of U.S. born parents have a greater educational attainment than children of immigrants. Using the 2016 General Social Survey (N= 1,899) ¬ this study investigates the relationship between parents’ place of birth and respondents’ educational attainment. At the bivariate level, children of immigrants attain fewer years of school. However, this relationship appears to be largely mediated by parental education. After controlling for sex, race, and perceived income at age 16, it was found that respondents\u27 educational attainment is not greatly affected by parents\u27 birthplace but by parents’ years of education completed. Guided by insights from Bourdieu’s theory of Habitus and straight-line assimilation theory, the findings show that education plays a major role in patterns related to the assimilation theory and the acquisition of the habitus. Respondents’ educational attainment is fundamentally driven by the systematic structures in society concerning parent’s education and status