Awards 07

Conference on Homogeneity and Heterogeneity in Public Opinion

Public opinion matters. When the public moves in a liberal or conservative direction, politicians respond. What we do not know, however, is whose opinions matter. Do politicians represent all people equally? Or are some preferences better represented than others? How much do preferences differ in the first place, for example, across income and education levels? Answers to these questions have dramatic implications for equality and representation in the United States. Our goal is to gather 20 prominent public opinion scholars from diverse intellectual backgrounds at a conference that explores “Homogeneity and Heterogeneity in Public Opinion.” Specifically, the conference will focus on three questions. How much heterogeneity exists in public opinion? When and why does heterogeneous public opinion emerge? And, what are the consequences of heterogeneous public opinion for representation and inequality in the United States? We expect two tangible results from the conference: (1) an edited volume organized around these three questions and (2) a collection of the data (to be housed at CISER) that participants use in the papers they write for the conference. We also expect the conference to promote discussion and research among social scientists at Cornell who are interested in inequality in public opinion and political representation.

Risk Communication and Lung Cancer Screening

Lung cancer survival rates can potentially greatly increase with early screening, yet the number of individuals getting screened represents only a fraction of the targeted population. The overall goal of this multi-phase research project is to investigate factors that encourage or discourage lung cancer screening. Previous research has shown that exposure to risk information can result in both desired and undesired outcomes: Risk messages can either encourage people to get screened or produce an opposite, “boomerang” effect by discouraging people from screening. By drawing on theories of attribution, protection-motivation, and unrealistic optimism, we seek to understand the independent and interactive effects of susceptibility/efficacy, optimistic biases, and internal/external attributional orientation on lung cancer screening attitudes and behaviors. The first phase of this project has three components: (1) an analysis of existing survey data collected from over 4,000 patients who have gotten screened for lung cancer at Weill Cornell Medical College since 2001 to examine how key communication variables might have influenced their decisions; (2) the addition of new communication questions on the patient survey for future data collection and analysis; and (3) the use of a random telephone survey of New York adults (the Empire State Poll) to examine attitudes and behaviors of individuals who have not gotten screened.

When faced with external threats or obstacles, research has shown that human groups generally become more cohesive and individuals refrain from within-group competition in order to promote group welfare. Such “stability-dependent cooperation” is in fact predicted from evolutionary theory because it can be in all group members’ interest to overcome mutual threats to survival. Given that people respond this way to cues that their group survival is threatened, some theorists have argued that people might attempt to manipulate fellow group members’ perceptions of external threats in order to elicit higher within-group cooperation or to suppress within-group competition. However, there is as yet no experimental data investigating whether people will deliberately misrepresent the level of group threat in order to increase cooperation. Theory suggests that in particular, those who hold high status within the group can benefit from reducing within-group competition because doing so suppresses attempts to usurp their position and allows the high status people to keep their high status position. Thus, high status individuals have a greater interest in “upping the perceived threat level” than do low status individuals. The proposed project consists of evolutionary models and two behavioral experiments investigating people’s willingness to manipulate cues of group threats, how this willingness varies with relative status within the group, the effects that this has on group cooperation, and the effects of task insurmountability.

Scripting the Future of a Community: A Participatory Visioning Process for Iowa’s Amana Colonies

This small grant proposal seeks funding to undertake a participation action research project with Iowa’s Amana Colonies-a significant historic utopian society in existence since 1855. Since their founding, the Amana Colonies have struggled to preserve their way of life, their values, social traditions and cultural landscape. Today, having abandoned communal living, the Amana’s livelihood relies heavily on tourism. Facing a tourism boom and the need for additional hospitality establishments, the Amana’s are seriously concerned for their community’s future and for the impacts of growth and development. Desperately in need of a vision, they have approached Cornell and X-Sense to assist them in examining, understanding and facilitating how they will plan, envision and script their future growth and development. Using place based participatory design methods and practices this research project will enable the Amana community to “own” the process of planning their future. Both the process and its results will provide evidence regarding how democratic place-based participatory planning and design processes can be used to facilitate community planning while sustaining the vitality of our most valued cultural landscapes.

Revisiting the Relation Between the Private and the Public “Spheres” After Welfare: A Feminist Legal Studies Project

I propose to conduct research for, and to write the first draft of, a conference paper/journal article on the implications of contemporary American welfare law for feminist conceptions of the relation between the private and public “spheres.” This project is located in an interdisciplinary space that straddles the humanities/social sciences divide, and that is criss-crossed by the following intellectual strands: feminist social and political theory, American constitutional law, and American social policy analysis. I intend to seek external funding for this project; in particular, I intend to seek a faculty fellowship from the Russell Sage Foundation.

Law and Social Sciences: Using Theory and Research on Discrimination in Title VII Class Action Litigation

Social scientists who study discrimination often use different conceptual frameworks and terminology in their research, making it difficult to establish the degree of comparability in theoretical ideas and empirical findings across disciplines and even across sub-areas within disciplines. Assessing such comparability, however, is increasingly important to legal actions involving workplace discrimination, given changing standards used by courts to determine the admissibility of evidence from expert witnesses. In this context, we propose an interdisciplinary conference to bring together leading social scientists who are engaged in research on discrimination and lawyers who may draw upon such research in handling discrimination lawsuits to discuss the use of social science research in legal practice. Our broad aims are to contribute to the advancement of academic research on the problem of discrimination by fostering interdisciplinary exchange, and to encourage more effective dissemination of social science research to attorneys engaged in litigation involving discrimination. The conference will be a first step in this direction, and will engage a select set of approximately 25-30 academics and lawyers in a discussion of these issues. The conference is intended to lay the foundation for a larger conference, which will produce an edited volume, as well as a proposal for an ISS theme project on the social sciences and discrimination law.

A regular customer to any service establishment such as a restaurant or a hotel has been familiarized with the use of service scripts. Scripts cause the service encounter to be highly standardized providing a consistent level of service across all customers. Scripts also allow customers to become an active participant in the service encounter, where they follow the lead of the common script. However, in such a predictable service environment how is it possible to ever truly “delight” a customer. Thus, what affects does the use of service scripts have on quality and provider performance? In addition, when should scripts be utilized and when is a customized approach more appropriate. In this study, we plan to explore the preceding research questions through a triangulation of empirical research methods. During the qualitative research phase, we intend to lay the foundation for the uses of scripting and customization in services. Next, we will conduct a web-based choice surveys (Verma 2007) with different scenarios to explore the scripting preferences of customers and managers in the service encounter. Finally, we will design and conduct a controlled laboratory experiment to vary the usage of scripting in different service settings to determine when it is optimal to use a scripted versus a customized approach. In conclusion of our empirical analyses, we aim to address under which situations scripting is appropriate as well as the affects scripting has on provider performance and quality.

Adult Attachment: Integrating Social, Cognitive, and Neurophysiological Approaches

Attachment relationships (e.g., with parents, partners, close friends) are vital to the physical and psychological health and well-being of an individual. What are the cognitive and affective processes that underlie a secure attachment? The proposed research addresses questions regarding the cognitive and affective processes underlying adult attachment utilizing a variety of research designs (e.g., correlational vs. experimental designs), methodologies (e.g., implicit, explicit, neurophysiological), and statistical procedures (Structural Equation Modeling). The goal of Study 1 is to examine the extent to which mental representations of attachment figures (e.g., one’s mother, romantic partner) automatically and effortlessly activate positive reactions, and the degree to which such reactions, in turn, relate to feelings of attachment security, subjective experience of well-being and positive relational outcomes. Study 2 examines the extent to which such automatic reactions are malleable. Does increasing the accessibility of positive memories with an attachment figure (e.g., one’s partner) promote the automatic activation of positive reactions? Conversely, does increasing the accessibility of negative memories decrease the activation of positive reactions or even promote negative ones? By taking advantage of the methods at the vanguard of the field, and approaching the study of the individual and his or her relationships from a multi-level and interdisciplinary approach, the research findings offer to elucidate the processes – cognitive, affective, neurophysiological – that influence subjective experience and behavior within relational context.

Expected Utility Theory Through the Lens of Insurance Data

This project studies households’ decision making under uncertainty using a unique dataset on consumers’ choices of auto, home, and excess liability insurance. For each type of insurance, we observe multiple choices (e.g., deductible, coverage against bodily injury, and coverage against loss of value). In addition, we observe the entire claims history for each household in our sample. The project consists of four papers. The first paper shows that households’ decision making does not conform to the predictions of the standard model of decision making under uncertainty in economics—expected utility theory. It does so by comparing each household’s choices of auto and home deductibles. Expected utility theory predicts that households who choose a high home deductible also should choose a high auto deductible. However, we find that households’ auto and home deductible choices are essentially independent of each other. The second paper will study the relation between households’ choices of insurance against large losses and choices of insurance against small losses. The third paper will use state of the art econometric techniques to provide joint identification regions for households’ beliefs and preferences over risky alternatives. The forth paper will examine whether commonly proposed alternatives to expected utility theory might provide a rationale for insurance choices observed in our dataset.

The proposed research explores cross-linguistic differences in English- and Mandarin-learning infants’ ability to learn labels for actions. Whereas infants learning Mandarin easily learn labels for actions (along with labels for people and objects), infants learning English struggle with learning these labels (although they easily acquire labels for people and objects). To document the reasons for this discrepancy, three experimental studies will test how infants learning Mandarin and those learning English attend to and attach labels to actions, people and objects. Our results will provide much-needed data on how Mandarin-speaking children perform in experimental paradigms and will provide important modifications to how early word learning is examined and discussed in the language development literature.

The focus of this conference and resulting edited book will be on how chaotic environmental settings influence human development from infancy through adolescence. Chaotic settings are characterized by high levels of noise, crowding, instability, and a lack of structure and predictability. We will draw upon Bronfenbrenner's bioecological model of human development to provide a theoretical and organizational framework to address our objectives. A series of presentations will review what is currently known about relations between environmental chaos at the microsystem level and children's development. We will then integrate existing research and theory to construct a framework for studying how higher order levels of chaos can alter the ecology of early human development. Because of the wide focus of Bronfenbrenner's theory it is essential that a conference of this type be interdisciplinary in nature, with participants drawn from such diverse fields as developmental and environmental psychology, medicine, geography, public health, sociology, and anthropology.

What’s a Price Worth? An Experimental Study of Prices and Preferences

The proposed research project is an attempt to examine the effect of commodity prices on consumer demand beyond their effects through the budget constraint. Adopting a theoretical framework that distinguishes between prices that enter the budget constraint (market prices) and prices that affect preferences (normal prices), we propose to implement both lab and field experiments with a unique design that will allow us to measure the effect of variations in normal prices on consumer choices, holding market prices constant.

This interdisciplinary workshop to be held at Cornell University in the spring of 2008 will develop theoretical approaches in the political and social sciences on "immigrant political incorporation." The incorporation process is poorly understood, despite immigrants having a larger demographic presence in the United States than at any time in the last century, and the salience of immigration in public policy debates. This workshop, the second of three to be held jointly at Harvard University and Cornell University, will invite a select group of fifteen social scientists working on immigration to Cornell for a two day meeting to present, discuss and develop models of immigrant political incorporation. The workshop series will generate a synthetic research article that will help frame the research agenda in this area, as well an edited volume of approaches to and models of political incorporation.

The Diversification of Small Business Entrepreneurs: Form and Effects

Diversification among small business entrepreneurs is a common form of growth that has received little academic attention to date. This project will assess the frequency of diversification and the relative likelihood of survival. Using data of over two million Texan business outlets open from 1990 to the present—including the entire population of retail outlets in the state, my results may yield evidence of management difficulties associated with diversification for entrepreneurs and small business owners that are much like those associated with large conglomerates.

Embedded Neo-Liberalism in the Gear of Social Change: A Comparative-Historical Analysis

This proposal is for a working conference at Cornell, rethinking methods of social movement analysis in comprehending the multiple ways in which neo-liberal political culture is embedded across the world. We plan 14 presentations, and 4-5 invited commentators. The conference will culminate several years of collaborative work on developing a methodology sensitive to social movement contestation of the categories through which they are analyzed and/or depicted. Our theoretical point of departure is that neo-liberalism represents a transformative moment in modern political-economy, and that this is expressed in a variety of movements for social justice. We bring to this proposition a historical, relational method of "incorporated comparison," in which our case studies of different expressions of neo-liberalism are examined, separately and together, as power struggles over social change and over the terms through which we understand social change (whether categories of political sociology, or modernist narratives). Our goal is to produce an edited collection.

Chronic Pain, Stress, and Resilience in Later Adulthood

It is estimated that chronic pain afflicts between 50 and 80 million people in the United States alone, with an increased prevalence among the elderly. In addition to the emotional suffering that accompanies the pain experience, chronic pain presents enormous costs to society and remains a major health care problem for the elderly in the United States. The question of how older adults successfully adapt to chronic pain is a pressing concern for social scientists, educators, and policy-makers alike. Although research on chronic pain in the elderly has increased in recent years, the field still suffers from two weaknesses that compromise our understanding of the process by which emotional adaptation to pain develops in older populations: (1) a limited number of systematic, detailed analyses of older adults daily lives as they encounter the demands of adapting to painful experiences; and (2) little empirical attention to the role of resilience resources that may aid in the recovery from daily pain and stress for populations with chronic pain. The current project addresses these weaknesses by utilizing a combination of innovative methodological (daily diary) and statistical approaches (multilevel random coefficients modeling) to determine how the daily experiences of older adults with chronic pain, as well as their reactions to those experiences, are associated with positive adaptation over time.

In July 2001 the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) released an article showing that having a vaginal birth after having had previous caesarean birth (VBAC) was associated with a higher risk of uterine rupture (an outcome that is often fatal for the baby). Following the release of this article, we found that the national VBAC rate dropped by 20% within a two month period. We also found that this drop occurred almost entirely for women with more than high school education. We propose to use this phenomenon to investigate an unanswered question: how does information from medical research affect the type of health care used through its effect on the patient vs the physician? Our research proposal is comprised of an economic analysis of secondary data, as well as an experimental psychology primary data component to understand physician and patient decision-making and responses to new information. Understanding how the results of medical research are influencing medical practice and the channels by which they act is important because of the vast sums of public funds spent on medical research. The degree to which this research will have an impact on the health of individuals depends on the extent to which the new information gained is put into practice by the public.

Secondary Effects of Biofuels Demands: Implications for Feed and Livestock Industries

The rapidly growing demands for biofuel feedstocks represent new demands for grains and oilseeds and, indeed, structural changes in agricultural commodity markets. As these commodities and/or their derivative products also serve as feedstocks to related livestock and dairy industries, primary commodity effects will be reverberated through impacts on feed prices and production in these inter-related sectors. The focus of our proposed study is to examine more closely these underlying secondary market effects and the relation of input prices to feed costs. From such research, we can forecast future changes in feed costs that would serve as useful information for production decisions and risk management strategies. Understanding the degree of substitution of biofuel by-product feeds into livestock rations will allow for determination of cost-effective feeding strategies for producers and an understanding of the extent of market utilization capacity. With the importance of the dairy production sector in the Northeast, combining these efforts to estimate the impacts on future milk production levels and farm profitability across various grain and feed pricing scenarios will be important in understanding the ultimate impact of higher feed costs on milk supply.

Imagined and Realized Futures of U.S. Bioweapons Threat Assessments

The purpose of this study is to analyze the types of social machinery and institutional forces involved in shaping how bioweapons (BW) threat assessments are imagined, developed, and materialized within U.S. intelligence, defense, and foreign policies. I will use as a case study U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s BW program leading up to the 2003 war. Recent governmental and non-governmental investigations have revealed that the intelligence on Iraqi BW used to justify the war was largely constructed from threat visions imagined by the CIA and CIA-funded defense contractors. Although one could attribute this flawed assessment to an unfortunate and rare bungling of intelligence or a Bush Administration predilection for war, a closer look at US BW threat assessments reveals a more complicated picture involving historical and institutional factors shaping these assessments. In order to interrogate how such threat perceptions become realities, this paper will ask the following questions: How are enemy bioweapons capabilities imagined within U.S. bioweapons threat assessments? What social machinery has created, sustained, and extended these conceptualizations within the intelligence and defense communities? This work builds on my existing research involving social and technical analysis of bioweapons threats and how these analyses can inform U.S. policymaking. This research will constitute part of a larger book project analyzing issues of knowledge and expertise underpinning U.S. bioweapons threat assessments, which will be of interest to social scientists, policy analysts, and policymakers.

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Encoding and Retrieving Information with Prosody

'Prosody' encompasses all those aspects of an utterance that are not due to the choice of the particular words, but are used to encode the syntactic grouping, to express emphasis, or to distinguish different speech acts (e.g. declaratives vs. questions). The factors determining prosody span all aspects of grammar: phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors play a role. Moreover, language processing factors such as production difficulty and working memory restrictions have been shown to be relevant. Prosody as a field of research is thus inherently interdisciplinary, and one reason why prosody in human language is still poorly understood is that traditionally each subfield was investigating one factor but ignoring others. The two studies aim to test some aspects of prosody experimentally, both in production and perception, integrating insights from previous research. The two key issues that we are interested in are: (i) What information about the sentence and its context is encoded in its prosody? (ii) How much of this information is reliably retrieved by the listener? These are basic questions about natural language that have so far only been rudimentarily answered. Any progress in understanding these issues would have implications and applications in a wide range of areas, including improving comprehensibility of synthesized speech and improving the recognition rate in speech recognition systems, both of which are crucial for speech-related assistive technology.

For more information, please see the FAQ, funding statistics, and overview.

All questions should be directed to Anneliese Truame (607-255-3304), ISS Adminstrative Coordinator.