Thesis (M.P.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

Socio-emotional (or psycho-social) well-being, established through nurturing relationships and community experiences, enable children and adults to evolve into caring, non-violent, emotionally-healthy citizens. As globalization, social changes and political unrest have—in recent decades—led to increased levels of “socially constructed uncertainty” (Marris, 1991), they put a squeeze on social support networks and caretaking relationships, and jeopardize the prospects for the constructive satisfaction of fundamental psychological needs across diverse segments of human societies. This dissertation evaluated purposefully-selected development texts' tendencies to make socio-emotionally conducive—or neglectful—program recommendations, by proposing and applying a socio-emotional capacity building framework that draws from research produced in the areas of developmental psychology, peace psychology, and sociology. A mixed-methods text-analytical approach was deployed that combines ideological and critical discourse analyses, as well as quantitative/qualitative content analyses for determining the extent to which development texts acknowledge the relevance of socio-emotional well-being for human and social capital development. The study followed an expertise-based evaluation model called “connoisseurship and criticism” (Eisner, 2002), by first describing and analyzing policy texts, and subsequently engaging in a critical text evaluation. The study found that UN conference reports indirectly acknowledge the relevance for socio-emotional enablement and protection, in the context of discussions related to human and children's rights, education, or women's empowerment. However, they only marginally discuss the need to foster socio-emotional well-being as a human capacity development rationale per se. The IMF, while acknowledging responsibility for the social conduciveness of macro-economic development interventions, does not discuss issues related to socio-emotional capacity development. The World Bank's strategic plan and other strategy papers touch on issues of socio-emotional capacity development only tangentially. The study concludes that the discourse communities that have authored the development texts analyzed in this study largely ignore the question of socio-emotional well-being for human and social capital development. Their discourse “backgrounds” discussions about the kind and nature of social structures necessary for nurturing socio-emotional enablement and well-being. Developmental psychologists are challenged to “infect” socio-economic development discourse by calling for the effective integration of the theme of socio-emotional well-being into socio-economic development publications.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2010 July 6.

<p>This dissertation is a collection of three papers. Each paper constitutes a chapter. Each chapter empirically examines an aspect of bias-motivated behavior in the United States. </p> <p>The first chapter studies the impact of penalty enhancement statutes by state legislatures on the incidence of hate crimes in the United States. Penalty enhancements may deter crime, however, the passing of such laws may also increase awareness among law enforcement officials and increase arrests. Using administrative data on hate crimes and a difference-in-differences method that leverages state-level variation in the introduction of legislation, this paper does not find a significant effect of the state enactment of penalty enhancement statutes on hate-crime incidence rates. </p> <p>The second chapter examines whether election timing and election outcomes affect the incidence of crimes motivated by hate and intolerance. Using administrative data and a difference-in-differences design that compares election with non-election years, I show that hate crimes increase by an average of 28 percent in the three weeks around a US presidential election. This effect is larger in recent presidential elections and when there is no incumbent candidate. Second, using a similar design and cross-state variation in the timing of gubernatorial elections, I find no evidence that these state-level elections affect hate-crime incidence. Third, using regression-discontinuity designs based on vote counts, I find that the number of hate crimes is not affected by presidential or gubernatorial election outcomes. </p> <p>The third chapter studies the impact of presidential and gubernatorial election timing on the level of toxicity present on social media platforms such as Twitter. Together with Sameer Borwankar, I empirically determine the extent to which the toxicity of Twitter content changes during election times as compared to non-election times. We randomly sample Twitter users and collect all tweets made by this sample around election time. We use a difference-in-differences identification leveraging election and non-election years. We further focus on toxic content that is motivated by political polarization and examine various bias-motivation categories that come up in this content as well as the variation in the intensity of toxicity between national and local election times.  </p> <p><br></p>