At the end of a long road, a doctoral thesis

The depth and breadth of graduate student scholarship is reflected in the listing of doctoral theses published each year in the Commencement program. Here is a look at some of them.

• Annie Gjelsvik: ‘Homicide and Death by Legal Intervention: Differences in Risk Across Race and Class’
  
• Natasha Zaretsky: ‘The End of the American Century: Narratives of National Decline and Family Decline in the 1970s’
  
• Melissa Kearns: ‘The Roles of Vision and Body Senses in a Homing Task: The Visual Environment Matters’
  

Student: Annie Gjelsvik
Advisers: Sally Zierler, Fayneese Miller, Jeffrey Blume
Thesis: ‘Homicide and Death by Legal Intervention: Differences in Risk Across Race and Class’

Home ownership may be key to ending violent crimes in poor neighborhoods, according to one graduate student’s dissertation.

Community health graduate student Annie Gjelsvik found that for every 10 percent increase in owner-occupied homes in neighborhoods, there was a 17 percent decrease in the homicide risk of the males – those with the greatest chance of dying from the violent crime – across races and ethnicities.

Gjelsvik analyzed the statistics on black, Hispanic and white men ages 15 through 44 in Rhode Island and Massachusetts from 1989 to 1990 for her dissertation, “Homicide and Death by Legal Intervention: Differences in Risk Across Race and Class.”

“Much of the discussion around crime control in the United States concentrates on more policing and more incarceration,” Gjelsvik wrote, adding that “the bottom line is neighborhoods with greater homeownership have fewer homicides.”

The idea behind her finding is that higher home ownership creates greater social cohesion in a neighborhood because there is less turnover, she said.

Home ownership – defined as an owner-occupied home – had the strongest correlation with homicide rates within all socioeconomic influences, including such factors as poverty, education level and female-headed households.

To perform her research, Gjelsvik linked Rhode Island and Massachusetts’ death certificate information with Census data to create a rich resource of information about neighborhoods.

As neighborhood poverty increased, so did homicide rates, she found. Each 10 percent increase in neighborhood poverty was associated with a 50 percent increase in homicide risk for black, Hispanic and white men.

The finding suggests area-based interventions that would improve neighborhood social and economic conditions may be effective in decreasing the risk of its men dying in this violent manner.

It’s been established that white men live on average six years longer than black men, Gjelsvik said, and homicide is a big cause for that differential.

Improving home ownership from less than 20 percent in neighborhoods to greater than 50 percent could decrease the number of white men killed by homicide by 33 per million, decrease the number of Hispanic men killed by homicide by 772 per million, and decrease the number of black men killed by homicide by 665 per million, she calculated.

Gjelsvik also looked specifically at racial disparities for the risk of dying at the hands of a police officer. Although being killed by a police officer is a rare cause of death, black males are the most likely to die in such a manner, she said.

In a state-by-state analysis using 10 years of data, Gjelsvik found black men consistently had about four times the risk of being killed by police as white men. Hispanic men have about twice the risk as white men.

Gjelsvik used the Internet to download much of the police data from the Centers for Disease Control Web site. She is now working on a related effort that could provide other public health practitioners and researchers with the same access to information.

Gjelsvik is employed by the University and the Rhode Island Department of Health on an initiative to make health department data accessible online. “It’s an important way to make data public and generate more hypotheses,” she said.

Her advisers included Sally Zierler, professor of community health, Fayneese Miller, associate professor of education, and Jeffrey Blume, assistant professor of community health. – Kristen Cole

Last winter, a series of TV commercials hawked a popular brand of sneaker by depicting the 1970s as a hip-hop time to come of age. Maybe it was, but funk has more than one meaning.

Life in the United States was complicated during the 1970s, a period woefully understudied by historians, says Natasha Zaretsky. During that decade, two sets of anxieties came to the national forefront, she argues. The first, in the wake of the Vietnam War, was the perceived loss of American global power, a worry expressed by political and economic leaders. The second, as articulated by cultural and social critics, was the erosion of the traditional male-led, middle-class family.

Zaretsky examines the links between both sets of concerns, making the case that they must be analyzed together to fully understand the 1970s. She explores culture, family and foreign policy in five phenomena that melded themes of national and family decline, starting with the nation’s discussion about American prisoners of war in Vietnam. To some pundits, nothing hinted of national weakness more than the defeat of American military forces in Southeast Asia. According to Zaretsky, POW memoirs as well as the government's campaign to publicize the POW plight routinely featured men without families and families without fathers. “Meanwhile, for military psychologists, the prolonged incarceration of POWs provided a unique opportunity for inquiry, not only into the psychological effects of male absenteeism on families left behind, but also into the possibilities for the restoration of male authority within the home once men had returned,” she writes.

Zaretsky also explores themes of national and family decline with respect to the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-74, worker-productivity lag, the bicentennial celebration of 1976, and the cry among social critics that narcissism had pervaded society. She relies on an array of published and unpublished materials and sources.

Zaretsky credits generous fellowship assistance from Brown and two travel grants from research institutions, which allowed her to consult 13 private and governmental archives.

She has delivered conference papers on her research and has an essay slated to appear in an upcoming anthology on recent U.S. history.

Currently reshaping the dissertation into a book, Zaretsky plans to add a final chapter that will explore how the themes of national and family decline were used and adopted in the 1980 presidential campaign by Ronald Reagan, who was a master at linking the integrity of the traditional family to national military and economic strength, she says.

Now an assistant professor of history at Southern Illinois University (SIU), Zaretsky praises the constructive criticism offered by her husband, Jonathan Wiesen, who received a doctorate in history at Brown in 1998, and who preceded Zaretsky to SIU, where he is an associate professor of history. Zaretsky calls adviser Mari Jo Buhle, professor of American civilization, “amazing” and “wonderful” for “reading every chapter painstakingly and giving me substantive feedback that kept me going.” – Scott J. Turner

Clicking the heels of her ruby slippers three times, Dorothy immediately discovered the most direct route from Oz back home to Kansas.

For the rest of us, however, the task of finding our way home is more complicated; we must rely on vision and body senses to navigate our way through the world. Melissa Kearns, who will receive her doctorate in cognitive and linguistic science this weekend, demonstrates in her dissertation that we change our navigational strategies according to the information available to us.

“Navigation is a fundamental survival skill, and a great deal of research has focused on how we do it,” she said. “I focused on what information we use to estimate our distances and turns so we can get back home by the most direct path.”

During the past three years Kearns has tested some 100 subjects in her department’s Virtual Environment Navigation Lab (VENLab) to determine when people rely on vision and when they use other body senses – and when they use a combination of the two – to find the shortest route back to their starting point in a virtual reality setting.

Her subjects donned helmets and goggles that allowed them to see a stereo image of a virtual environment within the otherwise empty 40-by-40-foot lab. Using a triangular completion path, she instructed them to walk a straight line, then turn to the right or left and walk a distance further. Kearns then evaluated her subjects on their “homing” skills by directing them to return to their starting position via the most direct path, that is, the third leg of the triangle.

“As you walk around in the lab, the virtual environment updates, giving you a highly immersive experience. The subject can see the whole field and its landmarks by turning his head, just as in reality,” explained Kearns, who earned her undergraduate degree at Tufts. “It’s a giant video game.”

Subjects had to integrate distances and angles to find their way “home.” When relying on vision, the brain evaluates optic flow – that is, the apparent motion of the world flowing past us as we walk or ride in a car – to interpret distance. When relying upon other body senses, we use messages from our muscles – such as how tired we are – along with the vestibular system of our inner ear. The latter contains fluid that gives us a sense of acceleration and direction; Kearns likens the system to the fluid bubble in a woodworker’s level.

“This gives you a perception of how far you’ve come,” she said. “As you move around in the real world, these two sources of information are redundant; they both tell you the same story.”

But in the VENLab, Kearns manipulated the virtual environment to create a “gain,” a visual experience similar to that of walking on a moving sidewalk in an airport.

“As you walk, the visual world is moving at a faster rate than your body is actually moving you,” she said. “That gives you two different cues on distance – one based body senses, the other on vision – and that puts ‘home’ in two different places, where you started in the room versus where you started in the virtual environment.”

The exercise allowed Kearns to determine which navigation strategy her subjects were using. “If they’re relying on vision, they go back to their starting place in the virtual environment; if they’re relying on their body senses, they go back to where they started in the room,” she said.

Previous research showed that when subjects were blindfolded, they were still successful in returning to their starting place – demonstrating reliance on their body senses. Kearns likens this to wandering in the woods or another environment with minimal visual detail in which people are more strongly influenced by their body senses.

When subjects are not blindfolded and are offered visual landmarks, they rely about equally on vision and body senses; as more landmarks are added to the virtual environment, the subjects increasingly rely on vision. “The landmarks provide information on orientation and position, so people rely on them more,” she said.

The visual virtual environment is so compelling, Kearns added, that when subjects approached a virtual cliff, nearly all of them braced themselves for a fall – despite knowing that they had just entered a room with a completely flat surface.

“That happens time and time again. We’ve even had some people who insist on sitting on the ‘edge,’ to ease themselves down,” she said.

The bottom line, according to Kearns, is that people are flexible about how they navigate. She and advisor William Warren hope to publish her research next year. – Mary Jo Curtis