Medical Pluralism and Women’s Health: Ayurveda and Allopathy in a Changing Andhra Pradesh

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Rachel Owen and Dr. John Hawkins, Anthropology Department My research took place in Andhra Pradesh, South India, in Vishakhapatnam, or Visag, for short. I studied the interaction between Allopathy (Allopathy is one of the terms used to describe western medicine, or biomedicine) and Ayurveda(Ayurveda is the traditional Hindu medicine system used in India for over […]

The Absent God: Do Implicit Biases Influence Current Prayer Research?

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Chase O’Gwin and Dr. Brent Slife, Psychology Department Main Text In a recent article Dr. Slife and Reber (2009) make an argument that there is a pervasive bias against theism in psychological research. They state that in the effort to remain neutral towards religious thinking, including Christian theism, the science of psychology has become implicitly […]

What’s Moral About Moral Reasoning: Dealing with Personal Versus Contrived Dilemmas

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Lacey Nielson and Dr. Terry Olson, School of Family Life Moral reasoning is commonly assessed using the Defining Issues Test (DIT) by James Rest which correlates with Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. The DIT presents contrived moral dilemmas with issue statements. In our study, we wanted to see if moral reasoning in real life […]

Analyzing the Gap between Actual and Perceived Body Size and Its Association with Weight Control among High School Aged Girls

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Erin Moore and Dr. Renata Forste, Sociology My ORCA grant was used in a statistical examination using data from the 2001-2002 Health Behaviors in School-age Children, a nationally representative survey measuring children and adolescents on a variety of health-related behaviors and attitudes. With these data, I explored the effects of a discrepancy between actual and […]

An Observation of Public Behavior among Ecuadorian Orphans

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Emily Miller and Dr. Charles Nuckolls, Anthropology Identity within a social structure is easily analyzed when found in a culturally traditional setting. However, when physical and mental handicaps, parental figure transience, and varying levels of familial contact become factors the social structure and the roles within that structure are not as easily defined. Research for […]

Aboriginal Cultural Resilience: A Community Ethnography in Utopia

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Jaren Meldrum and Dr. Todd L. Goodsell, Sociology Department Main Text Most rural indigenous communities in Australia have an abnormally high frequency of tobacco and alcohol use, domestic violence, and gambling, the prevalence of which can be seen as a result of an anomic loss of cultural identity in the postcolonial era (O’Connor 1984; Johnston […]

Security in South Africa: The Perceptions of Women

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B. Macrae McDermott and Dr. Valerie Hudson, Political Science I recently completed the data collection portion of the research project entitled “Security in South Africa: The Perceptions of Women.” With the aid of my faculty mentor, I developed a mixed method, ethnographic field study in order to gain a greater understanding of women’s perceptions of […]

Transformative Processes in Marriage: Effects on Father-Adolescent Relationships

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Brandon McDaniel and Dr. Erin Holmes, School of Family Life Main Text Researchers suggest that marital processes and the father-child relationship are linked (Holmes, Duncan, Bair, & White, 2007). Unfortunately, much of this work focuses on negative marital processes. For example, low marital satisfaction, emotional distance between spouses, and high marital conflict undermine father involvement […]

Decision-Making Process of Elected Officials

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Bradley Masters Main Text John Kingdon, in his famous book, Congressman’s Voting Decisions, said, “Because congressmen rely most heavily on colleagues within the house and on constituents for guidance as they vote, other actors in the system such as lobbyists and administration policy makers tend to work through these two gatekeeper sources” (Kingdon 1989, My […]

The Efficacy of Using Animal-Assisted Therapy to Decrease Maladaptive Behaviors in Children with Reactive Attachment Disorder

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Trisha Markle and Dr. Gary Burlingame, Psychology This study is currently still in progress. We are in the final stages of a pilot study that was supported by this ORCA grant. A new and funded version of the study will begin in January based upon the findings of the pilot. As noted in our IRB, […]