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Övning ger Färdighet: How Home Language Policies and Practices Affect Swedish Heritage Language Proficiency and Usage
No full textM.S.This study investigated how the expectations for language use in the home, or home language policies, affected the proficiency of children in their heritage language from ages 8 to 13. The heritage language investigated was Swedish in the DC metropolitan area. The study used a mixed methods approach with both quantitative and qualitative questionnaires as well as a written proficiency measure of a cloze test with an error analysis and voluntary writing samples. Kendall’s tau was used to investigate the presence of a correlation between the amount of Swedish spoken in the home between parents & children and between children & their siblings to the proficiency level of the children in Swedish. The findings from this study indicate that the amount of Swedish spoken by the parents, but not the children, in the home can influence the proficiency level of their children. Additionally, qualitative results revealed that parents have strong emotions and attitudes about language use and these attitudes contribute to and develop home language practices and expectations. Further research is needed to evaluate and qualify this relationship. Keywords: heritage language, home language policy, cloze tes
An Analysis of Disability Benefits Processing Time: How Do Claimant Medical Conditions and Social Security Policies Affect Processing Time
No full textM.P.P.As of November 2023, over 1 million individuals have disability benefits claims currently pending before the Social Security Administration. Despite this enormous backlog of applications, Social Security’s ability to timely process disability benefits claims has diminished significantly in recent years. The average processing time for a disability reconsideration claim was over 7 months in 2023, a 1 month increase from the 2022 average. While substantial research has been undertaken to describe the incidence of disability benefit receipt and the demographic factors associated with receipt, there is a significant lack in the literature regarding how these factors affect processing time for disability benefits claims. Further, no analysis reading the change in the evaluation of medical evidence, the removal of the “Treating Physician Rule” has been done. Therefore, this thesis aims to rectify these gaps. This thesis uses data from the Social Security Administration for all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and Saipan for the years 1994 to 2021. Utilizing ordinary least squares estimation, this paper considers three hypotheses: (1) whether claims based primarily on mental and emotional conditions will experience higher processing times than other primary diagnoses, (2) whether the removal of the “Treating Physician Rule” increased processing time for all disability benefits claims, and (3) after the removal of the “Treating Physician Rule” whether claims based primarily on mental and emotional conditions experienced higher processing times than other claims. The findings contained herein reveal that, in general, claims based on mental and emotional primary diagnoses experience longer processing times than other types of claims. Further, the removal of the “Treating Physician Rule” increased processing time for all disability benefits claims. However, claims based on physical primary diagnoses faced greater increases in processing time than mental and emotional claims for SSI Initial Applications following the removal of the “Treating Physician Rule” while the removal had a roughly equal effect for SSDI Initial Applications
“Just listen and open your mind.” A Conversation with Yoko Tawada
No full textInterview between Nicoletta Pireddu and Yoko Tawada.https://doi.org/10.57928/y9h9-hr0
The Power of Knowing: Examining Voter Confidence and Knowledge of Election Security Measures in the 2022 U.S. General Election
No full textM.P.P.Voter confidence, recognized as a voter’s belief that votes were counted accurately in an election, has decreased with the rise of election misinformation and election denialism in the 2020 and 2022 U.S. elections. Previous research has linked election-day voting experiences, perceptions of fraud, voting modes, and demographic factors to voter confidence. There are no studies linking voter knowledge of the voting process to voter confidence. In the social sciences, it is generally accepted that educating people on a specific issue encourages favorable attitudes or behavior towards it. Such is the case with sex education and curbing teen pregnancy or drug education programs and drug prevention. A similar case is made with campaigns aimed at spreading ‘awareness.’ Embedded within the axiom is the understanding that education, or awareness, equips individuals with knowledge or information. And it is this knowledge about a topic or event that primarily shapes desired behaviors or outcomes. Therefore, if there's a significant correlation between voter knowledge and voter confidence, it justifies exploring and implementing voter education policies to bolster confidence, especially in preparation for the 2024 presidential election.This study investigates the impact election security knowledge has on individual voter confidence; a concept that has been largely overlooked in previous research. If there is a substantial connection between voter knowledge and confidence, it becomes crucial for both researchers and policymakers to explore the potential impact of voter education initiatives on information dissemination. Using data from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE), this study explores how understanding election security relates to people's trust in the accuracy of national vote counting. This paper examines the effect of election security knowledge on voter confidence in the U.S. 2022 General Election. I predict that higher election security knowledge correlates with greater confidence in national elections, proportional to one's level of understanding. My findings support this hypothesis. Additionally, my study reaffirms previous findings regarding correlates of voter confidence, such as voting experience, but also uncovers unexpected results, like higher confidence among mail-in and absentee voters. Moreover, it highlights a partisan divide, with Republicans showing lower confidence regardless of their level of election security knowledge
Order, In Re DNI/AG 702(h) Certification, 2024-A, 2024-B, 2024-C and Its Predecessor Certifications
No full text[MD]
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Privacy Office Fiscal Year 2023 Second Semi-Annual Reports to Congress, October 2021-March 2023
No full textFirst page of documen
Democracies and Political Short-Termism: An Analysis of Expenditures Across Policy Areas
No full textM.P.P.Many scholars have theorized that democracies prioritize short-term policy aims overlong-term aims due to factors like election cycles and lack of political representation. In this paper, using ordinary least squares and random effects regressions, I test this hypothesis using spending data on three policy areas: environmental expenditures as an indicator of long-term policy interests, and national debt and pension expenditures as indicators of short-term policy interests. I find that democracies spend more across all three policy areas. This might be due to omitted variables, such as education, tax revenues, and economic growth. These categories might also be too simplistic to reflect the nuances of long-term and short-term factors
Ideological Contradiction in Far-Right Food Discourse: Elitism and Environmental Unsustainability
No full textM.S.In recent decades, democratic governments have faced repeated challenges related to the rise of contemporary far-right populist movements that thrive on the fear stoked by far-right
politicians’ racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, sexist, and nationalistic discourse (Wodak, 2020).
Within far-right political ideologies, a glaring contradiction emerges between these movements
supposed anti-elitist positions (Wodak, 2017) and their embrace of neoliberal economic policies
that benefit the socioeconomically advantaged (Betz, 1993; Harvey, 2005). Given Bourdieu’s
(1984) identification of how food-related behaviors reinforce current class structures as well as
DeSoucey’s (2010) elaboration of how food and political thought are often intertwined, in this
thesis, I investigate food-related discourse to further explore how such ideological contradictions
are naturalized in interaction.Taking inspiration from recent scholarship on language and materiality (Shankar & Cavanaugh, 2012), elite discourse practices (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2017; Thurlow, 2020) and
elite authenticity (Mapes, 2018, 2021; Mapes & Ross, 2020), I conduct a multimodal critical
discourse analysis (van Leeuwen, 2017) of an episode of the Tucker Carlson Originals
docuseries episode The End of Men. Specifically, I show how segments focusing on an
anonymous right-wing bodybuilder called The Raw Egg Nationalist make use of non-diegetic
dialogue and visual semiotic resources to establish an anti-elitist stance while simultaneously
displaying their elite status through the evaluation and recommendation of specific dietary
practices. Supplementing this data with an analysis of extracts from The Raw Egg Nationalist’s
recent book, The Eggs Benedict Option, I take an eco-critical discourse approach (Stibbe, 2014,
2018) to demonstrate how the dietary recommendations espoused by The Raw Egg Nationalist in
The End of Men contradict the environmental positions and policies for which he advocates.This analysis is paired with a discussion on how the elite food-related discourse practices are utilized by The Raw Egg Nationalist (and, by extension, Fox News and Tucker Carlson) to
simultaneously promote a racist and xenophobic politics of nationalism to the audience.
Additionally, I connect these dietary and environmental discourses to historical eco-fascist
movements, underscoring the need to conduct contemporary investigations of these movements
as political parties across the political spectrum begin to recognize the irrefutable evidence of
pending climate catastrophe. Finally, I illustrate how the notion of interpassivity (Žižek, 1989;
Pfaller, 1996, 2017) can be further developed as a tool for understanding how material objects
interact with discursive practices to create multimodal coherence and cohesion of seemingly
contradictory ideological positions
Impact of a Patient Care Navigator on Appointment Attendance Rates of Children with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus
No full textD.N.P.Between 2001 and 2017, the incidence of type 1 diabetes in the pediatric population has increased to 2.15 per 1,000 from 1.48 per 1,000 youths. Management of type 1 diabetes can be overwhelming for children and their families. Non-adherence to medical appointments contributes to poor management of type 1 diabetes. This quality improvement project assessed the effectiveness of a patient care navigator for pediatric patients who had not been seen in six months or longer at a diabetes clinic within a large pediatric teaching hospital in the mid-Atlantic region. The patient care navigator called parents or caregivers of patients who did not attend their appointments in the last six months to remind them about their appointment or schedule it for them. For the purposes of this project, the navigator conducted one-on-one interview with parent or caregiver through the phone. At the end of the interview, she offered resources to the families as needed. The project spanned over three months with the primary aim of increasing appointment attendance rates. The secondary aim was to determine the barriers that parents or caregivers faced to attending their appointments. Out of the 300 families who were targeted, 10 parents or caregivers were purposively selected for the interview. The derived data from the interview was analyzed utilizing a thematic analysis approach. Patients who received the intervention were statistically significantly more likely to attend their appointments when compared to those who did not receive the intervention, (z=17.3,
The Impact of Recreational Marijuana Legalization on Intimate Partner Violence
No full textM.P.P.State laws governing marijuana usage have been liberalizing rapidly in recent decades. With nearly half of all US states legalizing recreational marijuana as of this writing, the full impact of these policy changes is still being understood. The potential effect of recreational marijuana legalization on intimate partner violence has been researched, but has yet to be conclusively determined. With recent data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System, this paper analyzes the effect of state marijuana legalization on reported rates of intimate partner violence. Using data from 2013 to 2019, I find that legalization of recreational marijuana results in a substantial decrease in rates of intimate partner violence