Master’s Thesis
United Through Reading (UTR) is a non-profit organization that provides the tools for military service members to make videos of themselves reading books. Families get a copy of the video recording and a copy of the book when service members must leave their family for training, deployment, temporary duty, or other military induced separations. This allows the service member to remain connected to their children. It also establishes a reading routine that maintains reading fluency.
For my master’s thesis, I conducted an impact assessment for UTR, evaluating the effects of their program on military members, spouses, and children. UTR has since become a client through my work at the IVMF, where we have expanded upon my thesis work and launched a longitudinal evaluation of their program.
Undergraduate Honors Thesis
My undergraduate honors thesis explored the relationship between extracurricular activities at the high school level and the facilitation of a psychological sense of community among the adolescent participants in those activities. Looking at three different types of activities (competitive, performance, and participatory) I explored what components led to stronger or weaker sense of community, enjoyment, and commitment among students. To integrate an applied component, I also developed a handbook for the purposeful facilitation of a sense of community among these groups.
Collaborative Anthropological Research Lab (CARL)
Under the direction of Dr. H. J. François Dengah, CARL brought together a cohort of anthropology students from freshmen to seniors, with a focus on mentorship, methods education, and collaboration. Through my three years in CARL, I worked on projects centered around the conceptualization and enactment of gender roles within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). These projects utilized interviews, free-listing, pile-sorts, cultural consensus analysis, and dissonance analysis. We presented both papers and posters at multiple conferences and co-authored two journal articles.
Erica Hawvermale 