Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: The South University School of Pharmacy embedded eight quarters of service-learning in its Doctor of Pharmacy’s early/intermediate professional practice experience program to introduce students to service and altruism as part of a pharmacy professional’s defining ethos, and to provide students leadership opportunities as mentors. Purpose: This assessment project’s focus is twofold: 1) assess the eight-quarter service-learning experience contributions to the development of student ability outcomes mapped to the Early and Intermediate Professional Practice Experiences as conceived in the school’s initial curricular plan, and 2) establish a baseline against which to assess forthcoming changes in the service-learning experience. Methods: The Class of 2008 was surveyed during Quarter Seven using a two-part, thirty-one item survey that elicited student perception of service-learning and introductory practice experience contributions to their development of PharmD curricular outcomes mapped to those experiences. Results: The work in progress indicates, not unexpectedly, that students perceive the intermediate professional practice experiences in quarter five (2, 4-week rotations) as more directly linked to their professional development than the service learning activity. Full results from the closed and open-ended response survey sections will be reported, as well as the model for on-going assessment of this curricular requirement. Implications: Recommendations for internal and external audiences will be presented to help programs with multi-term service-learning activity embedded in their experiential curricula consider programmatic adjustments that help students see service as valuable in their professional education, and to identify specific developmental gains they make via curricular-linked service.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: The study aims to extend the existing knowledge about the specific dynamics of first-time participation in protest events. Although we start to know quite a lot about political (protest) activism, we hardly have a cue who, why and how people participate in protest for their first time. To tackle that puzzle we rely on extensive and innovative protest survey evidence covering 21 separate demonstrations in eight countries across ten different issues. On the aggregate-level, we can predict quite well which demonstrations will attract many first-time participants. Tests clearly establish that demonstrations staged at the beginning of a protest cycle, large demonstrations, demonstrations of the old or of the new emotional movements, demonstrations populated by older people and people not belonging to organizations are on average attended by a larger share of first-time participants than other protest events. On the individual level, first-timers appear to be only marginally different from many-timers. Only age and organizational membership appear to be consistent predictors of first-timership. We find that the attitudes of the demonstrators about the protest issue and the way they relate to the other demonstrators play a modest role as well. Yet, it is only the combination and interplay of the individual- and aggregate-level determinants that produces satisfying results. Whether people protest for the first time or not depends on the supply on the protest market and on their individual dispositions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The present study aims to explore the world-wide phenomenon of fourteen year-olds support of social-movement citizenship. Previous research on youth engagement in social-movements is scarce in the fields of political socialization and social-movements. This empirical gap is counterintuitive because social-movements are one of few available methods for political participation of youth under voting age. Thus, the first objective of the study is to evaluate the extent to which individual determinants influence support of social-movement citizenship. The second objective is to estimate the impact of country-level determinants on individual support of social-movement citizenship. To implement these objectives, I utilize Hierarchical Level Modeling with data from the IEA Civic Education study, containing relevant information on 84,676 students from 28 countries. At the micro-level, results show that support of conventional citizenship has the strongest effect on the support of social-movement citizenship; followed by perceptions of governmental role as related to the society and perceptions of governmental role as related to the economy. Gender, attention to news and discussions about international news also play an important role in explaining youths' support of social-movement citizenship. At the macro-level, results show that types of welfare regimes correlates with youths' support of social movements. Interestingly, support of conventional citizenship, perceiving governmental role as related to the society as well as to economy interact with the country-level attributes. Overall the analysis suggests that welfare regimes function as cultural environments where different emphases of citizenship rights and social policies shape youth support for social movements.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Despite many stereotypical images,
some recent studies have found little explanatory power of religious
attachment to the attitudes of democracy or war in the Muslim society.
This result challenges conventional wisdoms that religion deeply
connects to political turmoil in the Middle East. With international
events like 911, War on Terror, and War on Iraq, this debate is further
complicated with the ongoing political situations in the Middle East.
While journalistic information may mislead people with oversimplified
discussions, today political scientists still lack a powerful theory to
explain the support of political Islam. The effort of this paper is to
make a contribution in this regard by answering three questions:
(1) Are religious people in the Muslim society more likely to support
political Islam?
(2) What makes them support or not support political Islam at the
individual level?
(3) How does political culture affect people’s religiopolitical
attitudes across different Muslim societies?
This paper has seven sections. First, a brief literature review
summarizes the recent development in the field of Religion and Politics
with regard to the support of political Islam. Second, an innovative
psychometric approach, Item Response Theory (IRT), is proposed to this
study. The next is the research design, including the issues of
conceptual definition, variable formation, data processing, major
hypotheses, and the explanatory rationale. In the fourth section, the
results of regression analyses are presented and interpreted. In the
fifth section, structural equation modeling is applied to evaluate the
explanatory power of different causal paths. Then the focus will shift
to the country level by using hierarchical linear models to explain the
variation of individual-level relationships. Finally, the conclusion
will show that cultural explanations, specifically the modernization
theory, are much more powerful than socioeconomic explanations to
explain the support of political Islam in the Muslim world.

Publication Type: Individual Poster
Abstract: We report a cross-sectional and a longitudinal experiment that examined developmental changes in the relative contribution of monocular and binocular variables in the guidance of interceptive arm movements. Three- to eight-month-old infants were observed while presented with differently sized balls that approached frontally with a constant velocity under both monocular and binocular viewing conditions. Movement onset indicated that with age infants increasingly came to rely on binocular variables in controlling the timing of the interceptive arm movements. That is, from seven to eight months of age movement onset was independent from object size under binocular but not under monocular viewing. In contrast, binocular viewing enhanced the spatial accuracy of the interceptive arm movements at all ages. We concluded that attunement to binocular information is a key process in infants’ gaining adaptive control of goal-directed arm movements. However, interceptive arm movements entail the formation of multiple on-line couplings between optic and movement variables, each of which appears to develop at its own pace.