2008 Social Sciences Summer Research
Program
Faculty Proposals
Cognitive and Linguistics Sciences
Andrea Levitt, Cognitive and Linguistics Sciences
Vocal attractiveness: where does it come from, how is it related to other physical qualities, and how do men and women judge it?
We’ve all listened to voices we find very pleasant and others that sound decidedly
unappealing. What are we reacting to when we make these judgments? Speech researchers
have studied a number of the physical correlates of attractiveness in male
and female voices, including their pitch, formant characteristics, speech rate
and voice quality. Recent research suggests, in addition, that measures of
vocal attractiveness may be correlated with measures of physical attractiveness,
and in the case of women, that judgments of the attractiveness of male voices
may vary with the timing of their menstrual cycles. However, most of these
studies rely on short segments of speech that do not permit an assessment of
the contributions of features such as speech rate and voice quality. They also
do not typically compare women’s assessment of women’s voices to that of men
to see whether there are systematic differences. For this project, the student
researcher will review and summarize the literature on vocal attractiveness,
record and analyze the voices of a number of male and female speakers to develop
stimuli for testing, and then obtain judgments from both women and men on the
vocal (and the estimated physical) attractiveness of both male and female speakers.
Wellesley Centers for Women
Sumru Erkut,
I am looking for an intern to work on a project for evaluating a sex education program. This project provides technical assistance and evaluation services to the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts for their multifaceted approach to designing a comprehensive sex education curriculum, Get Real, for middle school students in Massachusetts. Get Real, is being developed in response to a request from the Boston School System. The comprehensive approach includes lesson plans for 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students, teacher training, and parent training.
Four underlying premises are built in to the curriculum. These are
(1) sexual health is an integral part of health education;
(2) parents/guardians and other caregiving adults are the students’ primary
sexuality educators;
(3) most sexual behavior occurs in the context of relationships, therefore
relationship skills are key elements of a comprehensive sex education curriculum;
and
(4) while abstinence from sex is the healthiest choice for avoiding sexually
transmitted infections and unintended pregnancy, adolescents need to have a
comprehensive understanding of sexual health, sexuality, and protection methods,
which they will need when they become sexually active.
The intern will work with project staff on all phases of their engagement with PPLM but primarily focus on analyzing data on the short term impact of taking a course on comprehensive sex education on middle school students. The intern will also participate in writing reports and manuscripts for publication.
Skills Required:
SPSS, excellent writing skills, social science background.
Economics Department
Joseph P. Joyce, Economics Department
At the beginning of the Bretton Woods era in 1945, capital markets were strongly regulated and capital flows greatly diminished from their pre-1914 levels. By the 1990s, however, international capital markets had been reestablished in the upper-income countries and many emerging markets. I am interested in two aspects of international capital flows:
First, I am writing a study of the implications for the IMF of the resurgence
of global capital. As part of that work I am assembling a database on the IMF.
Second, I am investigating financial crises in emerging markets. Bank crises
have become a frequent occurrence in the post-Bretton Woods era. These events
are costly, with a loss on average equal to 2 percent of GDP during each
year of the crisis. I am interested in the impact of foreign factors such
as U.S. interest rates on these events and whether the presence of capital
controls lessen the impact of foreign shocks.
I would like to work with a student on these topics. I would require assistance
in obtaining data and helping me with my book manuscript. The student can also
undertake related work of interest. The student must have taken principles
of macroeconomics and statistics, and preferably also econometrics, and be
familiar with spreadsheets (Excel).
Stacy Sneeringer, Economics Department
The Effect of the 1990 Coastal Zone Act Reauthorization Amendments
On Coastal Water Pollution
The 1990 Coastal Zone Reauthorization Amendments (CZARA), a portion of the Clean Water Act, federally mandated coastal states to adopt management measures to regulate non-point source (NPS) pollution. Coastal states adopted management plans at varying times between 1997 and 2002. While the government employed resources to implement these plans, it did not perform analyses to test whether the legislation had the intended effect of cleaning coastal waters. This project uses the different adoption times to estimate effects on coastal water quality, as measured by pollutant concentrations in off-shore mussels.
The student will perform data entry and analysis, as well as literature reviews and summaries. Necessary skills include knowledge of Excel and Stata, organized writing, commitment, creativity, and intellectual curiosity. No knowledge of coastal zones or environmental law is needed. Only students who have taken econometrics and know basic Stata will be considered.
Environmental Studies
Jay Turner, Environmental Studies
Does nature have rights? Do people have a right to a clean and healthy environment? Is it in the public interest to protect the environment? My research focuses on the history of American environmental politics, from the 1960s to present. Many scholars have folded the environmental movement into the emergence of rights-based political movements, such as the civil rights movement, women's movement, and other liberation movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. They have suggested that the environmental movement emphasized the rights of Americans to a clean environment and the rights of nature, more so than arguments that emphasized the public interest. This summer, I am looking for a student to help me examine the specific arguments environmental groups have drawn upon across a wide range of issues -- including endangered species protection, environmental justice, and climate change -- to justify their political and policy aims and to consider how those arguments have changed over time. I am looking for a student with a strong interest in environmental politics and a willingness to undertake original research of environmental groups at the local and national level.
History Department
Pat Giersch, History Department
I am working on two interrelated projects. The first seeks to unravel the connections between global economic changes, long-distance trade, and the Han Chinese colonization of South and Southwest China from the seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries. More specifically, the project traces the impact on Guangxi and Yunnan Provinces of two major transformations: (1) the explosive commercial growth in eighteenth-century East/Southeast Asia and (2) the reorientation of Asian trading networks in response to nineteenth-century European colonialism. What is the relationship between these major economic changes, Han merchant and miner migration to Guangxi and Yunnan, and the development of economic practices that marginalized indigenous (non-Chinese) peoples of frontier China?
The second project is research for a book on the making of modern China. Most recognize China as an ancient land, but which aspects of China’s long history have shaped the nation’s turbulent transition from imperial times to present? The book’s answer may surprise many: China’s frontier history and its legacy of conquest along its East and Inner Asia frontiers has, over the past 400 years, been central to the creation of modern China. Part of the goal is to provide a historical background and interpretative framework for understanding vexing modern issues, such as Beijing’s explosive conflicts with the Tibetan Government in Exile, the ongoing disputes over Taiwan’s international status, and the issue of Muslim separatism in the Chinese Central Asian territory of Xinjiang.
In either project, the student will read background literature, prepare reviews
on a wide range of topics, and seek out relevant primary materials. For example,
the first project’s topics may include Chinese merchant and business practices,
ethnic minorities in China, European imperialism in East and Southeast Asia,
and comparative works on trade and economic development. Necessary skills include
an ability to read and summarize scholarly arguments. Strong reading skills
(able to read scholarly material) in Chinese and/or Japanese would be helpful,
but are not required.
Ann Congleton, Philosophy
Humanities Study in
the Curricula of Undergraduate Business Majors
In the process of developing my course in the Philosophy of Business (Philosophy 210), I have become aware that business is now the largest undergraduate major in the U.S., twice as large as the second ranking, according to table 249 of the 2005 “Digest of Education Statistics” published by the National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education. (http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/tables/dt05_249.asp Jan. 20, 2007). An informal, preliminary investigation suggests that undergraduate majors in business require very little or no study of the humanities. I would like an intern to investigate this paucity or absence of humanities study more closely, using a definition of “humanities” we would agree upon, with provision for the definition to be refined or to evolve in the course of the study.
The study would focus on the following questions, also with provision for refinement/evolution: What is the range of distribution requirements among undergraduate business majors? Do any undergraduate business majors require substantial study in the humanities, and if so, what do those programs say about why they have these requirements? Are there any other features that differ between programs with unusually high humanities requirements and programs with few or no humanities requirements? Is there any difference in what the graduates of high and low humanities programs in business do after they graduate? Has there been discussion among planners of programs for undergraduate business majors about inclusion of the humanities? As a related inquiry, how often do undergraduate business majors include a writing requirement, and if so, how is it described?
In addition, if the intern has time, she would investigate whether graduate programs in business have any humanities requirements, either for admission or as part of the graduate study.
Political Science Department
Analyzing Primary Elections in the United States
In recent years, political pundits and academics alike have paid increasing attention to primary elections in the United States. Many have hypothesized that primary elections are a principal cause of increasing partisan polarization—yet no-one has tested this hypothesis to see if it is true. This project seeks to better understand the historical role congressional primaries have played in partisan polarization. My co-author and I have gathered extensive data on congressional primaries in the United States from 1956 to the present. The student will assist in gathering further data, which will take two principal forms: first, the student will help collect historical statistics on congressional primaries to complete the data set. Second, the student will examine qualitative, historical accounts of local elections to better understand the relationship between primaries and polarization.
Students should have a strong interest in American politics and a familiarity with quantitative data. Knowledge of and experience with statistical analysis is a plus.
Psychology Department
Jonathan Cheek, Psychology Department
An Analysis of the Highly Sensitive Person Scale and Construct
I am conducting a series of studies involving the Highly Sensitive Person Scale which was developed by E. Aron and A. Aron in 1997. The foundation for their model is the assumption that about 20 to 35% of infants inherit the temperamental quality of high sensory-processing sensitivity and the rest do not. Among young children who are highly sensitive, those who experience adverse childhood environments will develop a general sense of negative affect (or negative emotionality) which in turn leads to the development of adolescent and adult shyness. Highly sensitive children who have more positive childhood experiences will develop positive characteristics such as aesthetic sensitivity and a rich inner life. One complication for this model is that factor analysis of the 27-item Highly Sensitive Person Scale yielded 3 theoretically interpretable factors in a sample of over 400 Wellesley undergraduates, and other multi-factor results have been reported recently by other researchers.
This summer I will be looking at ways to interpret the factors of the Highly
Sensitive Person Scale by correlating them with measures of shyness, introversion,
behavioral inhibition, introspectiveness, and aesthetic orientation. The student
will perform data analysis as well as literature reviews and summaries. Necessary
skills include knowledge of SPSS and personality questionnaires.
Tracy Gleason, Psychology
Daily Diaries of Imaginary Companions
I am interested in how young children understand their relationships with
other people. Preschool age children have a variety of different types of relationships,
but the extent to which they successfully distinguish between them or understand
their similarities and differences is unknown. The way in which I am investigating
these questions is by looking at relationships that young children have that
are entirely invented. Specifically, I am currently doing research on how imaginary
companions manifest in children’s lives. Parents of children with imaginary
companions are keeping diaries of the comings and goings of their children’s
pretend friends over the course of about two weeks. These diaries include information
such as what the child was doing prior to the appearance of the imaginary companion,
how long it stayed around, what the child said and did, who was present—every
available detail about an imaginary companion’s episodic manifestation. My
goal for this summer is to organize these reams of data into segments that
can be coded and analyzed. I will be looking at variables such as type of companion,
child factors, and the type of relationship that appears to exist between the
child and the companion. I am most interested in whether and how these descriptions
illustrate and reflect young children’s understanding of relationships through
their invented interactions and relationships. A student would apply psychological
principles to guide detail-oriented categorizing and coding, and would have
the opportunity to choose an aspect of the diaries to analyze for her own research
project.
I know what you’re thinking: How children come to understand what other people think and know.
Between the ages of three and four, children come to understand that other people have thoughts and beliefs that are different from their own. They develop a “theory of mind.” Yet several populations, including deaf, blind, and autistic children, show extensive delays in theory-of-mind understanding. Two competing proposals have been put forth to account for the theory of mind delay in these populations. One argues that all three populations are delayed in their language development and this language impairment leads to delays in theory of mind development. An alternative proposal argues that these populations are delayed in their inhibitory control skills, and therefore do not have the cognitive ability to deal with multiple perspectives. We hypothesize that language plays a primary role in the development of a theory-of—mind, and that inhibitory control skills develop as a consequence of language.
To test this hypothesis we are conducting a longitudinal study of language, inhibitory control, and theory of mind development. This summer we will work with three-year-olds at local daycare centers, testing them at the beginning of the summer, and then following up with the same children at the end of the summer.
Because this project involves working with young children, the ideal student
will have extensive experience and feel comfortable with preschoolers. The
student will learn to administer, videotape, and code different tasks, as well
as conduct basic statistical analyses. Some of this work involves using high-end
technology; the ideal student should feel at ease learning new computer (Mac)
and video skills.
Across different cultures, people gesture for different reasons. Sometimes they use gesture to supplement or clarify an ambiguous verbal sentence. Interestingly, many also gesture when their gestures cannot be seen. (Think of all those times you emphatically gestured while talking on the phone.) This evidence supports current proposals that gestures help people process and convey difficult ideas. We hypothesize that gestures may actually provide visual clues about the stability or fragility of an individual’s understanding of a concept. We hypothesize that consistency in gestural production reflects a solid understanding of a specific concept. Towards testing this hypothesis, we have developed gesture production and comprehension tasks. The production task elicits targeted gestures and measures participants’ consistency in illustrating targeted concepts in their gestures. The comprehension task examines how participants use information from a speaker’s gestures to help them solve a complex problem.
The student will learn to administer, videotape, and code these tasks, as well as conduct basic statistical analyses. She will also help find reference material relevant to the write up of this study. Because some of this work involves using high-end technology, the ideal student should feel at ease learning new computer (Mac) and video skills.
Paul Wink, Psychology Department
Wisdom and Psychosocial Functioning: Validation of Two Measures
Since ancient times, wisdom has been defined as good judgment in difficult
and uncertain life matters – a characteristic that is vital to individuals
and society in times of rapid globalization and ensuing cultural conflict.
Yet, surprisingly little is known about the implications of wisdom for psychosocial
functioning. This is the case primarily because of the uncertainty as to how
to measure this complex psychological construct. The purpose of the proposed
research is to validate two measures of wisdom. The first measure is a quasi-laboratory
procedure, the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (WISP), that involves first training
individuals to think aloud and then asking them to think aloud about wisdom
tasks describing difficult and uncertain life problems confronted by a hypothetical
individual (e.g., “what one should do and consider if called by a friend who
has decided to commit suicide?”). The responses are then scored on several
dimensions of wisdom by a panel of trained raters. The second measure is the
newly developed Self-Assessed Wisdom questionnaire (SAWS). Data collected on
Wellesley College students will be used to score the WISP and the SAWS and
investigating their implications for psychosocial functioning including such
characteristics as creativity, intelligence, care for the environment, and
openness to new experience. Student RAs will receive intensive training in
scoring of vignettes generated in response to the WISP.
Sociology Department
Lee
Cuba, Sociology Department
Student Learning and Academic
Decision Making at Selective Liberal Arts Colleges
Colleges
structure and support the academic experiences of their students in a variety
of ways, such as general education and major requirements, first year seminars,
writing programs, advising systems, international study opportunities, and
junior or senior thesis programs.
Although institutions are able to articulate the goals of these
programs, they know relatively little about how these requirements or programs
influence student learning or academic decision making. How do students make decisions at key points
in their academic careers (e.g., choosing a major, deciding to study away,
writing a senior thesis) in ways that promote both breadth and depth of
learning? Who influences these
decisions? What modifications to college programs and practices would
significantly enhance student learning?
Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, six liberal
arts colleges (Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Smith, Trinity and Wellesley) have formed
a research consortium to explore these and other questions concerning the
academic experiences of undergraduate students.
The student working on this project will read literature appropriate to
these issues, collaborate on the development of interview schedules to be used
in a longitudinal study of students who entered these institutions in fall
2006, and develop a coding scheme that can be used to conduct qualitative and
quantitative analyses of data collected during the first year of the
longitudinal study.
The Cultural Sociology of Refugees
For several years in my social theory seminar I have address the issue of
modernity and displacement. With the astronomical rise in refugees worldwide
and the
predicted 50 million refugees expected by 2010, a central sociological question
for comparative analysis is: how are stateless people be treated in the societies
in which they live as refugees? While there is much research on specific
cases of forced migration, there is less comparative research on the question
of treatment of refugees and even still less which is grounded in the cultural
analysis of the “stranger” and the “other” that is so central to sociological
analysis. The focus of this research will be on the cultural and political
responses to refugees, with particular focus on the cultural sociology of
this response, that is, the ways in which cultural meanings of societal strangers
shape specific policies at the state level, and with what consequences for
social stability and conflict. The research focus for the summer session
is on the case of Denmark, which has experienced perhaps the most pronounced
critical cultural response to governmental efforts to create “new Danes”
from refugee populations.
Smitha Radhakrishnan, Sociology Department
Examining the Production of “the Global” in Indian Information Technology Workplaces
In the context of the booming global knowledge economy, how are individuals coming from a wide range of class, regional, and linguistic backgrounds trained to be “global” professionals in their workplaces? How might particular modes of femininity and masculinity (including home/work prioritization, language, and bodily discipline) be implicated in being “global” or “Indian” and how are these work cultures produced? I have addressed these questions through extensive interviews with Indian IT professionals in India and California, and have been focusing on the lessons these interviews offer us for thinking through how globalization is produced on the ground in everyday environments. This summer, I hope to expand this research to include analysis of industry materials, including training manuals, websites of multinational and Indian corporations, and interviews with cross-cultural corporate trainers based in the US. I would welcome a student interested spearheading the acquisition and analysis of these materials. Ideally, the student should be interested in globalization, cross-cultural business practices, and gender, and should be ready to tackle hands-on research and analysis. Attention to detail will be critical. Any social science background with interest in these areas is welcome.
isilver@frc.mass.edu
Hurricane Katrina, Disaster Relief and America's Poor
This project is a study of the charitable response to Hurricane Katrina. In a previous summer, a Wellesley student documented that Katrina became the target of more relief than any other disaster in American history (exceeding a billion dollars in private contributions) principally because the news media exposed graphic images of human suffering among those whose lives were already constrained by systemic barriers of poverty and race. My aim for this summer is to begin to assess the broader impacts of this relief effort on public attitudes about, and responses to, poverty in America.
The student who works on this project will investigate the following questions:
To what degree have Katrina relief efforts targeted the underlying systemic reasons – pertaining to class and race – that explain why certain people were so much more vulnerable than others to the Hurricane’s wrath? She will track the kinds of organizations where charitable dollars have gone over the past 2+ years in order to determine how much disaster relief has been earmarked toward enabling people to rebuild the lives they once lived as opposed to transforming their pre-Katrina living conditions altogether.
How do the effects of Katrina relief on poor people compare with everyday charitable giving to the poor – giving that is not fueled by the media drama surrounding disaster?
This research will make a significant contribution to my larger project, which is to do a critical evaluation of disaster relief – what it achieves, which needs it leaves unaddressed, and how it contributes to the ways we think about social problems.
Women’s Studies Department
Race, Gender and Genetics: Interdisciplinary Dialogue
Theories about human origins and the meanings of race in a biological sense
have been criticized for most of the 20th and 2lst centuries, becoming recessive
and dominant at particular historical moments. This is a moment of resurgence.
Fixed 19th century racial topologies are being rejected for more sophisticated
discussions of alleles, haplotypes, “HapMaps,” and SNPs that can be map onto
geographic models of human population dispersion. Such intellectual moves
bring a new sophistication to the old discussion of race, bringing into contestation
older social constructionist views versus seemingly newer biological models.
Historians need to find a way to enter this dialogue, to be more than Jeremiahs
crying in the wilderness against the biological work. My project asks: what
does race mean then in the face of the new genetic sciences? What are the connections
between the political discourses on race and racism and the multiple scientific
ones now taking place? What is the historical meaning of race within each discipline
and how do these legacies affect disciplinary understandings of race? How can
we get to interdisciplinary dialogue? I want to consider if the lens of gender
can provide insight into how the race discussion is being formed, and if as
in the l9th century, analogies of race and gender are being used one again,
or not.
The student working on this project will read historical and genetics literature
on race and gender, devise categories to understand their differing understandings,
examine how this question is covered in the press in both business and science
sections, and help to map what might be a constructive dialogue in the future
through a web-based bibliography and narrative website.
Writing Program
Wini Wood, The Writing Program
Analysis of Electronic Discourse in Relation to Offline Discourse
For seven years, the Mellon Residential Life Project has examined electronic discourse on Wellesley’s FirstClass system, focusing, in particular, on threads from the Community conference. This summer research project is our first research project that is independent of the primary goals of the Mellon Committee (to provide information and activities across campus that will yield more effective civic engagement online). Our goals for this project will be descriptive in nature: what characterizes the language in various online settings? How does this language differ from that used in specific offline settings? We will continue to examine Community threads, but will also collect and examine a range of samples of offline discourse that is related to these threads, as well.
The student working on this project will help develop a system for organizing
posts within a thread and will work with me to identify syntactic, semantic,
and rhetorical features of the discourse. I will train the student in discourse
analysis; together, we will consider and choose among competing methods of
discourse analysis. In addition to collecting, organizing, and analyzing data,
the student can expect to do some bibliographic work for the project as well.
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