The Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research recognizes Stanford's top ten percent of honors theses in social science, science, and engineering among the graduating senior class. Liza’s thesis is entitled The Psychology of Adolescent Poverty Under Climate Change: Evidence from Bangladesh. Climate change, she explains, has already begun deepening cycles of poverty across low- and middle-income nations, threatening decades of progress in development outcomes. The physical impacts of climate change on poor households have been well established, ranging from food insecurity to infrastructure loss. However, the impacts of chronic climate stress on the psychological health of low-income individuals in high-risk regions remain unexplored. This leaves a knowledge gap on a potentially vital clinical need among climate-vulnerable populations, but also a lack of consideration of a key potential contributor to psychological poverty traps in low-resource communities. Liza’s mixed-methods observational study investigates the effect of repeated climate threat exposure on the psychological health of low-income adolescents across Bangladesh and, in turn, how these psychological health trends influence adolescent temporal discounting trends. She administered psychological health and temporal discounting surveys to 1200 low-income adolescents in Dhaka, a moderate flood risk location, and Barisal, a very high flood risk location. She also conducted 24 semi-structured focus groups among 80 adolescents in each location to discern potential causal pathways from climate stress exposure to our quantitative outcomes. She finds that high climate threat exposure is associated with significantly higher rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents and that those experiencing at least moderate anxiety and depression are significantly more likely to exhibit temporal discounting. In turn, she finds that climate-driven psychological health challenges and resultant temporal discounting levels contribute substantially to modified future planning around migration and occupational planning, with climate adaptation preferences widely differing by gender. This study ultimately identifies a key emerging public health challenge with significant implications for community adaptation and poverty alleviation on our planet’s climate frontlines, demonstrating an urgent need for cross-sector intervention design.

Melissa’s thesis is entitled Chemical Castration as Gender Justice: How punitive attitudes inform gender policy preferences and voting behavior among Brazilian women. Currently, 19% of the women in the Brazilian Congress are part of Bolsonaro’s party, known for its anti-feminist and pro-punishment stances. At first, this fact seems to contradict expectations based on substantive representation. This concept would predict that women share similar interests and, therefore, would want to advance similar gender policies once in power. Melissa argues that this apparent contradiction can be better explained by exploring how gender, along with punishment attitudes, interacts with voting choices, a current gap in the literature. This project aims to fill this gap. Specifically, it answers the question: “How do attitudes toward punishment impact the gender policy preferences and voting behavior of Brazilian women?”. This mixed-methods study works with a novel data set of 39 interviews and 1,194 observations from an online survey experiment. This qualitative data was coded in 2 passes, using deductive, grounded, and in vivo codes, with the support of NVivo, followed by analytic memoing. The quantitative data includes results from a conjoint experiment and a survey experiment, which were analyzed, respectively, through average marginal component effect analysis and logistic regressions. The main findings of this thesis indicate that Brazilian women mostly have progressive views on gender issues, and there is a high demand for gender policy among all women. However, the content of the policies prioritized by them varies when voting, with a particular division of women across issues of gender punishment and abortion, which are mostly defined across partisan lines. This study aims to contribute to the literature on gender and punitive attitudes and substantive representation. Furthermore, through its survey gathering substantive data on policy preferences in Latin America, this project addresses a key challenge to research so far, namely the lack of data on these preferences.

The Class of 2024

Liza and Melissa are part of a cohort of nine graduating CDDRL honors students who have spent the past year working in consultation with CDDRL-affiliated faculty members and attending honors research workshops to develop their thesis projects. Collectively, their topics documented some of the most pressing issues impacting democracy today in the U.S., Mexico, China, Hong Kong, and the Middle East, among others.

“We are proud to graduate another cohort of students in the Fisher Family Honors Program,” shared Didi Kuo, Center Fellow at FSI and co-director of CDDRL’s Fisher Family Honors Program. “Our thesis writers tackled a wide range of topics that included immigration, education, health, and inequality, issues crucial to understanding democracy and development.”

In addition to the Firestone Medal and CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Award, several other students have received honors heading into graduation:

• Teiana Gonsalves has received the J.E. Wallace Sterling Award. Named for J.E. Wallace Sterling, who served as Stanford’s president from 1949 to 1968 and as chancellor until 1985, the Award recognizes a graduating senior whose undergraduate leadership and volunteer activities have made the largest impact on the Stanford community.
• Michael Alisky, Isabelle Coloma, Teiana Gonsalves, and Arabella Walley have all received the Award of Excellence. Designed to recognize the top 10% of the class, this award honors graduating seniors who have demonstrated a sincere commitment to the university through involvement, leadership, and extraordinary Stanford spirit.
• Arabella Walley has also been selected for a John Gardener Public Service Fellowship. Fellows from Stanford and UC Berkeley work in a government or nonprofit organization of their choice, matched with a mentor to guide their professional growth and development.

CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program trains students from any academic department at Stanford to prepare them to write a policy-relevant research thesis with global impact on a subject touching on democracy, development, and the rule of law. Honors students participate in research methods workshops, attend honors college in Washington, D.C., connect to the CDDRL research community, and write their thesis in close consultation with a faculty advisor to graduate with a certificate of honors in democracy, development, and the rule of law.
 

Explore the rest of the thesis topics of the Fisher Family Honors Program Class of 2024 below: