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The Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service

 

 

Congratulations to our 2020 Graduate Fellows! These fellowships are available thanks to the generosity of Scott and Betty Lukins, Alice O. Rice, and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Foundation.

 

Each year the institute awards research fellowships to graduate students working on important public policy questions. These fellowships are available thanks to the generosity of Scott and Betty Lukins, Alice O. Rice, and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Foundation.

Foley fellowships are awarded annually to graduate students who fulfill at least one of the following criteria:

  • Conduct research in the area of just and sustainable societies and policies
  • Seek to enhance their public policy research skills and pursue a research agenda focusing on major policy issues
  • Conduct research in the area of political institutions and democracy.

This year we awarded seven summer fellowships.

Kamal Ahmmad’s (marketing) research aims to understand consumers’ perception of lab grown meat, an alternative meat product, often termed as “cell-cultured meat.” The increased consumption of meat and the over-reliance on meat-related products have raised concerns related to environment and health. Global meat consumption is also expected to increase significantly in the next ten years, suggesting a need for an
environmentally friendly meat-alternative. Laboratory-grown meat is clearly a novel food, and convincing consumers to accept this product will be challenging for several reasons. Ahmmad examines the
effectiveness of different types of product labeling of cell-cultured meat and the influence of emotions and consumers’ behavioral orientations on purchase decisions.

Stephanie Gibbons’ (communication) research highlights the traditional and emerging media representations of women and women of color in the 2020 election. With a surge of diverse candidates, the news media has relied on traditional stereotypes to describe candidates, while also generating new media frames. Her research addresses three shortcomings of media representation research. First, scholarly work typically looks exclusively at either women or people of color, not both. Second, research often observes the text or the image, when a synthesis of both has been shown to have greater influence on news consumers. Finally, either qualitative or quantitative research is usually selected as a method. She instead employs a mixed methods approach in which both text and images from major U.S. newspapers are observed with regards to representations of women and women of color Presidential candidates.

Andrew Given’s (nursing) research examines the use of policy as an interventional tool in healthcare organizations. He specifically focuses on the incorporation of patient-centered care principles in policy development and how this approach can benefit patient outcomes at Opioid Treatment Programs (OTPs) in the Puget Sound region of Washington. Through partnership with a multi-clinic OTP, he is analyzing the impact of a progressive patient-centered policy that engages the issue of potentially lethal polysubstance misuse during treatment for Opioid Use Disorder. His research aims to support low barrier, high tolerance models of care through demonstrating the effectiveness of policy change in reducing adverse patient outcomes.

 

 

Joel Mehić-Parker’s (Political Science) research focuses on the concept of electability by assessing how people’s implicit and explicit attitudes about gender influence their candidate preferences. When individuals evaluate candidates, they rely on explicit attitudes (i.e. consciously evaluating the candidate) and implicit attitudes (i.e. subconscious evaluations). As explicit-level sexism decreases within our society (potentially because it is increasingly less socially desirable to reveal one’s sexism), sexism likely remains at the implicit-level. This study relies on survey measures of explicit sexism and a go/no-go association task to measure implicit sexism and, using an experimental design, tests how implicit and explicit ambivalent sexism relate to voters’ preferences for political candidates (varied by gender and race). The aim of this study is to better understand the complex dynamics of internalized attitudes about who should serve in office and how these attitudes drive perceived candidate electability.

 

Chase Riddle’s (political science) research focuses on the role emotional connections, or lack thereof, to politically laden language in explaining political behavior. His approach uses new programming developments within audio analysis software to measure the level of emotional vocal pitch fluctuations in an individual’s voice as they speak. By using this new technology, Riddle examines whether emotional connections to the language correlates with certain behaviors. His main project currently using this audio analysis to study the role emotional language, specifically in reference to ethnic identities, correlates with ethnic/genocidal violence.

 

 

Justin Stachofsky’s (Business Administration) research project is related to understanding the impact of technology on US elections, with a focus on voter perceptions and behavior in the electronic voting context. We will be using the fellowship funds to collect data from US voters on their perceptions of electronic voting as it relates to trust in government, privacy, and security as well as potential disenfranchisement introduced by using a technical medium to vote. This is highly relevant to the current political landscape as we have seen technology failure in elections such as the 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucuses, and the continued spread of COVID-19 raises questions of how we facilitate voting.

 

Sedef Topal (political science) conducts quantitative research on the roots of historical enmities in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, and applies image theory from political psychology. She plans to conduct online surveys with members of Kurdish and Turkish nationalist parties in order to explore their images about the other side; whether they have a barbarian, rogue, or imperialist image of each other, and how focusing on these images can help solve this conflict in a peaceful way.