ASU Scholarship Showcase

In this study, we examine how development status and water scarcity shape people's perceptions of "hard path" and "soft path" water solutions. Based on ethnographic research conducted in four semi-rural/peri-urban sites (in Bolivia, Fiji, New Zealand, and the US), we use content analysis to conduct statistical and thematic comparisons of interview data. Our results indicate clear differences associated with development status and, to a lesser extent, water scarcity. People in the two less developed sites were more likely to suggest hard path solutions, less likely to suggest soft path solutions, and more likely to see no path to solutions than people in the more developed sites. Thematically, people in the two less developed sites envisioned solutions that involve small-scale water infrastructure and decentralized, community-based solutions, while people in the more developed sites envisioned solutions that involve large-scale infrastructure and centralized, regulatory water solutions. People in the two water-scarce sites were less likely to suggest soft path solutions and more likely to see no path to solutions (but no more likely to suggest hard path solutions) than people in the water-rich sites. Thematically, people in the two water-rich sites seemed to perceive a wider array of unrealized potential soft path solutions than those in the water-scarce sites. On balance, our findings are encouraging in that they indicate that people are receptive to soft path solutions in a range of sites, even those with limited financial or water resources. Our research points to the need for more studies that investigate the social feasibility of soft path water solutions, particularly in sites with significant financial and natural resource constraints.

Background: Weight-related stigma is reported frequently by higher body-weight patients in healthcare settings. Bariatric surgery triggers profound weight loss. This weight loss may therefore alleviate patients' experiences of weight-related stigma within healthcare settings. In non-clinical settings, weight-related stigma is associated with weight-inducing eating patterns. Dietary adherence is a major challenge after bariatric surgery.

Objectives: (1) Evaluate the relationship between weight-related stigma and post-surgical dietary adherence; (2) understand if weight loss reduces weight-related stigma, thereby improving post-surgical dietary adherence; and (3) explore provider and patient perspectives on adherence and stigma in healthcare settings.

Design: This mixed methods study contrasts survey responses from 300 postoperative bariatric patients with ethnographic data based on interviews with 35 patients and extensive multi-year participant-observation within a clinic setting. The survey measured experiences of weight-related stigma, including from healthcare professionals, on the Interpersonal Sources of Weight Stigma scale and internalized stigma based on the Weight Bias Internalization Scale. Dietary adherence measures included patient self-reports, non-disordered eating patterns reported on the Disordered Eating after Bariatric Surgery scale, and food frequencies. Regression was used to assess the relationships among post-surgical stigma, dietary adherence, and weight loss. Qualitative analyses consisted of thematic analysis.

Results: The quantitative data show that internalized stigma and general experiences of weight-related stigma predict worse dietary adherence, even after weight is lost. The qualitative data show patients did not generally recognize this connection, and health professionals explained it as poor patient compliance.
Conclusion: Reducing perceptions of weight-related stigma in healthcare settings and weight bias internalization could enhance dietary adherence, regardless of time since patient's weight-loss surgery.

Background: Multiple studies show that obesity and depression tend to cluster in women. An “appearance concern” pathway has been proposed as one basic explanation of why higher weights might lead to depression. The transition to motherhood is a life phase in which women’s body image, weight, and depressive risk are in flux, with average weight increasing overall during this period. Examination of how these factors interact from pre- to post-pregnancy provides a means to test how body image plays a key role, as proposed, in causally shaping women’s depressive risk.

Methods: Tracking 39,915 pregnant women in the Norwegian Mother and Child (MoBA) Cohort Study forward 36 months after their deliveries, we test the moderating and mediating effects of body image concerns on the emergence of new mothers’ depressive symptoms by using a binary logistic regression model with a discrete-time event history approach and mediation analysis with bootstrapping.

Results: For women with high pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI), weight gain heightens their depressive symptoms over time. Body image concerns mediate the association between weight gain and the development of depressive symptoms regardless of weight status. However, the mediation effect is more evident for women with higher pre-pregnancy BMI. Conversely, better body image is highly protective against the transition to mild or more severe depressive symptoms among new mothers, but only for women who were not classified as obese prior to their pregnancies.

Conclusions: These findings support a role for body image concerns in the etiology of depressive symptoms during the transition to motherhood. The findings suggest body image interventions before or during pregnancy could help reduce risks of depression in the early postpartum period and well beyond.

Food and water shortages are two of the greatest challenges facing humans in the coming century. While our theoretical understanding of how humans become vulnerable to and cope with hunger is relatively well developed, anthropological research on parallel problems in the water domain is limited. By carefully considering well-established propositions derived from the food literature against what is known about water, our goal in this essay is to advance identifying, theorizing, and testing a broader anthropology of resource insecurity. Our analysis focuses on (1) the causes of resource insecurity at the community level, (2) “coping” responses to resource insecurity at the household level, and (3) the effect of insecurity on emotional well-being and mental health at the individual level. Based on our findings, we argue that human experiences of food and water insecurity are sufficiently similar to facilitate a broader theory of resource insecurity, including in how households and individuals cope. There are also important differences between food and water insecurity, including the role of structural factors (such as markets) in creating community-level vulnerabilities. These suggest food and water insecurity may also produce household struggles and individual suffering along independent pathways.

The impact of undergraduate research experiences (UREs) is supported by evidence from physical and life science fields, especially when student-apprentices work in traditional laboratories. Within social sciences specifically, some excellent student outcomes associated with UREs adhere to non–lab-based modalities like course-based research experiences (CUREs). Here, the authors evaluate the laboratory-based undergraduate research experiences (LUREs) as a potentially valuable approach for incorporating social science undergraduates in research. Using comparative analysis of survey data from students completing three types of social science-based UREs (n = 235), individual research experiences (IREs), CUREs, or LUREs, students perceived gains overall regardless of the type of experience, with some indication that LUREs are the most effective.

Many population centers in the American West rely on water from the Colorado River Basin, which has faced shortages in recent years that are anticipated to be exacerbated by climate change. Shortages to urban water supplies related to climate change will not be limited to cities dependent on the Colorado River. Considering this, addressing sustainable water governance is timely and critical for cities, states, and regions facing supply shortages and pollution problems. Engaging in sustainability transitions of these hydro-social systems will increase the ability of such systems to meet the water needs of urban communities. In this paper, we identify historical transitions in water governance and examine their context for three sites in the Colorado River Basin (Denver, Colorado, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Phoenix, Arizona) to provide insight for intentional transitions towards sustainable, or “water sensitive” cities. The comparative historical approach employed allows us to more fully understand differences in present-day water governance decisions between the sites, identify past catalysts for transitions, and recognize emerging patterns and opportunities that may impact current and future water governance in the Colorado River Basin and beyond.

The apolipoprotein E (APOE) e4 genotype is a powerful risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) cohort, we previously reported significant baseline structural differences in APOE e4 carriers relative to non-carriers, involving the left hippocampus more than the right—a difference more pronounced in e4 homozygotes than heterozygotes. We now examine the longitudinal effects of APOE genotype on hippocampal morphometry at 6-, 12- and 24-months, in the ADNI cohort. We employed a new automated surface registration system based on conformal geometry and tensor-based morphometry. Among different hippocampal surfaces, we computed high-order correspondences, using a novel inverse-consistent surface-based fluid registration method and multivariate statistics consisting of multivariate tensor-based morphometry (mTBM) and radial distance. At each time point, using Hotelling’s T² test, we found significant morphological deformation in APOE e4 carriers relative to non-carriers in the full cohort as well as in the non-demented (pooled MCI and control) subjects at each follow-up interval. In the complete ADNI cohort, we found greater atrophy of the left hippocampus than the right, and this asymmetry was more pronounced in e4 homozygotes than heterozygotes. These findings, combined with our earlier investigations, demonstrate an e4 dose effect on accelerated hippocampal atrophy, and support the enrichment of prevention trial cohorts with e4 carriers.

Many children born preterm exhibit frontal executive dysfunction, behavioral problems including attentional deficit/hyperactivity disorder and attention related learning disabilities. Anomalies in regional specificity of cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical circuits may underlie deficits in these disorders. Nonspecific volumetric deficits of striatal structures have been documented in these subjects, but little is known about surface deformation in these structures. For the first time, here we found regional surface morphological differences in the preterm neonatal ventral striatum. We performed regional group comparisons of the surface anatomy of the striatum (putamen and globus pallidus) between 17 preterm and 19 term-born neonates at term-equivalent age. We reconstructed striatal surfaces from manually segmented brain magnetic resonance images and analyzed them using our in-house conformal mapping program. All surfaces were registered to a template with a new surface fluid registration method. Vertex-based statistical comparisons between the two groups were performed via four methods: univariate and multivariate tensor-based morphometry, the commonly used medial axis distance, and a combination of the last two statistics. We found statistically significant differences in regional morphology between the two groups that are consistent across statistics, but more extensive for multivariate measures. Differences were localized to the ventral aspect of the striatum. In particular, we found abnormalities in the preterm anterior/inferior putamen, which is interconnected with the medial orbital/prefrontal cortex and the midline thalamic nuclei including the medial dorsal nucleus and pulvinar. These findings support the hypothesis that the ventral striatum is vulnerable, within the cortico-stiato-thalamo-cortical neural circuitry, which may underlie the risk for long-term development of frontal executive dysfunction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and attention-related learning disabilities in preterm neonates.

In this paper, we develop a new automated surface registration system based on surface conformal parameterization by holomorphic 1-forms, inverse consistent surface fluid registration, and multivariate tensor-based morphometty (mTBM). First, we conformally map a surface onto a planar rectangle space with holomorphic 1-forms. Second, we compute surface conformal representation by combining its local conformal factor and mean curvature and linearly scale the dynamic range of the conformal representation to form the feature image of the surface. Third, we align the feature image with a chosen template image via the fluid image registration algorithm, which has been extended into the curvilinear coordinates to adjust for the distortion introduced by surface parameterization. The inverse consistent image registration algorithm is also incorporated in the system to jointly estimate the forward and inverse transformations between the study and template images. This alignment induces a corresponding deformation on the surface. We tested the system on Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) baseline dataset to study AD symptoms on hippocampus. In our system, by modeling a hippocampus as a 3D parametric surface, we nonlinearly registered each surface with a selected template surface. Then we used mTBM to analyze the morphometry difference between diagnostic groups. Experimental results show that the new system has better performance than two publicly available subcortical surface registration tools: FIRST and SPHARM. We also analyzed the genetic influence of the Apolipoprotein E(is an element of)4 allele (ApoE4), which is considered as the most prevalent risk factor for AD. Our work successfully detected statistically significant difference between ApoE4 carriers and non-carriers in both patients of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and healthy control subjects. The results show evidence that the ApoE genotype may be associated with accelerated brain atrophy so that our work provides a new MRI analysis tool that may help presymptomatic AD research.

Complexities and uncertainties surrounding urbanization and climate change complicate water resource sustainability. Although research has examined various aspects of complex water systems, including uncertainties, relatively few attempts have been made to synthesize research findings in particular contexts. We fill this gap by examining the complexities, uncertainties, and decision processes for water sustainability and urban adaptation to climate change in the case study region of Phoenix, Arizona. In doing so, we integrate over a decade of research conducted by Arizona State University’s Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC). DCDC is a boundary organization that conducts research in collaboration with policy makers, with the goal of informing decision-making under uncertainty. Our results highlight: the counterintuitive, non-linear, and competing relationships in human–environment dynamics; the myriad uncertainties in climatic, scientific, political, and other domains of knowledge and practice; and, the social learning that has occurred across science and policy spheres. Finally, we reflect on how our interdisciplinary research and boundary organization has evolved over time to enhance adaptive and sustainable governance in the face of complex system dynamics.