Today, we are highlighting student research from Mt. SAC's Sociology Research Showcase!

The Sociology Research Showcase is a campus wide event that gives students an opportunity to share original empirical research in STEM, Social Sciences as well as developing research projects and literature reviews. The event includes projects from multiple areas of study and serves as a way to celebrate the wonderful research being done by our students right here on our campus . During this event, our cohost Ivan Sanchez, spoke to many student participants, some who brought family, friends, and significant others to celebrate their work.

At its heart, the showcase is about giving students a space to be seen as researchers, giving them a chance to take the questions they have been developing in class or in partnership with a faculty mentor and present them in a public academic setting.

One of the most exciting things about the showcase is the range of topics students explore (which we've listed for you below). While the diversity in projects is always pleasant to see, they all show how student research can connect classroom learning to real public issues and topics.

In partnership with the Sociology department, psychology, the honors center, the equity center, the humanities and social sciences division, and many more partners across campus we put together this event every year. Enjoy!

Resources:

Event Website: https://www.mtsac.edu/sociology/research_showcase.html

Undergraduate Research Librarian-created guide to undergraduate research including what research is, resources and strategies for successful research, and opportunities for sharing what your findings.

Some examples of student project titles include:

Socioeconomic Dental Health Inequality and Self-Esteem Across the Lifespan

The Politics and Bioethical Standards of Gene Therapeutics Shaped by Organizational Influence

The Perception of Happiness in a Relationship on Social Media Among College Students

The Cognitive Bias of Anchoring Effect in Quantitative Estimation

How to Improve Transfer Experience of a First Year Engineering Student?

International Surrogacy and the Necessity of U.S. Prohibition

The Pollution Weather Balloon Experiment

Labor Protection in Fast Fashion

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Prehospital Analgesic Intensity and Pain Relief for Adult Musculoskeletal Trauma: A NEMSIS Study

The Influence of Suggestion on Memory

The Relationship Between Sense of Belonging and Ethnocultural Identity and Campus Engagement in College Students

Run Time: 24 min

To Find the full transcript for this episode click HERE

And then research in the future. Yeah, I would love to continue doing research in the future. This was a great experience and I hope to hopefully get my master's at least in the future.

Welcome to the Mount San Antonio College Podcast. I'm Chisa Uyeki, a Mount SAC professor and librarian, and I'm pleased to be your host for this season. Our goal is to keep you connected to our campus by bringing you the activities and events you may not have time to attend to share the interesting things our colleagues are creating and innovative ways they are supporting and connecting with Mount SAC students. Join me as we explore Mount sac.

Hi and welcome. My name is Ivan Sanchez, one of your co hosts. Today we're going to highlight student research from Mount SAC's Research Showcase and Competition. The Sociology Research Showcase and Competition is a campus wide event that gives students an opportunity to share original empirical research, whether that's in STEM Social Sciences or if they're just developing their research projects and maybe just have a literature review to share. So far, the event includes projects for multiple areas of study and serves as a way to celebrate the wonderful research being done by our very own students right here on our campus. So during this event, I got a chance to speak to many of the student participants. Some of them brought family, friends and significant others to celebrate their work. At its heart, the showcase is about giving students a space to be seen as researchers.

It gives them a chance to take the questions they have been developing in class or in partnership with the faculty mentor and present them in a public academic setting. For many students, this might be the first opportunity they have to explain their research to an audience beyond their instructors and classmates. One of the most exciting things about the showcase is just the range of topics that students explore. These topics are as diverse as our student population and look at topics like gene therapy and bioethics, social media and relationships, political polarization and belongingness on campus.

So the diversity in the projects is beautiful to see, but they all show us that student research can connect what we're learning in the classroom to real public issues and research topics. To share a little bit about my connection to this event, I am a sociology professor and one of the lead organizers of the event. But really, you know, my involvement stems from my belief that community college students should have opportunities to participate in academic spaces like this. Students often do meaningful intellectual work in their classes, but they don't always get the chance to share that work publicly. So the showcase tries to change that in partnership with my department where I get a ton of help as well as our friends in Psychology, the Honors center, the Equity center, the Humanities and Social Sciences Division, and many more partners across campus, we put this event together every year. We're on our 13th one. In this episode, I wanted to take you along with me. As I attended and talked with student researchers, I looked at projects that were on display and also listened in on some of the student presentations.

My hope is to give you a sense of the kind of projects that students are creating and a feel for the types of exchanges that occur while students represent their research at the event. So if you want to learn more, we'll include a link to our website along with a link to photos from this and previous research showcases. Hopefully I'll catch you at the next one. Enjoy.

Hi, everyone. So I am here at the research showcase and competition. We are in the student center up above on the third floor where there is an event space. And what we're looking at today are students research projects. There's a variety of different frames laid out on made out on tables, and in these frames contain the abstracts of a variety of different research projects that students have been working on. I have stopped a student here to ask him a few questions about the event. So what are you doing here today? What did they have you do? What were you checking out?

So I was checking out a few tables with a lot of different data, one of them being social sciences, then state, and then like, literature reviews. So just going through reading the research studies and seeing how I can apply that to my class.

Awesome. Was there a particular research project that stood out to you?

There was a research done on, like, attractiveness and how that affects the way that people treat you. Even like, with like, financial and things like that. I wasn't expecting to see something like that. So that was pretty interesting. And then there was another one on pollution, and I'm very interested in, like, climate action, so that one was really good to see.

I'm so glad that the research projects kind of sparked your interest further.

It was just interesting to see, like, even learning about, like, bar grass and being able to name them. It was pretty cool when I was looking at, like, the boards and everything. But yeah, it was a pretty cool event. I enjoyed it.

Cool. It sounds like you were able to connect what we're doing in class with what you're seeing out in real research projects. So that's always really nice when you're able to do that. All right, thanks, Bella.

Thank you.

Like our student Bella said, there are three categories. Social science, STEM and literature review or research in progress. The social science and STEM categories include projects that have been completed. And they are projects that include things like. Let's see if I can squeeze in here and get a look at some of these project titles for you. So we have one called Moving to the Extremes and the Process of Political Polarization in Women by Megan Matthews. This one focuses on the political polarization effect that media may have on women especially. In particular, her focus in this research was comparing women of various racial backgrounds, which is something really interesting to see.

Another one here is called the Effect of Attractiveness on Financial Material and Time Sensitive Generosity by students Colonel Mitchell, Candy Lacey, and Trinity Tran. And this is the one that Bella was talking about. The focus being on how the halo effect, which is this effect that attractive individuals have making them more socially desirable. And the research focused on investigating the link between an individual's perceived attractiveness and a respondent's willingness to provide any form of generosity, whether that's time, material, or financial support. Some really incredible stuff that our students are doing. We actually have Megan here. So, Megan, can you tell us a little bit about your research?

Yeah. So the title of my research is Moving to the Extreme. The Process of Political Polarization in Women. So we looked at the how media choice Influences opinions on eight current social issues. So we used a variety of different media, ranging from ones that are more conservative to more liberal and then ones that are more moderate, and compared it with the social issues of abortion, birthright citizenship, and the death penalty.

Very cool.

With transgender girls in sports. Sorry.

Super interesting. A lot of moving parts. And at the heart of it, you're trying to see if watching certain media is correlated with certain views on these issues. What were some of your major findings?

We found that white women were most influenced by the media choices that we found. We did find that, like, for example, the black women were watching Anderson Cooper, but unlike the white women that did not seem to influence their opinions compared to the ones who did not. And beyond that, we found that they range mostly moderate on their like across the board for all women on the seven point scale that we used, the one that they lean most conservative on for all of the groups was transgender girls in K12 sports. And most liberal was protecting LGBTQ people from job discrimination.

Super interesting. So it almost sounds like this polarization due to the media could be race driven, where it mainly is being driven by white women and the way that the media may be catering to these women. So that's incredible research. Is there any future research that you may take this, you know, to a step forward. And then also if you could talk about your next steps, too, because I know I think you mentioned you were first year, so you still have maybe one more year, I'm guessing. Do you want to continue researching once you have transferred? And is there like a master's, a PhD in your future, do you think?

Yeah. So the first answer that the future research, we wanted to look at other media variables that are maybe more popular with the women of color to better understand that relationship. And then also to look at other variables like age, socioeconomic class, education level, religion to further inform how those extreme ideologies develop. And things like media choice also. And then research in the future. Yeah, I would love to continue doing research in the future. This was a great experience. And yeah, I hope to hopefully get my master's at least in the future.

That's amazing to hear. I'm glad that this experience has made you think about a career in research. So I'll let you enjoy the rest of the event. And I believe you'll be speaking as one of our presenters today, so I look forward to that as well.

All right.

Okay, so it looks like presentations are about to get started, so we're going to go ahead and head on in into the conference room and get things going.

Moving to the Extremes the Process of Political Polarization in women so here's our introduction. So our research question was how do different forms of media impact women's opinions on current social issues and contribute to patterns of political polarization? So essentially what this means is different forms of media are things like cable news like fox news or CNN, physical media like newspapers or social media platforms like YouTube. In current social issues, we looked at things like abortion, birthright citizenship and the death penalty. Patterns of political polarization that is growing extreme ideologies and divides among party lines. So a little bit more about what we wanted to find. We wanted to find women's stances on eight current social issues. We also considered the racial backgrounds of these women to look at other potential contributors to the development of extreme ideologies and also look at how they may choose media. We thought it was important to look at this issue now because as we have seen, political polarization be on the rise in recent decades, we've been able to witness how it has begun to shape our political landscape in our elections.

So understanding how things like gender, race and media choice influence the development of polarized views, it can help us prevent further divide among the United States citizens. So now that we looked at what we wanted to find, let's look at Some of the research that has already been done on this topic. So for political polarization in the Media in 2023, Jason Gatis found that partisan and nonpartisan news can both have polarizing effects. So partisan news is something that aligns very closely with a party's agenda or alliance and nonpartisan news is something that is a little bit more objective and unbiased. In 2013, Levandusky found that there was an 8% increase in polarization after consuming partisan news. Kind of contradict contradicting what Gaines found. He did find that there was not statistical significance in cross cutting media sources and contributing to polarization. So a cross cutting media source is something that if you are somebody who typically watches Fox News and you decide to watch cnn, you are watching a cross cutting media source because it is something that goes against your own political bias.

And even though he did not find statistical significance, he did find that it was a potential contributor which aligns with what Gaines found. Beyond this, Bainville also found that partisan media tends to further polarize those already on the extremes rather than polarizing moderates. And this is something that we saw reflected in many of the papers that we read. I will finish with a quote from Bainville. Polarization may be the core idea that is aided and abetted by the modern fragments and media rather than the other way around. Meaning that there is a connection between media and polarization rather than the other way around. We'll also look at the political socialization of women which contributes to how they develop their political beliefs. So in 2021, Barbara Rodriguez found that children begin learning about politics and gender roles at around the same time and they can observe patterns of men history historically holding political offices such as president.

And because of this, young girls may begin to sense that they do not belong in these political spaces. Beyond this, girls are socialized to prefer communal roles in areas such as nursing, teaching or motherhood. So it can be difficult for them to imagine balancing those roles with a more masculine role in something like politics. Finally, fathers are less likely to discuss politics with their daughters. And girls are more likely to have have their political interests dismissed by role models which can decrease political ambition. So now that we have seen what research has already been done, let's look a little bit into how we conducted our own research. So we used a seven point extremity scale with a one indicating a highly liberal view and a seven indicating a highly conservative view. To find where the women fell on this seven point scale we used an ANOVA test which is analysis of variance.

And this has allowed us to find the average opinion of women of five different racial categories on eight current social issues. We then used code to conduct bivariate regressions to find the relationship between six media variables and three out of those eight current social issues. We got our data from the American National Election studies or the ANEs, and we used their 2024 time series study. Also, as we go forward looking at our results, we used the same descriptor terms that were used in the ANES data to avoid any confusion. Okay, a little bit into how our research was unique. So we did get the idea to use the ANES data from the article by Jason Ganis and Kevin Wagner, but we focused solely on women and on women of different racial values.

Next up, we have Nemo Inger Spa with the relationship between sense of belonging and ethnocultural identity and campus engagement in college students.

So we came at the research with kind of two ideas already in mind, One being critical pedagogy and another being cultural pluralism. So these are both two different part aspects of critical theory where how we wanted to go about understanding and actually processing the data we took in. So we wanted to look at for cultural pluralism, how we value an individual's culture and their interest, individual identity as part of a greater community, not necessarily extensions of their respective ethnic communities. So what this would look like, for example, recently I've been really into deaf studies, so I'll use that as an example. But understanding the role of one single deaf person's cultural identity and how that plays into how they interact with their community as opposed to attempting to escape, describe that identity as, oh, they're an extension. They're just an extension of the deaf community. So understanding them on an individual level. And then we have critical pedagogy.

So reconstructing educational environments alongside students as opposed to retroactively. So what this could look like culturally is, I believe, more modernly. We have seen more institutions attempt to put into place programs that address, for example, students who maybe second generation or first generation in response to backlash to a lack of programs, as opposed to having those programs in place to begin with or constructing those programs alongside students. So with that input, with that greater cultural tie, so sense of belonging. So this is something I think we, you know, are all, if we're interested in sociology, at least bake leaf familiar with, even if you aren't. So the way we looked at social belonging and its impacts. So past studies have shown a very high tide to sense of belonging and academic self efficacy as well as level of engagement in academic spaces. So this could be anything from joining a club to raising your hand in class.

Right. Broad spectrum of things, self esteem. So if you have a higher sense of belonging, obviously you're. It's associated with a higher self esteem, mental wellness, general academic success, which we will tie back to that participation aspect, intrinsic motivation and their. Also their perception of the institution. Do they feel that the staff, that the faculty, that the programs in place are accepting of who they are? Do they feel that they have a voice in the institution in individual classes? And then ethnocultural relevance. So when it comes to sense of belonging, I believe more recently as well as we see more cross cultural studies kind of pop up and be a little bit more accepted and plug more into the public consciousness, we see more studies that tie root cultural identity as a social conduit. So the significance of being able to make those connections, of not saying, you know, this idea of colorblindness.

I believe more recently we have seen kind of fade away the idea that it is important to acknowledge somebody's cultural identity and somebody's identity in general in order to actually make them feel like they are part of whatever program or group you are bringing them into Cultural belonging and generational level of success. So again, kind of going back to first generation, second generation. We unfortunately with this study didn't have the proper data to really go into that generational perspective. Though that is something that we have expressed interest in potentially doing in the future. We also see that those who are amongst ethnic minorities have reported a markedly lower sense of belonging. In large part this has to do with representation. We will kind of go deeper into that. But what does representation look like? How do we define representation and how do we actually.

How do institutions go about attempting to make those connections and making their students feel seen? So our hypotheses, so our. We had three central hypotheses. So first, that there would be a positive relationship, a positive correlation between personal ethno cultural identity and sense of belonging on campus specifically. Second, that there would be a positive positive correlation between personal ethnocultural identity and participating in campus social events. And third, that there would be a correlation between participating in campus social events and their sense of belonging. So we ran a survey. This was done. This project was conducted as part of a research project for a class.

So we did put out a quadric survey. It was self reported of course there was initial 29 item general demographic recording to account for other students papers as well and just some pretty simple procedures. This was conducted for Mount Sac students, and they must have been taking.

So it seems like folks are a couple folks standing next to their posters. Here's one participant that I'm going to speak to about her research. Hi, my name is Ivan Sanchez. Nice to meet you. Calista, wonderful work on your project. Could you introduce yourself, your major? What motivated you to do this research project? It looks wonderful, by the way.

Thank you, my name is Calista Laguna. I'm a psychology major. And what motivated me to do this project was a family history of people with psychopathy and trying to find the first therapy for it.

Oh, wow. Absolutely. That sounds like an incredibly intrinsic motivation right there. And did someone help you with this project? Was there a mentor or was this something part of a class? Could you give us a little background on that?

So this is a personal research project that I've been tying into a podcast that I do on my own, and basically I had my mentor kind of guide me through the biology, making sure it was all correct. It was Professor Aster Soriano. He's a biology professor.

Wonderful. Thank you for that information. All right, let's get into the research. Can you give us the title of the research for our audio listeners and tell us what your hypothesis were, what you found, how you studied it, and give us a lowdown on that?

So the title here is Disconnected Empathy. It's basically talking about how most people with psychopathy actually have the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and the oxytocin in their brain, where the amygdala obviously develops things like that. They're not really working as much as a normal person's brain would. So basically, in this research, it's kind of seeing if two different therapies that are normally used separately could come together and possibly turn both of those regions of the brain back on.

Interesting.

And were you involved in the lab research, or is this secondhand data?

So this is actually all my idea right now. It is a huge hypothesis. I have no idea if it actually is going to work. I. Because I don't have access to a lab just yet, but I'm hoping because it works for depression and ADHD that it may work for this disorder as well.

Awesome. And then what are the next steps for you in terms of seeing this project in fruition?

So I'm actually going to do a whole genome sequencing on my own family due to where my interest in this started. Seeing if I can kind of do a workup of a small family, kind of like Brunner did with his research, where he found. Found that psychopathy was a genetic thing in one family. Just kind of to see if I can do that and then hopefully get it passed. Obviously this is ethically concerning when it comes to making somebody feel something that they don't feel naturally. So it would be definitely having to be passed by an internal review board and maybe moving this into my bachelor's for psychology, Neurology.

Absolutely. That's where I see this possible is at a university at the bachelor's level or at the master's level, or even at the PhD level. So really wonderful stuff. And speaking about that, what are your plans then for your next steps?

So I graduate in the summer here and then I'm going to be looking into going into hopefully Cal State Long beach or UC Irvine for neuroscience or psychology. And then from there I'm hoping to do an MD PhD where I can study it but still have a doctorate so that I can have clinical access. Access to it as well.

Absolutely. Okay. Well, thank you so much for your time and for sharing your research with us. We wish you the best of luck. I'm sure you're going to do amazing, amazing, amazing work in the future. So thank you.

Thank you for listening to the Mount San Antonio College Podcast, brought to you by Mount sac's POD Office and created in partnership with Avant Haüs Media. Original music created and edited by Nira Azira. Be sure to check out our growing library of over 230 episodes and let us know your thoughts. You can reach me, Chisa Uyeki at c u y e k i at mountsac.edu. wishing you an amazing year and happy listening.