Professor Maria Höhn, Huda Rahman ‘23, and Professor Christopher Bjork, Ilia Mahns ‘23

The purpose of our project was to introduce methods of research and modes of collaboration in preparation for our trip to Malaysia through the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education. Given the pandemic, we were unable to do the groundwork we had hoped to accomplish. Instead, with the guidance of Professor Maria Höhn and post-baccalaureate fellow Matthew Brill-Carlat, we explored refugee models of education alongside various community-engaged partnerships. Our research seeks to advance the Consortium’s development. 

Aside from the Ford Scholar framework, our project is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which also funds Vassar’s New Americans summer program, designed to support refugee high school students in pursuing higher-ed. During the summer, we researched how this might be expanded to include winter and spring break programming focused on the college application process. 

We researched mutual enrollment programs between different higher education institutions. Oftentimes immigrant and refugee students pursue an education at community colleges due to interlocking hardships including, financial and linguistic challenges. We are working towards developing community-engaged learning opportunities that foster cross-campus relations between Vassar and DCC.

Throughout our research, we attended several Zoom workshops concerning refugee education, hosted by both government and local organizations. There was a lot to learn from grassroots organizations, especially concerning forms of creative expression related to mental health. We have seen the importance of incorporating art and therapeutic practices in ensuring feelings of well-being and belonging within vulnerable communities.

Our research allowed us to observe patterns in online platforms and digital scholarship while gathering resources for education models and mental health intervention in Malaysia. This has informed us in further developing community-outreach and summer initiatives that hopefully can become applicable to our college.

New Americans Program- Summer of 2019 | Taken by Professor Höhn

Valley Scholars Initiative by Julián Aguilar, Vassar ‘23

World Refugee Day 2020 slide shared over zoom| Taken by ilia Mahns

Common Threads Art Exhibit of Story Cloths 

Professor Debra Zeifman and Yiqing (Alice) Fan ’22, Psychological Science Department

This June, I worked with Professor Zeifman on designing a new course called The Psychologist’s Toolkit for Success and Wellbeing in College. This course aims to use scientifically tested strategies to assist students in succeeding academically, socially, physically, and mentally in college.

At the beginning of the project, recalling the problems that students encountered after entering college, we came up with a list of potential topics. The topics are divided into four categories:

1. Physical health and wellbeing (e.g. sleep hygiene and habits)
2. Studying habits (e.g. avoiding procrastination)
3. Social interactions (e.g. conflict resolution)
4. Others (e.g. academic integrity & mental health education).

For each topic, Professor Zeifman helped me come up with questions and search terms. Then, I used PsycINFO and Google Scholar to look for research papers that addressed these ideas. We tended to search for more recent studies that examined college students. After putting together titles, abstracts, and citations of the most relevant studies, I started reading them. I highlighted the articles that are suitable to be used as readings assignments for our course and wrote a short general impression and important takeaways for each paper. In the end, I compiled valuable information that was proven by surveys or experiments and produced a summary for each topic that could serve as the literature foundation for our course.

We did not finish all topics in a month and will continue working on this project this summer and next term. Our next steps include producing a working syllabus with potential reading assignments, carrying out a survey study that examines Vassar students’ academic integrity, and serving as a teaching/research assistant for the future course.

Professor Dara Greenwood, Daria Lochoshvili ’22, Psychological Science Department

Professor Dara Greenwood is planning to write the textbook Social Psychology of Mass Media that will draw upon the disciplines of both psychology and media studies in order to explore the widespread psychological impact of mass media. This summer, Alice Aldoukhov and I researched the most recent literature about some of the topics that will be covered in the textbook.

Alice and I meeting over Zoom to discuss our findings and exchange some research tips

The first area I researched was advertising and persuasion. I explored the power of personalized advertising that targets consumers by using their personal information from their online profiles and browsing histories. Some studies showed that personalized ads are more effective than general ads because they enhance the personal relevance of the message for consumers, while other studies demonstrated that personalized ads may increase privacy concerns, thus leading to less persuasion. I also explored the importance of the source in persuasion and how different characteristics, such as expertise, trustworthiness, etc., affect the persuasiveness of the message. I researched social media influencers who are frequently hired by different brands to promote their products.

PsycInfo and Communication & Mass Media Complete were the two databases that I used most of the time for my research

Another topic that I delved into was the influence of celebrities on people’s body image. I found that Instagram is one of the most relevant platforms to this literature because many celebrities actively use Instagram to depict their private and professional lives. Moreover, Instagram is based solely on photo-sharing, so appearance plays a primary role on this platform. I also investigated the impact of fashion shows, specifically Victoria’s Secret, on women’s mental health and body image. At last, I found some factors, such as parasocial relationships with celebrities and parodies of thin-ideal images, that may alleviate the immense negative influence of the slender body ideal on people.

Adam Abadi ’22 and Professor Gisella Kagy (Economics)

This summer, I worked with Professor Kagy to examine the impact of the Bangladeshi garment industry on women’s empowerment. The goal was to determine whether proximity to job opportunities at garment factories can empower married Bangladeshi women. To measure empowerment, we used survey responses about household decision-making power, presence of domestic violence, and investments in children’s education.

My work primarily focused on constructing a geographic dataset of Bangladeshi garment factories and synthesizing factory locations with survey data. Throughout the project, I used a combination of Python, Stata, and QGIS for webscraping, data analysis, and geolocating.

After doing a brief literature review, I wrote a Python script that webscraped data from an online directory of over 4,000 Bangladeshi garment factories. I then used Stata to clean the data and visualize its key characteristics.

Next, I used the Google Maps Geocoding API to identify a likely pair of latitude/longitude coordinates for each factory, using factory addresses as inputs, and cleaned the resulting dataset in Stata. I repeated this process with the Google Maps Places API, which instead takes the factory names as inputs. To evaluate the precision and probable accuracy of coordinates derived from these two geolocation methods, I analyzed metadata from each set of coordinates. After that, I synthesized the coordinates from each method that were most likely to be accurate. 

Finally, I used QGIS to create another dataset that counted the number of employees and factories over time within a certain radius of each cluster of survey respondents. This will allow us to explore whether proximity to employment opportunities at garment factories affected respondents’ empowerment-related outcomes.

Dr. Pinar Batur, Martin Burstein ‘23, Robin Bleicher ‘23, Departments of Sociology and Environmental Studies

Our Ford Scholars Project consisted of three facets: designing a curriculum to teach high school students about the climate crisis, teaching our curriculum in a two-week intensive course, and conducting individual research projects to be incorporated into Dr. Batur’s syllabus for fall classes.

We spent the month of June designing a curriculum for high school students that integrated social science into a comprehensive understanding of the climate crisis. Our lecture-based classes laid the groundwork for theoretical concepts such as earth systems, ecosystem resilience, and environmental racism. These complex concepts were further developed by our six distinguished guest speakers, all of whom were Vassar professors or alumnae/i, who generously joined our class to add their valuable insights.

After taking part in our morning classes, the students engaged in corresponding afternoon activities led either by Vassar’s Exploring College program or the Environmental Cooperative. Each day concluded in a homework session during which we met with individual students to answer questions, give supplementary materials, or proof-read assignments. We also mentored three students each and made ourselves constantly available to them throughout the two-week intensive. The course culminated in two final projects for the students: a reflective narrative about their personal experience with the climate crisis, and a letter written to their city council members focused on climate mitigation and adaptation.

Meanwhile, throughout June and July, we have each researched individual projects for Dr. Batur’s materials for her fall class. Robin’s research focuses on First Nations Peoples and their response to the climate crisis, COVID-19, and the Black Lives Matter Movement that is sweeping the globe. Martin’s research focuses on the Navajo Nation and their fight against environmental racism and COVID-19. We are excited to share our research in Dr. Batur’s fall classes.

A photo taken during our curriculum planning sessions in June.

A student’s journal entry after using iNaturalist to identify a plant in their area.

A student’s Padlet entry, used as the slide for her digital narrative. She compiled resources that explain the problems with the retail industry and climate change.

Professor Robert DeMaria and Margaret Wagh ’20, English Department

The first page of Vassar College’s edition of the Tatler, a collection of every Tatler published from 1709 to 1711. Courtesy of Vassar College Special Collections.

Under Professor DeMaria’s direction this summer, I explored territory often ignored: the thousands of advertisements living in the 272 pages of the Tatler. I aimed to see what products were considered worthy of ink and to learn more of their advertisers. Often repeating, the advertisements included satirical doctrines, historical books, and moral disputes; also advertised were medicines, lost items, lotteries, wines, and countless ephemeral products.

Over six weeks, I pored over Vassar’s volume of the original folios in Special Collections, occasionally referencing online databases of eighteenth-century works. Professor DeMaria and I agreed an accurate, full transcription of the advertisements was needed before anything else, and so I composed an unprecedented digital collection of every advertisement in the Tatler. Following this recording, I moved towards my main task: the abbreviation of the advertisements.

Professor DeMaria and I agreed that the best method of adhering to the original advertisements while reducing excessive repetition was to place a full abridgment in the newsletter in which it first appears, and to place a shortened title in subsequent appearances; our hope was to convey the advertisements’ importance while condensing their appearances. Following the abridgment process, each advertisement will be placed into its respective Tatler in Professor DeMaria’s edition.

My immersion into the Tatler’s advertisements gifted me an insight into early eighteenth-century London, engaging a historical perspective that cannot be found in any other medium but the advertisements. I watched life change, week by week. It was only through reading each advertisement that I was able to witness the rise and fall of what was relevant to the daily life of Richard Steele’s readers. Hopefully, the advertisements, an often-unappreciated genre, will convey these shifts in London’s society in the Cambridge edition.

Professor Ismail Rashid and Oona Maloney ’22, History Department

This summer I worked with Professor Rashid on a Ford Scholars Project on Youth Culture and Black Student activism in the United States and South Africa. The project was split into two components over the course of 8 weeks; for the first 5 weeks, Professor Rashid and I expanded on AFRS 289, an existing 6 week seminar, into a 12 week course. For the second part of the project, I traveled to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. to begin research on an article that Professor Rashid and I will write on I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson, a Sierra Leonean Pan-Africanist, journalist, and unionist.

Reading one of the primary readings for AFRS 289 in the Library

Before Professor Rashid left, we brainstormed weekly topics for the class syllabus and established the student movements that would be studied in class. I helped by reviewing the three primary readings used in the course and sorting out the chapters that students did and did not have to read. I also created weekly folders containing articles that I found and made PowerPoints for each weekly lesson. Professor Rashid spent most of the summer project traveling in Africa, so I kept in contact with him while he was away through weekly WhatsApp calls.

After completing the first part of the project, I started the preliminary for Professor Rashid’s I.T.A. Wallace Johnson article. I traveled to Washington D.C. and stayed for a week to do research at the Library of Congress. At the LOC, I primarily worked in the Madison Building where I looked through 8 boxes of microfilm of three different Sierra Leonean newspapers from the early 1900s to see if there was news about Wallace-Johnson and his political activities. In the future, I will continue to work with Professor Rashid throughout the year on Wallace Johnson research and article writing.

The boxes of microfilm that I sorted through

A microfilm of an article from the Sierra Leonean newspaper the Sierra Leone Daily Mail

Matthew Park ’20, Economics & Mathematics

Professor Sarah Pearlman, Economics Department

This summer I worked with Professor Pearlman on the topic of the impact of declining Mexican migration on US Labor markets, focusing on pre and post great Recession time frame. 

Our first task was understanding the background of such a broad topic, conducting a literature review. We learned that fewer unskilled Mexicans were migrating due to Mexico’s economy on the rise and the US’s massive increase in border enforcement. Consequently, other immigrant groups were filling in the labor shortage, primarily those from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. 

We then began visualizing our findings using the US Census. Our findings confirmed our suspicions; more Mexican laborers were steadily leaving the agriculture and construction industries over the past two decades, being replaced by other immigrant groups. Additionally, we saw a clear trend in fewer Mexicans with high school education arriving, while more college educated Mexicans arriving to the US. 

We also observed that Mexicans were migrating to atypical states such as Washington and the Plains states like Montana and Wyoming. They were leaving heavily Mexican populated areas including California and the border states and moving Northeast, contradicting total immigrant movement trends. This suggested that perhaps immigrant groups did not compete but rather would move elsewhere to seek jobs. 

Lastly, we performed a diff and diff model regression, to observe the impact of an existing Mexican community and the year of the Great Recession 2007 on current immigrant communities in the same area. Interestingly, Asian and Central-American immigrants were most likely to settle where Mexicans were, while there was little correlation for South-Americans, West Indies, and other immigrant groups. 

My experience with this project taught me that researching can begin with a single question, but end up answering and asking completely different questions later in the process. We may not have answered our original question, but obtained invaluable evidence about migration trends of various immigrant groups and their tendencies to follow certain industries. 

This summer, I worked with Professor Gisella Kagy from the Economics Department and explored women empowerment & micro-enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa.

During the first week, I looked at some survey data of about 840 women working in manufacturing in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

For the majority of the project, I worked on another paper that explored the bargaining behavior of clothing micro-enterprises in Hohoe, Ghana and the effects on those behaviors due to personal, household, and firm characteristics of the owners.

Numerous works of literature have used theoretical and experimental frameworks to analyze the bargaining pattern of micro-enterprises, but this paper is one of the first to document the relationship between personal, household, and firm characteristics and bargaining behavior. Using previous works and models, we predicted that the final transaction price would be correlated to how much accessible cash the seller had at the time of transaction.

To investigate this prediction, I cleaned the survey data and prepared it for analysis. There were two major things that I worked on: (a) cleaning the data to ensure consistency between the raw data and the cleaned data (b) handling observations missing values and finalizing all intermediate sample sizes that were used in summary statistics and regressions. The regressions that followed showed that personal liquidity per capita of the firm owner’s household could predict the final price of bargaining: firms with less accessible cash were seen to settle on a lower final price, and this was consistent with our model’s prediction of people with lower personal liquidity being more risk-averse.

Next, I explored the “Price Reasoning” data from the survey to see a pattern that could qualitatively suggest why the firm owners were settling on their individual final prices.  These results can be important in understanding the implications of policies related to bargaining in developing countries.

The Assimilation Era in the late 1800s and early 1900s included policies that sought to assimilate Native Americans into more mainstream “American” culture. Native American households were given land “in trust”, meaning they benefitted from but did not own the land. These plots were intended to transition to “fee simple” land, which gave the beneficiaries of the land ownership rights. Much of this land remained in trust leading to possible differences in economic mobility between owners of fee simple land.

My part project was to use US census data to link people in Native American people across time. Because a unique identification number like Social Security was not put into place yet, we were required to match people on characteristics like name, place of birth, sex, and year of birth. Difficulties arose with this information due to problems like errors in transposing the data, inaccurate birth years, and nicknames, however there are methods to help overcome these difficulties.

The first method used code created by Dr. Ran Abramitzky. This process created “blocks” of people that were based on place of birth and initials. Each person in these blocks were assigned a probability that they were matches with one another and those with the highest probabilities in each were linked. This process resulted in roughly a 10% match rate.

In our next process, we used a Stata program called “Dtalink”, in which the user assigns numeric values to characteristics that match to sum to create final scores that determine if a person is a link. We then incorporate the “Jaro-Winkler String Distance” program that assigns a score to how similarly names are spelled. Our iteration of this method produced match rates of roughly 25-35%.