Interest groups have participated in the American political system since the signing of the U.S. Constitution. Environmental interest groups, a subsection of the American interest group society, have been especially active in national policies since the proliferation of environmental laws and environmental advocacy in the 1960s and 1970s. When environmental...
The current thesis presents contingent valuation research incorporating social psychological measures that investigates recreationists' willingness to pay recreation access fees at McDonald-Dunn Forest, Oregon. Context is provided through an extensive literature review of recreation fee management, issues and concerns related to recreation fees, recreationists' attitudes toward fees, relevant social psychological...
This study documents the occurrence of stereotypical representations of
gender, race, and other characteristics in individuals that appear in advertisements in
the prestigious academic journal Science. It repeats and expands upon a study
conducted by Mary Barbercheck (2001) that analyzed advertisements in Science
between 1995 and 1997. In this study,...
In the United States during the last 30 years there has been a shift from extractive natural resource-based economies of the Old West to a New West defined by environmental protection. Over the past century, a growing national support for environmental protection has influenced a lengthening list of national and...
The Linn and Benton County Gleaner network has helped the low-income families of urban and rural Oregon reclaim moral, social and cultural capital that is lost in the act of being poor in America. Rather than participating solely in government safety nets, these people reject “hand-outs” in favor of exchanging...
This thesis seeks to better understand the most pressing cultural barriers to progress in the sustainability movement, and to offer suggestions for overcoming barriers. This research includes a two-year long case study of the sustainability movement at OSU, where the researcher coordinated projects encouraging behavior change. Despite increasing severity and...
Commercial fishing is a culturally and economically significant industry on the Oregon coast. The importance of this industry to human communities is often neglected in fisheries research, with economic and ecological data being favored by managers and decision makers. Recent observations in many coastal communities have indicated aging of fishermen...
I examined the relative roles of biotic and abiotic factors in structuring redband trout
Oncorhynchus mykiss distributions in the South Fork John Day. I first examined the
relationship between the biological traits of the fish assemblage and riparian-geomorphic features in context of prevailing theories of stream ecology stemming from the...
Natural resource data are typically non-linear and complex, yet modeling methods often utilize statistical analysis techniques, such as regression, that are insufficient for use on such data. This research proposes an innovative modeling method based on pattern recognition techniques borrowed from the field of machine learning. These techniques make no...
Human development researchers consider adolescence a rich time for interest development and identity exploration. A relatively new movement in the Free-Choice Learning (FCL) arena, the Maker movement, offers learners interest-driven, experiential, often collaborative, and process-oriented activities ranging from game design (computer-based and otherwise) and robotics, to sewing LEDs into clothing...