• Assistant Professor
• School of Nursing

"Feasibility of a Web-Based Intervention to Improve Family Caregivers´ Communicative Skillfulness during Patients´ Medical Visits"

Effective communication among patients with Alzheimer´s disease (AD), their family caregivers, and healthcare providers is a critical aspect of geriatric care delivery.   Widely replicated research links poor patient-professional communication to a variety of negative outcomes including lower overall health status.   For patients with AD, family caregivers are likely to play an important role in preventing communication breakdowns and their adverse consequences.   Yet, caregivers rarely receive formal instruction in regard to the highly specialized skill of mediating communication between patients with AD and their healthcare providers.   The goal of the proposed study is to translate a recently developed protocol, Promoting Alzheimer´s Caregivers´ Communicative Skillfulness (PACCS), to a web-based format and to evaluate its effectiveness for improving communication during primary care encounters of persons with dementia.

• Department of Economics
• Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences

"The Political Economy of American Apartheid (1900-1950)"

This proposal seeks seed funding for a long-term project to study the evolution of American apartheid from 1900 through 1950.   The word apartheid is used in a strict sense: to denote the evolving set of laws, covenants, and state-sanctioned violence that prohibited blacks from moving into majority white neighborhoods during the first-half of the twentieth century.   The proposed analysis, therefore, focuses on the institutions that supported residential segregation not segregation, itself.   The long-term project builds on two related questions.   First, what were the laws and institutions that governed the housing choices of African Americans between 1900 and 1950? Second, how and why did these institutions evolve over time? A specific focus of the project is an analysis of how African Americans acquired increased housing rights despite widespread opposition from whites.

• Assistant Professor, Political Science
• The Dietrick School of Arts & Sciences

"Beyond Formal Institutions: Legislative Member Organizations in a Comparative Perspective"

Why do legislators invest scarce time and resources into forming and maintaining informal legislative groups that provide no obvious benefits? Legislative member organizations (LMOs), such as caucuses in the US Congress, cross-party groups in the Scottish Parliament, and intergroups in the European Parliament, exist in numerous law-making bodies around the world parallel to the formal legislative institutions of parties and committees.   Yet, unlike parties and committees, LMOs play no obvious role in the legislative process.   This project constitutes the first look at LMOs in a cross-national perspective and employs a mixed-methods approach that is of interest to scholars across several disciplines including political science, sociology, economics, public policy, and international organization.   It promises to shed light on the interactions of formal and informal political institutions, the dynamic nature of legislative politics, social networks as conduits of information exchange, and the relationships between actors inside the legislature and outsiders such as lobbyists and interest groups.