Professors awarded research scholarships

Story by Bridgette McAuliffe, Staff writer

Photo by Richard Thompson/The News

Two Murray State professors received the $1,000 Lana Porter Open Access Initiative Award to fund research projects.

One of the awarded professors, Azaher Molla, assistant professor of public and community health, already has 12 works published in peer-reviewed journals. He is currently collaborating with other Murray State professors on work involving health care in Graves County.

“I am working on how people are impoverished when they have big health care expenditures,” Molla said. “I’m working on that using a data set from Bangladesh.”

Molla explained that U.S. Medicare patients are being admitted to hospitals in higher volumes in Kentucky, and the state is fining hospitals for this because of the Affordable Care Act.

“The hospital has to pay a fine if a patient is readmitted within three months,” Molla said. “I’m working on finding how that can be
minimized.”

Sean Rife, assistant professor of psychology, also received the award, which will fund research he is currently performing with students in the department.

Rife’s background lies in social psychology, where he studies human interaction and the intersection of technology and relationships, specifically social media.

As social media is so prevalent in students’ daily lives, Rife said students take an interest, allowing him to bring his research into the classroom.

“I got into technology and computers in the mid-90s before the
internet became what it is today,” Rife said. “When I started my graduate work, I started thinking how electronically-mediated communication impacts our daily lives, our psychological well-being, its upsides and downsides.”

An area of focus in Rife’s studies has been looking at how individuals seek out emotional support through social media and the formation of online communities.

Rife said possible uses for the award include software for his lab that would allow him to evaluate where someone is looking on a screen in order to study how individuals analyze social media profiles.

“The idea is if you point a camera at the eye and look at its relative position, you can interpret that as what they’re looking at on a screen,” Rife said. “For example, if I wanted to look at the way people evaluate a social media profile, I could look at what they look at most on a profile. Is it the picture, description, profile, and how long they spend reading posts.”

William Crabtree, senior from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, is one of Rife’s students.

He said he is developing a topology of the different types of social media use and collecting preliminary data for research.

The purpose of their research is to look at the potentially negative mental health outcomes of certain social media behaviors.

“We’re looking for those types of behaviors and seeing if there is a relationship between that and depression, anxiety and other negative mental health outcomes,” Crabtree said.

Crabtree has also presented research on anxiety and stress at Scholars Week, but upon reading articles in Psychology Today, gained an interest in how social media affects students’ mental health.

“It’s one thing to just check Facebook and Instagram once a day to see how your friends are doing, but it’s another thing to constantly check it over and over again,” Crabtree said. “We’ve all been there, refreshing the page looking for something we probably don’t want to see anyway, and how much does that relate to those negative mental health outcomes.”

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