Category: Research Assistant Opportunity

Professor: Sergio Waisman
 
Department: Romance, German & Slavic Languages & Literatures
 
Title: Undercover Notes & Bilingual Crónicas
 
Description: “Undercover Notes & Bilingual Crónicas” is a new project based on my work as a bilingual and multicultural creative writer, literary translator, and a scholar of Latin American & Comparative literatures. The project consists of gathering and taking a series of notes (in writing as well as in images and short audio-videos, at times as short interviews and conversations with participating subjects) related to a series of “underground realities” (in various cross-cultural situations) that are found and co-exist (sometimes in parallel, sometimes intersecting) mostly in the greater Washington, DC area. Major underlining themes include immigrant experiences and a wide range of North-South linguistic, literary, and cultural exchanges.
 
The project consists of gathering and recording written and audio-visual material, keeping careful track of the material, and then editing the material in preparation for various anticipated forms of publication and dissemination. “Undercover Notes & Bilingual Crónicas” is a new inter-disciplinary, bilingual, cross-cultural project that involves a combination of research and creative methodologies and technologies, such as interviewing, recording and transcribing conversations, some translation work, undertaking digital research and communications (mostly in English; some in Spanish), as well as photography and other audio-visual recording techniques. Although the project is at a very early stage, possible final products include publication in print and/or electronic journals, a book at the end of the project, as well as podcast or other newer digital humanities outlets along the way. The final product and dissemination are still to be determined. At this early stage, I am in the creative phase, gathering all sorts of material related to the project, and actively writing and starting to produce the work. Working with a research assistant from this early stage would be of tremendous help.
 
Duties: The research assistant would assist with note-taking (and/or recording) relevant interviews and conversations, photographing (and/or video recording) interviews and conversations, undertaking digital research, transcribing recorded material (mostly in English, some in Spanish), some editing, and helping to keep all of the material well organized for publication and other digital and print dissemination. Ideally, the research assistant would have strong writing and/or artistic abilities, as well as strong audio-visual and relevant high-tech skills. The work will include audio-video recording, some photography, writing, and transcribing and editing of the material. The work will also require a research assistant with strong cultural sensitivities, especially able to work with different immigrant groups, and peoples from a wide range of backgrounds. Bilingual skills (Spanish/English) is a definite plus.
 
Time commitment: 4-6 hours per week (average)
 
Credit hour option*: 2-3
 
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: waisman@gwu.edu
 
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.

Professor: Annamaria Lusardi
 
Department: Business School
 
Title: Financial fragility in America: Evidence beyond asset building
 
Description: PROJECT OVERVIEW
Several years after the financial crisis, financial fragility is still pervasive in the U.S economy. This highlights the need to understand household financial preparedness beyond simple measures of wealth and asset building. In this paper, we will explore the determinants of financial fragility for American households. We will not only analyze their assets but particularly their debt and payment obligations, financial literacy, and demographic characteristics. Analyzing household balance sheets and financial management will help us understand the determinants of financial fragility of American families. Understanding the underlying factors associated with higher financial fragility is important not only to address the short-term effect of failing to cope with an emergency but also to shed light on the implications of financial fragility for long-term financial security.
 
PROJECT METHODOLOGY
The Financial Crisis of 2007-09 highlighted the severe economic impact of weak household financial resilience. In the aftermath of the crisis as the economy and the labor market recover, one would expect to see higher precautionary savings. However, more than one-third of Americans surveyed in the 2015 National Financial Capability Study (NFCS) reported that they could certainly not or probably not use any available resources to come up with $2,000 in a month if the need arose. Overall, the ability to cope with emergency expenses—what we define as financial fragility—remains low for households in the U.S., with adverse implications for the individual, the household and the overall economy.
 
Household financial fragility is often attributed to low income or too few assets. However, data from the 2015 NFCS show that while financial fragility is highest for low-income households, those in the middle-income ($50–75K) and high-income (greater than $75,000) ranges are also substantially financially fragile. Specifically 30% of middle-income and 20% of high-income households could be classified as financially fragile as of 2015. This is notable, especially when comparing the relative magnitude of the emergency expense ($2,000) to a household’s income level. Despite higher income, the failure to cope with financial emergencies could be caused by a myriad of factors such as having too many expenses, complex family structures and caregiving responsibilities, or suboptimal investments.
 
In this project, we seek to understand what factors can explain financial fragility among American households and what are the long-term implications of financial fragility. We will analyze the roots of financial fragility, examining to what extent it is determined by high indebtedness and other factors that offset high asset levels. To conduct the empirical analysis, we will use data from the 2015 NFCS to analyze the socioeconomic characteristics of financially fragile households, including demographic features such as education, ethnicity, age, and family structure, and non-demographic characteristics like debt levels and debt management, overall financial behavior, expenses, asset ownership, and financial literacy. The NFCS is a nationwide survey of approximately 25,000 adults. Since 2012, it has included a measure of financial fragility we have designed for that survey. Here is the question that was added to the survey: “How confident are you that you could come up with $2,000 if an unexpected need arose within the next month?” This comprehensive measure allows individuals to evaluate their own capacity to cope with financial emergencies in any way that suits their personal financial situation. This understanding of financial preparedness is a crucial contribution to the current literature, which has largely focused on pre-determined measures for household financial well-being such as levels of income, assets or savings.
 
For financially fragile households, suffering from a financial setback can lead to a reprioritization of expenses, with potentially adverse consequences for spending on sources such as children’s education and health. This is a source of increasing inequality in the society, and if unchecked, financial fragility could thus heighten socioeconomic disparities for American families in the future. Our analysis will have important implications for practitioners and policy makers for improving the financial resilience of American families. An understanding of weaknesses in the financial capability of Americans is a first step to creating mitigating policies that can prevent financial setbacks. For instance, we find that being financially literate lowers the likelihood of being financially fragile, independent of an individual’s level of educational attainment. Thus, policies can be implemented to provide financial education at the school, workplace and community levels. Policies that address saving for retirement have traditionally targeted tax and non-tax incentives, such as pre-tax retirement accounts. Through our analysis, we will show that incentives are also required for individuals and families to save and build resilience in the short term.
 
Duties: Help with collecting relevant literature
Read relevant literature and do a literature review
Provide help in collecting figures and data at aggregate levels
Assist in the data analysis according to expertise
 
Time commitment: 10 or more hours per week (average)
 
Credit hour option*: 3
 
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: alusardi@gwu.edu
 
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.

Professor: Shoko Hamano
 
Department: EALL
 
Title: Compilation of an annotated bibliography of Korean literature on Korean ideophones/sound-symbolic expressions (의성어 /의태어)
 
Description: The long-term objective of the research of which this project is part of is to find evidence possibly connecting the Korean and Japanese languages. The genealogical connection between these two languages, although suspected, has not been established because the standard method of identifying phonological correspondences between cognates fails in the case of languages that separated more than 5000 years ago. Instead, this project attempts to identify similarities between the ideophonic  (sound-symbolic) systems of these two languages that cannot be accounted for on either universal or typological grounds.
 
One problem in this line of comparative research presents, however, is that forms normally considered ideophones either by linguists or lexicographers may contain pseudo-ideophonic expressions derived from prosaic words. The problem is severe in Korean because of extensive ideophonization of prosaic words. (The same problem exists in Japanese to an extent, but not to the same extent.) In order to be able to compare ideophones in these two languages, unproblematic ideophones need to be identified first. On the basis of insights gleaned from extensive studies of Japanese ideophones, I have already identified mono-syllabic Korean ideophones using a dictionary of Korean ideophones. Disyllabic and trisyllabic forms are more problematic. Existing literature written in English or Japanese does not provide clear guidelines.
 
Serious phonological study of Korean ideophones began in the 1990s in the US, Japan, and Korea. I have access to materials from the former two countries, and these usually focus specifically on vowel harmony and consonantal mutation, but I am more interested in how ideophonic roots are composed, and I suspect that Korean resources would be more varied and contain relevant information. Unfortunately, because I am not a proficient reader of Korean (I can read short phonological papers slowly), I do not know how much work has been done in Korea in this specific area I am interested in.
 
I would therefore like a native speaker of Korean to look for academic articles and books written in Korean on the topic of Korean ideophones and identify the specific sections that are relevant to my research. The research assistant will need to provide full citations with short summaries of the most relevant sections in English. This will allow me to focus on the most relevant literature and to quickly come up with a better picture of Korean ideophones.
 
Duties: In the first week, I will give a briefing of the overall research objective and background, and the procedures that the assistant needs to follow. The assistant will first conduct online search of dissertations, journal articles, book articles, and books on Korean ideophones and translate their titles into English. The assistant will acquire physical or electronic copies of these materials. (If they can be acquired only by a faculty member, I will order them.) Then the assistant will scan the table of contents, identify sections that appear relevant, skim through the sections, and summarize in English what is reported there. If a section seems too technical, the summary can be very brief only noting that there is a technical discussion of the subject. The assistant will need to compile these into bi-weekly reports, providing the full citations, electronic paper versions and/or scanned pages, and summaries. After each report, I will meet with the assistant for half an hour to provide feedback and ask clarification questions if necessary.
 
Time commitment: 1-3 hours per week (average)
 
Credit hour option*: 1
 
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: hamano@gwu.edu
 
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.