College of Letters & Science
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The College of Letters and Science, the largest center for learning, teaching and research at Montana State University, offers students an excellent liberal arts and sciences education in nearly 50 majors, 25 minors and over 25 graduate degrees within the four areas of the humanities, natural sciences, mathematics and social sciences.
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Item A longitudinal assessment of variability in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and psychosocial correlates in a national United States sample(Elsevier BV, 2023-02) Shook, Natalie J.; Oosterhoff, Benjamin; Sevi, BarışRecent evidence suggests that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is not static. In order to develop effective vaccine uptake interventions, we need to understand the extent to which vaccine hesitancy fluctuates and identify factors associated with both between- and within-person differences in vaccine hesitancy. The goals of the current study were to assess the extent to which COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy varied at an individual level across time and to determine whether disgust sensitivity and germ aversion were associated with between- and within-person differences in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. A national sample of U.S. adults (N = 1025; 516 woman; Mage = 46.34 years, SDage = 16.56, range: 18 to 85 years; 72.6 % White) completed six weekly online surveys (March 20 – May 3, 2020). Between-person mean COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy rates were relatively stable across the six-week period (range: 38–42 %). However, there was considerable within-person variability in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Approximately, 40 % of the sample changed their vaccine hesitancy at least once during the six weeks. There was a significant between-person effect for disgust sensitivity, such that greater disgust sensitivity was associated with a lower likelihood of COVID-19 vaccine hesitance. There was also a significant within-person effect for germ aversion. Participants who experienced greater germ aversion for a given week relative to their own six week average were less likely to be COVID-19 vaccine hesitant that week relative to their own six-week average. This study provides important information on rapidly changing individual variability in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy on a weekly basis, which should be taken into consideration with any efforts to decrease vaccine hesitancy and increase vaccine uptake. Further, these findings identify-two psychological factors (disgust sensitivity and germ aversion) with malleable components that could be leveraged in developing vaccine uptake interventions.Item Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework(Montana State University Library, 2022) Jones, Michael D.; McBeth, Mark K.; Shanahan, Elizabeth A.A long history of literature describes how stories are central to how humans understand and communicate about the world around them. The NPF applies these discoveries to the policy process, whereby narratives are meaning-making tools used to capture attention and influence policy outcomes. Conceived at the Portneuf School of Narrative in the early part of the century and formally named in 2010, the Narrative Policy Framework’s (NPF) initial purpose was to scientifically understand the relationship between narratives and the policy process. Since its seminal naming, the NPF’s charter has expanded to non-scientific approaches (Gray & Jones, 2015; Jones and Radaelli, 2015), to science and policy communication, as well as proclaiming normative commitments to both science and democracy. Recently, guideline publications have also been produced that provide detailed instructions about how to conduct NPF research. Along the way several summary pieces have chronicled the NPF’s development. Two of these NPF assessments were part of larger collections of NPF studies, including the 2014 edited volume The Science of Stories and a special NPF symposium issue featured in the Policy Studies Journal. On par with NPF collections emerging every four years, here we offer a third collection of NPF studies that represent some of the best NPF studies to date.Item Quantifying the role of airborne transmission in the spread of COVID-19(American Institute of Mathematical Sciences, 2022-01) Hayden, Matthew; Morrow, Bryce; Yang, Wesley; Wang, JinThere is an ongoing debate on the different transmission modes of SARS-CoV-2 and their relative contributions to the pandemic. In this paper, we employ a simple mathematical model, which incorporates both the human-to-human and environment-to-human transmission routes, to study the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. We focus our attention on the role of airborne transmission in the spread of the disease in a university campus setting. We conduct both mathematical analysis and numerical simulation, and incorporate published experimental data for the viral concentration in the air to fit model parameters. Meanwhile, we compare the outcome to that of the standard SIR model, utilizing a perturbation analysis in the presence of multiple time scales. Our data fitting and numerical simulation results show that the risk of airborne transmission for SARS-CoV-2 strongly depends on how long the virus can remain viable in the air. If the time for this viability is short, the airborne transmission route would be inconsequential in shaping the overall transmission risk and the total infection size. On the other hand, if the infectious virus can persist in aerosols beyond a few hours, then airborne transmission could play a much more significant role in the spread of COVID-19.