This portfolio includes two public policy research projects for the New York State Recreation and Park Society and a GSS SPSS-sourced study, “Exploring Consistency of Pro-Life Beliefs Among the Religiously Confident.” The first project involved gathering and analyzing data from municipal boards to support NYSRPS’s outreach and advocacy efforts. The second examined national survey data to assess whether individuals with strong religious confidence apply “pro-life” views consistently across multiple life-related issues.
Public policy portfolio
Exploring Consistency of Pro-Life Beliefs Among the Religiously Confident
My study explores the relationship between confidence in organized religion and pro-life or pro-choice stances on abortion, supporting or opposing capital punishment, and contraception for adolescents despite parental approval and suicide.
Using GSS SPSS outputs, I found that the relationship between confidence in organized religion and all tested variables showed significance in all bivariate analyses, disproving the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between the two variables. In the multivariate analysis, those with more confidence in organized religion tended to less strongly favor capital punishment, showing a specified relationship in which the research hypothesis was accepted for democrats and republicans but not for respondents in the independent/other category.
The research hypothesis states that if a person has more confidence in organized religion, then they will tend to favor capital punishment less strongly, for all political ideological categories. For Republicans and Democrats, the research hypothesis was supported, but not for independents/others. Republicans and democrats with more confidence in organized religion tended to favor capital punishment less strongly, even when controlling for one's political views.
When controlled for political affiliation, republican respondents favored the death penalty at much higher rates than Democrats. There are likely other political or social factors that play into the abortion debate, and religion may still serve as a false rationale if contradictions are found amongst the other dependent variables.
New York State Recreation and Park Society Board Member Data Collection
This study reports open-source data collected on town and village board officials in 23 Central New York (CNY) municipalities. The study will be presented to Courtney Carroll and the executive board of the New York State Recreation and Park Society (NYSRPS). The results will be used to improve government relations, outreach, and advocacy strategies based on the demographic and contact information collected to better advance parks and recreation for the public.
Data was collected from public government websites and municipal pages across 23 towns and villages in CNY, focusing on board officials' locations, names, municipality type, gender, title, board size, contact information, and individual term length/count. The target population includes board officials and superiors from 23 municipalities in CNY. The sample consists of 119 board officials, using publicly available records as the sampling frame (open- source). Since data was collected manually through chosen municipal websites, there are no threats to accuracy. Issues of representativeness include outdated or missing website data, incomplete term length information, rural/urban underrepresentation, and inconsistent municipality structures.