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Mixed Methods Evaluation of a Novel Interactive Perinatal Telehealth Program
No full textD.N.P.Mental health conditions impact one in five perinatal patients as the most common complication of pregnancy and birth, leading to the need for individualized telehealth programs for this at-risk population. Telehealth increased exponentially since the COVID-19 pandemic, exemplifying telehealth as a convenient, cost-effective, and timely healthcare delivery modality. Perinatal telehealth programs support mental health, maternal satisfaction, and postpartum preparedness. However, few studies examine the impact of these programs on maternal outcomes other than satisfaction. This project evaluated a fully online midwife-led perinatal program that led to highly satisfied people over time and supported their mental health needs. The program used unlimited, on-demand, interactive text messaging, biweekly video teleconferencing, and educational videos to prepare pregnant people for postpartum. A mixed methods retrospective, descriptive design measured satisfaction and examined participant feedback from a convenience sample of 66 former clients who completed the program between December 2019 and December 2022.
Several clients sought the program for mental health support, having a personal history of anxiety (65.2%, n = 15) or depression (30.4%, n = 7). Upon program completion, 93.3% (n = 14) were extremely likely to recommend the program and 80.0% (n = 12) felt well prepared for postpartum. Physical fitness and ongoing mental health support were the most desirable future supplemental topics. Survey results showed 86.2% (n = 25) were very satisfied with the program over time, and most (65.5%, n = 19) said the program was very important for pregnant people, with video teleconferencing and text messaging rated more beneficial than educational videos. Mental health support ranked as the most useful focus area. Interviewed participants described the program as a “lifeline.”
Interdisciplinary care, sessions for partners of pregnant people, and expanded access are important considerations for future perinatal telehealth programs. These programs will need to offer strong support for the birthing person, as well as essential infant and postpartum care education. Future studies should focus on the impact of online perinatal programs on maternal mental health conditions. Supportive telehealth programs are essential to all pregnant and postpartum people and should become part of the standard of care during the perinatal period
The Geopolitical Economy, Influence, and Power of Sport: The Soft Power Effects of Hosting a Mega-Event
No full textM.P.P.In my thesis, I will examine the economic (trade, foreign direct investment) and reputational (tourism, national perception, brand, influence) effects on a country for hosting a sporting ‘Mega-Event’ like the International Olympic Committee’s Olympic Games (Summer and Winter) and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup. I hypothesize that hosting one of these events has a positive correlation with key economic indicators in Exports (% of GDP), GDP Growth (annual %), and Domestic Currency Exchange Rate as well as indicators related to a country’s global appeal and influence as in Tourism (# of arrivals), Nation Brand (Perception survey), Country Index (Societal survey), and Soft Power Index (Influence, finance survey), all else equal
Digital Research & Innovation Faculty Panel
No full textJoin fellow faculty members as they present their projects developed under the Digital Research & Innovation Pilot Program. This session provides a platform for academics to showcase how digital tools and methodologies can transform research and teaching landscapes. Each panelist will cover their unique project, the integration of digital technologies in their research, the challenges they faced, and the impacts on their fields of study. Attendees will gain insights into the practical applications of digital technologies in academic research and instruction, and learn about the potential for these tools to enhance scholarly work. The session will also include a Q&A segment
Interaction With and About Conversational User Interfaces: An Interactional Sociolinguistic Approach
No full textPh.D.With the rapid development of AI tools in today’s technological landscape, there has been increased interest in the capacity of conversational user interfaces (CUIs)—such as chatbots and voice assistants—to emulate patterns of human conversation. While CUI research and design have long drawn on insights from social interaction, recent microanalytic research (e.g. Porcheron et al. 2018; Reeves & Porcheron 2023) suggests that CUI interaction is more accurately understood as users drawing on interactional means to “regulate” CUIs than as a conversational experience. This interactional sociolinguistic study builds on previous research by identifying and explicating the linguistic practices that users draw on to regulate CUIs and the ways in which such practices are shaped as they occur in three social contexts. By examining these different contexts, this study sheds light on the various ways in which speakers create and reflect micro- and macro-level social meanings in their interactions with and about CUIs.First, I analyze nine Korean speakers’ interactions with ChatGPT to show how the linguistic devices and strategies they draw on, such as honorifics and repetition, reflect their orientation to such interactions as “interactional regulation” (Reeves & Porcheron 2023). I also illustrate the functional role that conventionally “polite” expressions, such as greetings and thanks, play in such interactions. Second, I move on to examine CUI interactions involving multiple human participants and a voice assistant. Drawing on studies of framing in family discourse (e.g. Gordon 2008, 2013; Tannen 2004b, 2006), I analyze recordings of one Korean family’s interactions with Google Assistant to show how family members juggle frames of interaction with the device and with one another. I demonstrate how family members reframe their interactions with Google Assistant into opportunities for constructing humor and solidarity with each other, often by producing evaluations of the device that reflect the master narrative (Tannen 2008) of “AI are intelligent machines.” Finally, I show how similar practices of evaluation are used in Korean Twitch streamers’ broadcasts of their interactions with ChatGPT. I demonstrate how the streamers construct “small stories” (Georgakopoulou 2006) of antagonism between themselves and ChatGPT and connect those stories to another master narrative about AI, “AI domination of humanity,” to perform for and foster engagement with viewers.
By using interactional sociolinguistics, an approach to discourse developed to examine conversations among human participants, this study furthers our understanding of how CUI interactions, while substantially different from such conversations, are shaped by their local interactional context as well as their broader sociocultural context
Women’s Representation Under Threat: The Impact of Political Violence Against Women on Women's Representation in Public Office
No full textM.P.P.This paper investigates the impact of political violence targeting women on women’s representation in public office. Over the last several years, incidents of political violence against women have risen to unprecedented levels. However, it has so far been unclear as to whether this rise in violence is driving women from politics, and thereby undermining their representation in public office. This study analyzes this relationship using secondary data on 153 countries across 6 years in a time and country fixed effects regression model with a one-year lag. This analysis showed that political violence targeting women does not appear to have an immediate impact on the percentage of women in the national legislature. However, my results are likely capturing correlation rather than causation due to data and method limitations, and regardless do not mean that women are not negatively impacted mentally, emotionally, financially, or otherwise by political violence targeting women. Therefore, I recommend that future researchers concentrate on answering this question again once we have many more years of data that wholistically capture political violence targeting women
Noblewomen's Political Networks Across the European Wars of Religion (1559-1633)
No full textPh.D.This dissertation considers noblewomen’s political careers during the European Wars of Religion. From the start of the French civil wars in 1562 until the end of the Eighty Years’ War in 1648, sovereignties across Europe debated to settle questions of religion. The wars involved France, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, and the Netherlands, as well as the many sovereign provinces which dotted the Franco-German borderlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In all of these areas, noblewomen directed the affairs of their families, often in the absence of male heads of house. They oversaw their families’ political strategies, estates, finances, and clientage networks. Many gained power through service in royal courts, particularly female households. The disparate affairs that fill noblewomen’s letters - the business of family, estate, finance, court, and diplomacy - all form the work of their politics. Utilizing hundreds of letters and family papers, this study situates noblewomen in the context of their female communities, investigating their political contributions through analysis of their relationships. This project looks in particular at the noblewomen who held privileges and access across different sovereignties, and exposes a wide variety of distinctly female, transregional political networks. These noblewomen helped to determine the course of the religious wars and the future of their families in a period which saw the height of noblewomen’s political ubiquity in the early modern era
Producing Pondichéry: Bureaucracy, Social Lives, and Urban Development in French India, 1699-1757
No full textPh.D.Pondichéry—France’s principal colony on India’s southeastern Coromandel coast—changed drastically over the first decades of the eighteenth century. Though the city’s origins emanated from early modern France’s attempts to participate in a burgeoning global economy, what started out as a small outpost eventually became a home to people from all over the early modern world. Whether they directly or indirectly participated in the global commerce that had brought them all together, the people who came to Pondichéry built a home and continued living their lives regardless of the French metropole’s shifting desires and policies. For the diverse amalgam of residents, the politics of global trade might have been what brought them together, but each one also had their own interests in making happy and healthy domestic and urban conditions that would ensure their personal and familial situations in Pondichéry. Subsequently, this dissertation argues that social and economic politics of the household in Pondichéry, which were negotiated within the city’s burgeoning bureaucracy, became central to metropolitan colonial efforts in French India and around the Indian Ocean from the beginning of colonization. Using notarial archives, civil records, memoirs, correspondence, and other sources, this dissertation teases out different threads of social life that would become the warp and weft of Pondichéry’s urban fabric. As issues arose between colonists and with the city administration over questions of slave management, the provisioning of social welfare, and even the process of housing auctions (among other topics), the various parties found their own solutions. The resolutions to these legal and civil disputes were institutionalized through bureaucratic processes. The precedents created from these exchanges defined the practices that fashioned the social structures and cultural categories that governed everyday life in Pondichéry. The resulting meanings of these categories reflect the tensions between the imperial aims of the broader French Empire and the social realities that the residents of Pondichéry needed from their colonial government to maintain their precarious colonial existence. This study illuminates how the meeting of colonists’ needs through bureaucratic invention and innovation produced Pondichéry
Spiritual Questing in Nineteenth-Century New England: Margaret Fuller’s Construction of Female Selfhood
No full textM.A.Margaret Fuller’s exploration of spiritual identity in nineteenth-century New England represents a compelling example of the way in which spirituality and identity converged in early American intellectual discourse. Fuller considered her immediate cultural environment’s conceptions of spirituality while also looking beyond America to invoke German and English currents of thought in her writing. This thesis depicts how Fuller propelled a cultural exchange of ideas in Antebellum American intellectual culture. Fuller’s evolving concept of the self and female selfhood is chronologically traced and examined in regard to her invocation of spiritual positions including Christianity and pantheism. I examine Fuller’s synthesis of German philosophy and American Transcendentalism in order to emphasize Fuller’s spiritual syncretism and contribution to American intellectualism
The Role of Government Policy and Firm Behavior in Health Care
No full textPh.D.In the first chapter, I examine the effects of the interaction between minimum wage increases and the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion on Medicaid take-up. I find that contrary to mechanical predictions, minimum wage hikes result in increased Medicaid take-up everywhere. But I suggest that the mechanisms causing these effects differ between Medicaid expansion and non-expansion states. Increases in Medicaid take-up in Medicaid expansion states are more consistent with crowd-out of private insurance – faced with higher labor costs, employers take advantage of Medicaid availability and reduce the generosity of employer sponsored insurance, prompting workers’ substitution towards Medicaid. In Medicaid non-expansion states, increases in Medicaid take-up are more consistent with reductions in uninsurance – minimum wage increases are associated with losses of benefits from other public programs so that workers take up Medicaid to replace the lost benefits. Overall, minimum wage increases affect the mix of benefits a worker receives from the government and firms.In the second chapter, Francisco Garrido, Adrian Rubli and I study the effects of firm mergers on incumbent behavior and firm entry in the U.S. dialysis industry. We find that mergers cause a decrease in dialysis facilities and stations in markets. This is driven by a sharp reduction in both variables by the merging entity, which is only partially offset by an increase by non-merging firms. We do not find evidence for novel firm entry. Additionally, we find declines in nurses and technicians at merging firms with the opposite effects at non-merging firms. Consistent with effects on capacity and quality, we find increased patient deaths at merging firms and higher patient recovery at non-merging firms.In the third chapter, I document household income trajectories of low income workers over a span of four years. I show that workers in low income households in 2013 face substantial income fluctuations, with nearly 50% experiencing incomes above 190% of the Federal Poverty Level in 2016. These observations have important implications for sample selection choices when studying the effects of public policies targeting low income workers. They also have applications for policy administration, suggesting that current income eligibility review may be burdensome and imperfect
Learning by Doing: Faculty Perspectives on Experiential Learning in Online Environments
No full textHow do we facilitate knowledge construction through experience in online environments? Online courses bring together students from diverse geographical regions and various social, cultural, and economic backgrounds. Our challenge as educators is how to design experiential learning that is not place-dependent yet supports students' critical and reflective learning through experiences.
In this session, we will hear from faculty members across various academic fields at the university and their insights on developing experiential learning opportunities within their online courses. We will learn about specific ideas on structuring experiences in an online environment, actively engaging students in critical reflection and inquiry, and setting opportunities for applying students' understanding in real-world contexts. We hope these examples inspire you to walk away with ideas on integrating experiential learning experiences into your course