Dr. Miranda Galvin - Assistant Professor of Criminology
Title: “Policy, punishment, and place.”
Description: This talk will provide an overview of ongoing research related to the sources of disparity in punishment in Pennsylvania and Maryland using decomposition methods to parse the influence of behavior, treatment, and policy structures.
Dr. Elizabeth Skowron - Professor of Human Development and Family Studies & Associate Director, Child Maltreatment Solutions Network
Title: "Identifying modifiable caregiving risk processes and effective interventions to prevent child maltreatment and improve child welfare outcomes"
Description: Child maltreatment (CM) is a serious public health problem in the United States, resulting in substantial economic burdens for the public and negative developmental outcomes for affected children. In this talk, I will present some findings from our studies on modifiable risk processes in parenting young children, including what we’ve learned about dynamic patterns of autonomic physiology and parenting behavior that potentiate risk for physical child abuse and neglect. I will also discuss our clinical trials research on a family-based intervention, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, and its impact on novel target mechanisms and outcomes in child welfare-involved families.
Dr. Riley Tucker - Assistant Professor of Criminology
Title: "Roasting Without Hate Words: Learning the Language & Dynamics of Online Bullying"
Description: Research shows that young people increasingly experience negative social encounters online. Such interactions, often marked by hate speech or general aggression, have negative psychological and behavioral impacts on victims. While this is an important issue to address, relevant textual content can be difficult to detect when users express harmful sentiments without using explicit hate words. To gain a more comprehensive understanding about how young people negatively interact online, I am co-leading a research team investigating Reddit's /r/RoastMe, an online community that provides a space for users to insult one another yet bans hate speech. By working with a team of undergraduate students to annotate roasts based on who is targeted and which stereotypes are leveraged to make insults, we can gain unique insights about the social dynamics shaping negative online interactions. In the second stage of this project, we will utilize large language models and other NLP methods to learn the textual signature of these roasts and train a model to classify aggressive posts in a larger set of 15 million comments from 400 Reddit communities associated with American universities. By linking post data from college-centered Reddit communities to data from the Census and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, we will test whether the prevalence of online bullying is explained by the demographic composition of university student populations or residential demographics of the university locale.
A light lunch will be served for in-person attendees. Please register.
