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Addressing Barriers to Social Interaction for Older Adults Who Have Ceased Driving
Get PDFAdults over 65 represent the fastest-growing demographic in the United States, with 97.5% preferring to age in their homes. For many older adults living in suburban and rural areas, driving is essential for maintaining mobility. When driving is no longer an option due to health-related reasons (affecting an estimated 600,000 to 1 million older adults annually), older adults transition to non-driving in a process called driving cessation, which is associated with increased risks of health decline, admission to long-term care, and social isolation. This study investigates the use of for-profit rideshare services (e.g., Uber) as a potential intervention for older adults coping with driving cessation. The research focuses on the role of "buffers," or mediating supports that foster a sense of control as older adults navigate new transportation options. Seven older adults participated in semi-structured interviews and five of seven participated in a Benign Behavioral Intervention (BBI) involving use of Go Go Grandparent, a concierge rideshare service, accompanied by a facilitator and a trusted companion. These buffers improved participants’ comfort with the service, although a single experience was insufficient for fostering independent use. Participants also expressed frustration with Go Go Grandparent’s pricing structure and, when available, reported a preference for nonprofit or volunteer-based transportation services over for-profit rideshare.Plan II Honors Progra
Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Weapons: A Commonsense Approach to Understanding Costs and Benefits (Summer 2025)
No full textArtificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning (ML), has transformed computing, offering potential benefits in the nuclear enterprise, which encompasses weapons, delivery systems, platforms, and command and control infrastructure. While AI can enhance efficiency in areas like predictive maintenance and operational planning, its integration into the nuclear enterprise poses significant risks, some of which are inherent in the nature of ML. Five principles should guide AI's responsible application in a nuclear weapons context: maintaining meaningful human control in nuclear decision-making processes; evaluating AI risks within a nation’s broader nuclear posture; recognizing the challenges of verifying international agreements on AI restrictions; managing risks through self-imposed limitations; and leveraging AI to enhance human oversight. While AI offers opportunities to improve nuclear surety and operational efficiency in areas like planning and predictive maintenance, its deployment must prioritize minimizing catastrophic risks and preserving human judgment in critical decision-making processes.LBJ School of Public Affair
Rap Resonance: Intellectualizing Public Aversion to Modern American Trap Music
Get PDFRap music has long been critiqued for its notions of violence, promiscuity, misogyny, and various other explicit themes. To the common listener, the lyrics of these rap songs are no lullaby, but they aren’t meant to be. Pre-existing scholarships have focused on the impact of rap music on the Black community, seeing it from a bilateral sense; a liberation and necessary resonance with the Black community or an exasperation of violence in inner-city ghettos. Public aversion to rap music has not been explored outside the Black community. More specifically, pre-existing scholarships fail to account for debatably the most violent and widely condemned subgenre configuration of rap—trap music, specifically out of Atlanta, Georgia. This thesis explores public aversion to trap music, highlighting how animosity to the genre stems from its delivery, not its content. Further, it contextualizes the animosity to be deeply rooted in racial stereotyping which has long hindered the Black community. This thesis examines the historical roots of Black stereotyping, the linguistic complexities of trap music language, and the economic mechanisms of racial capitalism which allow Black trap artists to capitalize off of Black stereotypes for profit. The aim is to explore where public aversion to modern American trap music comes from, why it exists, how it persists, and to what extent it is used strategically by trap artists to further their musical careers. Understanding the root of aversion unravels how racial hierarchies shape cultural reception to the genre and challenges narratives that dismiss trap music as unintellectual, materialistic, and socially destructive to the Black community.Plan II Honors Progra
Talking Trash: Negotiating the Global Plastics Treaty
Get PDFThis thesis explores the factors that influence the ability of issue-based coalitions to achieve their goals in multilateral negotiations through a case study on the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution during the negotiations for the Global Plastics Treaty. As part of the broader trend of addressing global challenges through multilateral agreements, the Global Plastics Treaty was scheduled to be developed through five rounds of negotiations from November of 2022 to December of 2024. However, these negotiations have yet to produce an agreement to address global plastic pollution.
By analyzing the actions of the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution both during and outside of the formal negotiating sessions, this study provides a comprehensive account of the first phase of the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations and contributes to existing literature on the role of issue-based coalitions in multilateral diplomacy. This thesis argues that the approach to participation and level of proactivity demonstrated by issue-based coalitions are significant determinants of their ability to impact negotiations. These findings offer valuable insights into the dynamics of issue-based coalitions and their potential influence on multilateral negotiations, including the ongoing sessions for the Global Plastics Treaty. Despite the lack of agreement on the Global Plastics Treaty itself, this thesis also concludes there is a promising future for multilateralism, even in a world order where the United States is not the central international actor.Governmen
Fiscal sponsorship and the performance of financial equity in the nonprofit dance ecology
Get PDF“What is fiscal sponsorship? Do I need a fiscal sponsor? Will I 'make it' if I am a fiscally sponsored artist?” Fiscal Sponsorship and the Performance of Financial Equity in the Nonprofit Dance Ecology interrogates the largely uncritiqued practice of fiscal sponsorship in the nonprofit dance field and its purported advancement of financial equity and economic justice for historically under resourced artists. I define the process as a legal partnership through which a fiscally sponsored artist pays a percentage of their contributed income to a nonprofit in exchange for financial and legal oversight from the organization’s 501(c)(3) status. In practice however, fiscal sponsorship is a nebulous series of choreographies at best. First theorized in the 1950s, the mechanism experienced exponential growth over almost seventy years with little legal support aside from precedent and one mention in a 1994 Internal Revenue Service textbook. I outline my equity-centered queries through three chapters that strive to counter-map the practice’s interwoven history with the nonprofit dance field, embody the cyclical process to identify hegemonic habits, and activate the field’s radical imagination past the nonprofit industrial complex. Through these interventions in fiscal sponsorship, I argue that the practice is not achieving its widely celebrated narrative of equity and instead reproduces extractive patterns that undermine an artist’s self-determination, agency, and long-term financial stability.Theatre and Danc
Negative emotional reactions to romantic conflict : does age impact associations with physical health?
Get PDFEffective management of the negative emotions which arise in response to conflicts in individuals’ romantic relationships is important for mitigating the harmful consequences of negative emotions for physical health (e.g., Consedine, 2008; Haase et al., 2016). Previous research tends to focus on ways that individuals may manage the amount of negative emotion they experience (Gross, 2015; Zhao et al., 2022) yet has largely overlooked the possibility that individuals might also mitigate physical health outcomes by managing which specific negative emotion they experience. Furthermore, the extent to which different negative emotional reactions to romantic conflict are harmful for physical health may change across the lifespan. That is, the discrete emotions theory of affective aging (DEA; Kunzmann & Wrosch, 2017, 2024) predicts that reacting to challenges with anger may be less harmful for health in younger adulthood, whereas reacting to challenges with sadness may be less harmful for health in older age. However, no prior empirical work has tested age differences in the associations between anger and sadness and physical health outcomes in the context of a romantic conflict or in a sample spanning younger, middle-aged, and older adults. To address this gap, the present dissertation research leverages an age-diverse sample of romantic couples’ conflicts across laboratory (Study 1) and daily life (Study 2) settings to examine whether age moderates the associations between anger and sadness and physical health symptoms. Contrary to hypotheses drawn from the DEA, no significant evidence of age moderation emerged in either study. Study 2, but not Study 1, significantly replicated previous research linking negative emotions to heightened physical symptoms. Overall, the present research does not lend significant support to the idea that managing which negative emotion individuals experience in response to romantic conflicts may mitigate physical health effects. Future research which builds on the present work by examining emotional responses to challenges across various life domains may improve our understanding of how aging shapes the ways individuals regulate their negative emotions to protect their physical health.Psycholog
Dollars and sense : Texas foster care liaisons and the financial aid process
Get PDFPostsecondary policies shape former foster youths’ journeys through higher education, especially given their low rates of transition into and graduation from college (Gieger, 2017; Johnson, 2021). Texas offers a state tuition waiver, participates in the federal Education Training and Voucher (ETV) program, and is one of two states that legislatively mandated the appointment of foster care liaisons on college campuses. Prior research illustrates that financial precarity is a major source of tension for students who have experienced foster care and that they underutilize aid programs meant to support them, including the ETV and the state tuition waiver program (Day et al., 2011; Okpych & Courtney, 2021; Hanson et al., 2022). Likewise, little direct research exists on the implementation of the Texas liaison mandate (Watt et al., 2023). Drawing upon 11 interviews, this qualitative study utilizes administrative burdens theory (Herd & Moynihan, 2018) to examine the role of Texas foster care liaisons, their engagement with students with foster care histories on financial aid related tasks, and the possible presence of administrative burdens in postsecondary aid policies for former foster youth.Educational Leadership and Polic
The social construction of sex trafficking in LGBTQ+ youth
Get PDFSex trafficking is a human rights violation and severe form of violence with significant adverse health complications. There are few qualitative studies involving survivors of sex trafficking, and even fewer about the LGBTQ+ population. Lack of understanding about sex trafficking prevents nurses and other service providers in the healthcare sector from preventing it, identifying victims, responding to them, and supporting them. In this dissertation, we describe the process of developing and implementing a qualitative descriptive study founded in a post-positivism philosophy and constructivist theory that addresses this problem. We explore the thoughts and perceptions of sex trafficking in a sample of 11 LGBTQ+ sex trafficking survivors throughout their before, during and after sex trafficking experiences, providing a perspective about the social construction of the phenomenon. Our goal is to expand knowledge on what is happening with them, so that they can be better cared for.
After completing a literature review on the subject (Chapter 2), we synthesized the social determinants of health framework and minority stress model to provide a foundation for our study (Chapter 3). We designed and conducted a qualitative descriptive study aligned with the purpose of the dissertation and used the results from our literature review and framework synthesis to compose an interview guide that would address our research questions (Chapter 4). Then, we interviewed a sample of 11 LGBTQ+ sex trafficking survivors. Throughout the research process we used a community-based and trauma-informed approach. The data were coded and themes were developed using reflexive thematic analysis. We found significant themes of violence, social dysfunction, impaired agency, discrimination, homophobia and others. We also identified some themes unique to the LGBTQ+ identity within the sex trafficking phenomenon which are discussed in Chapter 4. In Chapter 5, I conclude the report, discuss nursing implications, reflect on the researcher as an instrument, and share personal reflections about the study. I hope the results of our research will compel the scientific, academic, and service provider community to comprehend the struggles that LGBTQ+ sex trafficking survivors experience. Healthcare providers may thereby devise prevention measures, innovate new interventions, and identify and respond to LGBTQ+ victims of sex trafficking.Nursin
Post-migration stressors take a toll on refugee health
No full textThis study examined the relationship among post-migration stressors, mental distress, and physical symptoms among migrants who need protection. Stressors, like economic insecurity and discrimination, were linked to mental distress, which then increased the likelihood of physical symptoms.Population Research Cente
Bayesian predictive posterior distributions
Get PDFBayesian uncertainty can be characterized in a number of ways, the usual one starting with a prior distribution which represents prior uncertainty as to the value of a parameter. This gets updated to the posterior quantification of uncertainty via the data evidence using the likelihood function. This framework is however difficult to relax. An alternative representation of Bayesian uncertainty has been provided by Doob in 1949 who showed that a predictive sampling scheme also provided a representation of the posterior. This set-up can be relaxed by modifying the nature of a predictive density function. In short, it can be a density estimator given the current knowledge. The idea then is to impute the missing data from the observed sample onwards updating the density estimator as it goes. By modeling the unseen data through this scheme, the object of interest can be computed by the observed data and the simulated unseen data. Under some conditions, we can prove that this procedure is equivalent to sampling from a posterior. In this dissertation, several methods using the predictive sampling scheme are discussed. We first introduce some prerequisite knowledge, such as Bayesian bootstrap, Dirichlet process, discrete-time martingale and its convergence, weak convergence of random measures and exchangeability. Then making use of the advantage of convergence of martingales, the martingale posterior is discussed in the dissertation. Inspired by martingale posteriors, a Bayesian bootstrap for mixture models is introduced as an extension of the traditional Bayesian bootstrap to mixture models. Using submartingales, a new approach to quantify the uncertainty for the log-concave densities is proposed, by which we can directly sample densities from the posterior. A natural martingale posterior constructed by the score function is discussed for Bayesian parametric models as well. In theory, instead of requiring exchangeability in the traditional prior-likelihood-posterior scheme, we only need some weaker conditions such as asymptotic exchangeability in the predictive sampling scheme. In application, these methods can be implemented in parallel and avoid using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. We prove the convergence and exchangeability for each method. We also provide illustrations and comparisons with the existing methods on both simulated and real data.Statistic