Posters from Research Days 2022
Eden Lowinger, Briana Lopez-Patino
Sociocultural Impact of AIDS Understanding on Prevention Education and Treatment Accessibility
Casey Adrian, Sarah Morea
A New Educational Paradigm: Identifying the Foundations of GMHC's Sex-Affirming HIV Prevention Education
Dan Pergel, Claire Goldstein
Gay Men’s Health Crisis’ (GMHC) Struggle to Respond to Changing Epidemiological Trends in the First 15-Years of the AIDS Epidemic (1981-1996)
Juan Riestra, Danielle Kinches, Coral Nizen-Jacobellis, Emily Presutti, Ilana Plotkin
Not a One Night Review... How Sexual Hookups Have Changed Over the Past 10 Years: A Literature Review
Maya Kovic, Emily Jebens, Madison Mark, Crystal Zhu, Vlad Rosenberg, Anta Noor
Anxious Emotions Lead to Anxious Solutions? Examining the Relationships Between Emotions, Alcohol Consumption, and Consent
Leora Wasserman, Gianna Deni, Emma Immediato, Jennifer Randaldo, Samantha Tomasi
"Oh, We're Just Talking": Operationalizing a Contemporary Dating Phenomenon
Current Research
We have many different programs of research currently underway, and we often explore multiple topics at once. Some of our featured topics include:
- The Hookup Survey: This survey is released every semester and explores an array of topics including many recurring elements with a spot for exploring new themes (i.e. sexual consent, virtual sexual encounters, etc.). This survey was recently adapted and released at a national level.
- Sex and the Coronavirus: Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic we have focused on examining changes to sexual behavior and lifestyle as a result of the pandemic.
- “Just Talking”: Recently we have been exploring the relationship phenomena best referred to as “just talking”. We have explored the idea that individuals experience a period of “talking” where you are not in a committed relationship (yet) but are (perhaps) more than friends.
- Sexual Consent and Decision Making: We have both quantitative (from several of our surveys) and qualitative (from focus groups) data examining a variety of consent-related research questions, including (but not limited to): how do college student conceptions of consent square with affirmative consent policies? What role do friends/peers play in the consent process during sex? Are there factors that can determine how people understand consent? We frequently collaborate with another research lab on campus, headed by Dr. Rich Mattson in Psychology.
- Tend and Befriend: The tend and befriend model is a response to stress as opposed to the commonly known fight or flight model. Tend and befriend has been theorized to be the typical response to females under high-stress scenarios.
- Family Acceptance: This project analyzed how students' families influence a student’s overall happiness following “coming out” as a sexual and/or gender minority.
- Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) Project: The goal of this project is to analyze the Gay Men's Health Crisis Archive -- a collection of notes from the coordinators of the GHMC that detail the many lives lost during the AIDs epidemic of the 80s and 90s -- and write a micro-history of the various conflicts, transitions, and redefinitions related to individual and organizational identities.
- Sex and Gender Research: This study pulls apart different aspects of sex and gender to provide better healthcare to transgender and intersex individuals.
- State Street Alcohol and Consent Study: This study is currently postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but had the goal of analyzing student's expectations regarding sex and alcohol change throughout a “going out” experience.
- FEM Scale Study: This study assesses the validity of commonly used gender role measures in order to develop a more up-to-date, valid, and psychometrically sound measure.
- Changing Nature of Sexual Orientation: This study explores archival and current measurements of sexual orientation (attraction, behavior, and identity) to document changes in the sexual orientations of emerging adults.
