Police use of deadly force is an understudied yet deeply important issue in our society. Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in public concern over use of deadly force, particularly when that force is used against people of color. Due to the relative low frequency of deadly force incidents, little is known about when such force is used, or who it is used on. Recent studies have found a racial disparity between white and black subjects of deadly force, with black subjects significantly over represented as a proportion of the population. This study further expands our understanding of police use of deadly force, specifically the situational context of its use against white and black subjects. We use 100 random cases from the Washington Post Fatal Force data set and conduct a content analysis on this sample to identify data on multiple possible situational factors. This exploratory study found several important differences between situations involving a white or black subject of a deadly police shooting. Black subjects are on average seven years younger than white subjects. Black subjects are statistically more likely to be killed following contact initiated by an officer, such as a traffic or pedestrian stop. White subjects are more likely to be killed following contact initiated by dispatchers or courts, such as a call for service or when serving a warrant. Differences were also found related to the reasons for contact, the location of the incident, and the forms of resistance from the subject. This study provides validation to claims that police use deadly force differently between black and white subjects, and implicates police officer training and discretion in the racial disparity of use of deadly force.

No description available.

The need to arm targets, allies, and bystanders in the face of increased discrimination and political unrest is imperative to the well-being and mental health of minorities in the United States. Most recently, Sue and colleagues (2019) introduced “microinterventions” a taxonomy of anti-discrimination strategies that aim to disarm or counteract the experience of a microaggression and enhance overall psychological well-being (Sue, 2019). Utilizers of mental health services may seek treatment due to symptoms of depression, anxiety and/or PTSD related to repeated instances of microaggressions (Sue et al.,2007). The field of psychology must respond by sharing resources and providing identity affirming counseling to help clients process feelings of negative sense of self, helplessness, and internalized attitudes (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019; Miller et al., 2018). There is a significant gap in the psychological literature with regard to the effectiveness, benefits and associated outcomes of individual-level strategies and tactics to disarm and disrupt instances of microaggressions (Brondolo, Pencille, Beatty, Contrafa, 2009). The purpose of this study was to contribute to the multicultural and social advocacy literature by training individuals on microintervention tactics and utilizing qualitative methodology to evaluate participants experiences and outcomes. A pre and post design with short answer responses and a one month follow up was conducted using consensual qualitative research data analysis methods (CQR-M). The results of the study are discussed in terms of their applicability to multicultural workshops and trainings, clinical practice and future areas of microintervention and response strategy research.

Today, there are about 250 million international migrants globally, and the number is increasing each year. Immigrants have contributed to the global economy, bridged cultural and business exchanges between host and home countries, and increased ethnic, racial, social, and cultural diversity in the host societies. Immigrants have also been overgeneralized about, misunderstood, scapegoated, and discriminated against. Understanding what drives international migration, who migrate, and how immigrants fare in destination has valuable theoretical, practical, and policy implications. This dissertation consists of three essays on international immigration. The first paper aims to test a series of immigration theories by studying immigrant skill-selection into South Africa and the United States. Most of the research on the determinants of immigrant skill selection has been focusing on immigrants in the United States and other developed destination countries. However, migration has been growing much faster in recent years between developing countries. This case study offers insights into the similarities and differences of immigration theories within the contexts of international migration into South Africa and the US. This project is funded by the Hamilton Research Fellowship of Columbia School of Social Work. The second paper narrows down the focus onto Asian immigrants in the United States, studying how the skill-selection of Asian immigrants from different regions has evolved over the past four decades. Asian sending countries have experienced tremendous growth in their economy and educational infrastructure. The rapid development provides an excellent opportunity to test the theories on the associations between emigrants’ skill-selection and sending countries’ income, inequality, and education level. On the other hand, during the study period, the United States has had massive expansion employment-based immigration system, followed by cutbacks in immigration policies. I study the association between immigration patterns and these policies to draw inferences on how the changes in immigration policies have affected the skill selection of Asian immigrants. This research is funded by Columbia University Weatherhead East Asia Institute’s Dorothy Borg Research Program Dissertation Research Fellowship. The third paper centers on the less-educated immigrant groups in the US and investigates the gap in welfare use between less-educated immigrant and native households during 1995-2018, spanning periods of economic recessions and recoveries, changes in welfare policy regimes, and policies towards immigrants. I use “decomposition analysis” to study to what extend demographic factors, macroeconomic trends, and welfare and immigration policy could explain the disparities in welfare participation between immigrants and natives. This paper is co-authored with Dr. Neeraj Kaushal from Columbia School of Social Work and Dr. Julia Shu-Huah Wang from the University of Hong Kong. The work has been published in Population Research and Policy Review (doi.org/10.1007/s11113-020-09621-8).

While accounting for less than 5 percent of the Canadian population, Indigenous peoples represent more than 30 percent of the federal prison population of Canada. In a prairie province like Manitoba the numbers are even more extreme, with over three-quarters of the prison population being Indigenous. This contemporary “Indian Problem” has been theorized in recent decades as an outcome of the colonial history of Canada. Indigenous Studies scholarship has critiqued the temporal political imaginary of the subsequent reconciliation discourse that locates colonial violence, and, thus, culpability and responsibility of the Canadian state, to an ‘event’ of history. Such national stories not only diminish the interrogation of ongoing structures of colonial violence but relegate any meaningful political processes of accountability and justice to the dustbin of history. This ‘legacy’ framework of historicizing colonial violence has created fecund conditions for (re)apprehending Indigenous bodies at the junctures of legal and medical reasoning, where questions of punishment, containment and rehabilitation for criminal actions become uneasily blurred with questions of healing and repair of damaged bodies and minds. The uptake of ‘Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder’ (FASD) in the Canadian justice system in recent decades operates precisely at this juncture of treating Indigenous peoples as uniquely medicalized, or disabled, criminals, and has created further capacities for deepening this ‘legacy’ framework for apprehending and containing Indigenous peoples as offenders, or even as potential offenders of a social and legal order. FASD is an umbrella term describing the range of lifelong physical, mental, behavioral and learning disabilities that can occur in an individual who was exposed to alcohol while in utero. It is typically thought of as a neurocognitive disability that affects memory, executive reasoning, and the ability to learn from or think consequentially about one’s actions. As such, it has become a broad institutional discourse for predicting criminal behaviors through a medicalized conception of risk of violence. FASD is typically raised as an ethical problem in the criminal justice system, provoking important questions as to whether we punish crimes (for which one is culpable) or disabilities (for which one is not). In addition, if FASD represents a permanent neurocognitive disability without any hope of cure, how should the rehabilitative and reintegrative tenets of the criminal code be imagined and implemented? These problems are compounded further by the regular speculation that Canada is in the midst of a hitherto unknown epidemic of this “invisible disorder” of FASD. Important as these ethical and political problems are, the dissertation argues that the specific institutional urgency surrounding the medicalization of criminal offenders with FASD has been enabled by diagnostic logics of deferral and certainty that pertains to the “Indian Problem.” These logics allow FASD to relocate and bury questions of colonial responsibility within the Indigenous body itself which is tragically doomed to permanent brain damage and cognitive disorder and an incorrigible lifestyle of dysfunction and crime. The ‘colonial legacy’ predicates a foreclosure on Indigenous futurity. This dissertation is based on 24 months of fieldwork in a non-profit community outreach program for justice-involved individuals with FASD in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As an FASD community outreach worker, my job was to assist individuals to navigate the complexities of criminal justice and social welfare systems that might pose challenges to those with cognitive disabilities associated with FASD. I learned very quickly, however, that actors as diverse as lawyers, probation officers, doctors, social workers, FASD researchers and even my community outreach colleagues and supervisors, operated within a diagnostic imaginary that quite often assumed without proof the presence of an FASD diagnosis for our almost exclusively Indigenous clientele. The dissertation analyzes the everyday procedures of FASD knowledge formation and circulation beginning with a basic ethnographic question: how does one know that another has FASD? This line of questioning was situated within the broad institutional apparatus of the criminal justice system in Canada, which I examine thematically and temporally as four separate stages of encounter: 1) the initial crime and related discourses of accusation; 2) the trial setting; 3) the sentencing trial; and, finally, 4) the post-carceral release phase. This temporal framework emerged naturally out of my experience of ethnographic work as a community outreach worker and innumerable casual and professional encounters with social workers, slum landlords, and my many hours spent in courts, probation offices, and jail visitations. In addition, I had a four-month placement with an assessment team at an FASD diagnostic clinic and did extensive work in the archive of legal cases and decisions pertaining to Indigenous offenders and the unique problematic of FASD in the legal system. Breaking down the minute social and legal details that attend to determinations of FASD at these various stages unmasks the ways in which FASD comes to explain Indigenous criminality as a congenital condition that is an expression of biological and cultural dysfunction, while strategically ignoring any examination of ongoing structures of colonial violence.

No description available.

Multiracial people are the fastest growing population in the United States; yet despite their growing population size, they often experience prejudice, stigma, and discrimination (Pew Research Center, 2015). Research suggests that racist discrimination—both in its overt and covert forms—is associated with mental health concerns for multiracial people (e.g., Sue & Spanierman, 2020; Townsend et al., 2009; Tran et al., 2016). Currently, very few studies have assessed proximal stressors, or those related to subjective perceptions and appraisals, with samples of multiracial people. Research with other racial minority groups suggests that expectations of rejection and internalized racism are significant stressors for these populations (Chan & Mendoza‐Denton, 2008; Henson et al., 2013). While several measures currently exist that examine the race-based stressors multiracial people encounter, none of the scales adequately address proximal stressors (Franco & O’Brien, 2018; Salahuddin & O’Brien, 2011; Yoo et al., 2016). The purpose of the present study is to address the limitations of previous measures and develop a measurement of race-related proximal minority stressors for multiracial people. Based on a review of multiracial minority stressors (i.e., expectations of rejection, internalized monoracism, and concealment of multiracial identity) and psychological distress and well-being, a measure of minoritized multiracial stress was developed (the Minoritized Multiracial Stress Scale; MMSS). The proposed MMSS was evaluated by eight expert reviewers and a pilot study of 13 multiracial people. Items were modified based on their feedback and the scale was subsequently administered to a sample of 569 self-identified multiracial people. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to determine and confirm factor structure. A four-factor structure model consisting of internalized monoracism, concealment and concealment motivation, expectations of rejection, and what appeared to be a pride construct, emerged from the exploratory factor analysis. The pride factor was not supported in the confirmatory factor analysis. The final model confirmed in the confirmatory factor analysis sample and supported in the full sample was composed of three factors: internalized monoracism, concealment and concealment motivation, and expectations of rejection. Convergent, concurrent, and discriminant validity were established. The present research proposes a valid and reliable measurement of proximal stressors for multiracial people. Implications of the MMSS, its limitations, and future directions for clinical and research work are discussed.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is estimated to impact about one in four U.S. women in their lifetime and represents 15% of all violent crime. Total violent crime rates have steadily declined across the country, but rates of IPV victimization have fallen at far slower rates and the incidence of intimate partner homicide has been increasing in recent years. These alarming trends suggest that current strategies for IPV prevention are insufficient and may even be counterproductive. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has developed and maintained a police-centric response to IPV—a response that relies on arrest as its primary tool through practices and policies including mandatory arrest laws and other pro-arrest policing practices. This police-centric response to IPV persists despite increased recognition of the harms of mass criminalization and incarceration and growing calls for criminal legal reform, and despite a lack of empirical evidence that policing and arrest in fact prevent or reduce IPV.In addition, there are strong theoretical reasons to believe, and emerging empirical evidence to suggest, that there are negative consequences of the police-centric response to IPV that extend beyond subsequent IPV victimization, including the increased risk of all-cause mortality among survivors of IPV and the increased risk of child protective services involvement for families. However, there is very limited quantitative research estimating these negative consequences of IPV policing. There are also likely profound racialized disparities in the consequences of IPV policing because of the ways in which policing, and the criminal legal system more broadly, disproportionately harms Black communities and other communities of color. In this dissertation, I assessed the state- and county-level consequences of the police-centric response to IPV for the health and safety of IPV survivors and estimated the extent to which those consequences have differential impacts across racialized groups. The first chapter presents a systematic scoping review synthesizing the existing evidence concerning the negative and racialized consequences of the police-centric response to IPV. The review included all empirical studies (quantitative and qualitative) focused on a U.S. population that assessed consequences of IPV policing. A total of 34 articles were included in the review. I found that survivor criminalization was the most studied negative consequence of IPV policing and the existing evidence suggests that IPV policing has increased the risk of survivor arrest. I also found that there have been numerous rigorous studies on the effects of mandatory arrest laws on population-level measures of IPV victimization, including IPV homicide rates. The evidence to date generally suggests there is no association between mandatory arrest rates and population-level IPV victimization rates. The review also identified gaps in the evidence base: specifically, there is a need for research on additional potential consequences of IPV policing such as police violence against survivors, child protective services involvement, and measures of the psychosocial and physical health of survivors. The second chapter presents a difference-in-differences analysis estimating the effect of state-level changes in warrantless arrest legislation for IPV on the all-cause mortality of IPV survivors from 1980-2019 in the U.S. I analyzed panel data measured at the state-year level and included data for all U.S. states and the District of Columbia. I used women’s all-cause mortality age 20-54 as a proxy for all-cause mortality among IPV survivors. I used quasi-Poisson regression models with a population offset term with robust standard errors to model the association between state-year changes in warrantless arrest legislation and all-cause mortality. I also fit two models with race-specific rates of women’s all-cause mortality (20-54 years) to assess if there are differences by racialized group. Overall, the findings suggested that there is no detectable effect of mandatory arrest laws on women’s mortality (20-54 years) at the population level, however, there appears to be a harmful effect of preferred arrest laws. Despite no documentation of a harmful effect of mandatory arrest laws on women’s mortality (20-54 years), this null effect should be weighed against known, documented harmful effects of mandatory arrest such as its role as a driver of female arrests and arrests of IPV survivors. The third chapter presents a county-level analysis of the intersection between IPV arrest practice and family surveillance from 2000-2019 in large U.S. counties. I hypothesized that family surveillance and subsequent intervention by child protective services agencies would be a negative consequence of the police-centric response to IPV because of direct coordination between police and child welfare systems and the subsequent increased risk of child protective services involvement that may follow from the arrest of a parent. I evaluated family surveillance and child protective services involvement as a negative consequence because of the harmful and racialized ways in which the U.S. child welfare apparatus targets, punishes, and breaks apart Black families. The criminal legal system and child welfare system are both rooted in structural racism and, thus, their coordination is expected to cause generational harm for Black families. The outcome of interest was the rate of child maltreatment reports that received a response from child welfare agencies and the exposure of interest was the percentage of IPV incidents that were reported to police and resulted in arrest, measured at the county-year level. I used Poisson regression and modeled between- and within-county effects using three types of models: 1) a multilevel county random intercept model, 2) a multilevel county random intercept model with state fixed effects, and 3) a county fixed effects model. I also fit two additional models with race-specific outcome data and conducted an interaction analysis by the percentage of Black residents in the county to assess if there were differences by racialized groups and within different racialized contexts. The findings presented in the third chapter demonstrated no overall association between the percentage of police-reported IPV incidents that resulted in arrest and child maltreatment report rate at the county level. In addition, there was no county-level evidence to suggest that the association differed for the Black vs. non-Hispanic white child maltreatment report rates. These county-level findings are inconsistent with existing individual-level survey research and qualitative research that provide evidence that IPV policing is associated with child protective services involvement through direct coordination between police and the child welfare system. However, the interaction analysis demonstrated that the percentage of police-reported IPV incidents that resulted in arrest was positively associated with the Black child maltreatment report rate within counties with a low percentage of Black residents. Therefore, the association between IPV policing and family surveillance may vary by individual and contextual factors. This was the first study to examine the intersection between IPV policing and family surveillance at the county level, so additional research is warranted to assess whether the findings can be replicated. Individual family-level data would be useful to further interrogate the relationship between IPV policing and family surveillance.

Multiracial people are the fastest growing population in the United States; yet despite their growing population size, they often experience prejudice, stigma, and discrimination (Pew Research Center, 2015). Research suggests that racist discrimination—both in its overt and covert forms—is associated with mental health concerns for multiracial people (e.g., Sue & Spanierman, 2020; Townsend et al., 2009; Tran et al., 2016). Currently, very few studies have assessed proximal stressors, or those related to subjective perceptions and appraisals, with samples of multiracial people. Research with other racial minority groups suggests that expectations of rejection and internalized racism are significant stressors for these populations (Chan & Mendoza‐Denton, 2008; Henson et al., 2013). While several measures currently exist that examine the race-based stressors multiracial people encounter, none of the scales adequately address proximal stressors (Franco & O’Brien, 2018; Salahuddin & O’Brien, 2011; Yoo et al., 2016). The purpose of the present study is to address the limitations of previous measures and develop a measurement of race-related proximal minority stressors for multiracial people. Based on a review of multiracial minority stressors (i.e., expectations of rejection, internalized monoracism, and concealment of multiracial identity) and psychological distress and well-being, a measure of minoritized multiracial stress was developed (the Minoritized Multiracial Stress Scale; MMSS). The proposed MMSS was evaluated by eight expert reviewers and a pilot study of 13 multiracial people. Items were modified based on their feedback and the scale was subsequently administered to a sample of 569 self-identified multiracial people. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to determine and confirm factor structure. A four-factor structure model consisting of internalized monoracism, concealment and concealment motivation, expectations of rejection, and what appeared to be a pride construct, emerged from the exploratory factor analysis. The pride factor was not supported in the confirmatory factor analysis. The final model confirmed in the confirmatory factor analysis sample and supported in the full sample was composed of three factors: internalized monoracism, concealment and concealment motivation, and expectations of rejection. Convergent, concurrent, and discriminant validity were established. The present research proposes a valid and reliable measurement of proximal stressors for multiracial people. Implications of the MMSS, its limitations, and future directions for clinical and research work are discussed.

This dissertation consists of three essays in the fields of labor economics and education economics. The first chapter examines the effect of residential segregation on neighbor-based informal hiring. Existing works in the neighborhood effects literature have documented mixed evidence of community characteristics on employment and earnings. Yet most studies are silent on or unable to pinpoint the exact mechanisms that drive their results, making it hard to reconcile the conflicting findings. As a departure, in the first chapter, I start with a specific mechanism—job search via neighbor networks—and explore how segregation at the place of residence affects employment through this channel. In the remaining essays, I turn to the economics of education. The second chapter homes in on a specific unintended consequence of standardized testing: cheating between students on exams. While outright cheating is a common tactic to cope with grade pressure, it has received little attention from economists. My second chapter thus contributes to the sparse literature on how inordinate emphasis on exams can distort student behavior even to the test day. Finally, the third chapter revisits the popular belief that education necessarily improves cognitive skills. Insofar as one of the primary goals of school is to develop student intellect, are all years of schooling created equal? Along these lines, I question the value of the first year of high school to Chinese students in the context of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an educational initiative of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). To briefly recap, the first chapter studies how residential segregation by race and by education affects job search via neighbor networks. Using confidential data from the US Census Bureau, I measure segregation for each characteristic at both the individual level and the neighborhood level. Causality is achieved by interweaving a spatial framework with a mover-stayer design. The spatial component entails comparison between individuals across different hyperlocal neighborhoods (blocks) within the same reference area (block group). The focus of the comparison is existing residents on a block (stayers) with respect to newcomers (movers). Specifically, I ask: what is the likelihood that an incumbent resident—conditional on changing jobs—will join a firm that has employed a new neighbor on their block? How is this probability mediated by residential segregation? My answers to these questions are manifold. At the individual level, I find that future coworkership with new block neighbors is less likely among segregated stayers than among integrated stayers, irrespective of races and levels of schooling. The impacts are heterogeneous in magnitude, being most adverse for the most socioeconomically disadvantaged demographics: Blacks and those without a high school education. At the block level, however, higher segregation along either dimension raises the likelihood of “any” future coworkership with new block neighbors for all racial or educational “groups.” My hybrid identification strategy, capitalizing on data granularity, allows a causal interpretation of these results. Together, they point to the coexistence of homophily and in-group competition for job opportunities in linking residential segregation to neighbor-based informal hiring. My subtle findings have important implications for policy-making. The second chapter is an investigation of student cheating on high-stakes exams, a relatively understudied topic in the economics of education. The setting is Vietnam, the relevant assessment is the country’s national high school exit exams, and the (mis)behavior of interest is cheating between non-elite students and elite students who happen to sit in the same test room on test day. To quantify the pervasiveness of this misconduct, I exploit the quasi-random assignment of students from schools of varying quality into test rooms. Using micro-data from a large Vietnamese province, I find that the fraction of elite students in the same room has significantly positive effects on non-elite students’ scores when the tests are non-competitive (2007-2013). The effects are concentrated in the multiple-choice/quantitative subject tests and absent in the essay/qualitative subject tests. The average gains due to same-room elite density vary across subjects and can be as large as one point on a 0-10 grading scale. However, these effects disappear after an exam redesign in 2015 raises the stakes of the assessment (2018-2019). Similar patterns emerge when instead of quantity, the quality of the elite students in the same room is the main explanatory variable. Backed by institutional details, these findings provide credible evidence that discreet interpersonal cheating is present pre-reform, but vanishes as the reform reshuffles student incentives. The third and last chapter explores the implications for cognitive skills of increased absolute schooling at an important juncture in a student’s academic career: transition between junior high school (or middle school) and senior high school (or high school). In particular, I ask if the first year of senior secondary school (Grade 10) affects 15-year-old Chinese students’ performance on the PISA 2015. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I find that on average, this additional year of schooling has no discernible effects on Science, Math, and Reading test scores. However, there is evidence that in the PISA 2015, Chinese tenth graders have fewer hours of in-school class time in these subjects and enjoy Science and peer cooperation less than comparable Chinese ninth graders. These observations add to the disappointment left by the lack of effects on test scores, even when they are insufficient to explain it away.