Older adults in nursing homes often lead lives that are vastly different from the lives they had previously enjoyed. Identifying and analyzing the task-oriented care that older adults experience within nursing homes especially in a mealtime setting provides a unique lens into the complete disconnect that older adults can feel in a nursing home setting. This study focuses on how older adults experience task-oriented care during mealtimes in a nursing home, placing an emphasis on categorizing and analyzing their negative experiences. Ten different video recordings of mealtimes in a variety of nursing home settings where an older adult is fed by a nursing home caregiver were analyzed and coded for quotations that fit specific themes. The quotations were further distilled into three overarching themes. The three themes of caregiver lack of attention, negative interactions centered around food, and the older adult struggling to engage socially categorize the mealtime experiences of older adults in nursing homes. This study provides a deeper understanding of social interactions in nursing homes and can pave the way for more nuanced and tailored interventions to improve the social and emotional wellbeing of older adults in nursing homes.

UCLA’s Central Valley Project is an on-campus organization dedicated to motivating Central Valley high school students to pursue higher education, mentorship, and empowering young student leaders in the Central Valley Community. I will be asking how: How does participation in Central Valley Project shape academic readiness for college among low-income, first-generation, and minoritized high school students? What role does mentorship play in influencing academic readiness for college? I will be taking a mixed-methods approach to understand how financial and structural barriers affect college access for Central Valley Students. I will survey high school students who are a part of the organization. I will ask students questions about their time during Central Valley Project, specifically focusing on whether specific events that are offered make them feel more prepared to go to college. I will ask how prepared they felt for college at the beginning of the academic year versus now at the end of the academic year, using a Likert scale. I will interview alumni of Central Valley Project who are attending four-year universities to learn if their participation in the organization shaped their decision to attend a four-year university. I predict that I will find students were impacted during their time at the Central Valley Project. Many high school students in the Central Valley lack access to college readiness resources, and this project opens the door to show how one organization is making a difference for Central Valley youth.

Previous research has established that there is a lack of accessible housing for individuals living with disabilities, or lowered mobility. However, little research has been done with a focus on the barrier that residential entryway steps pose for people with mobility disabilities during medical emergencies. Therefore, this ethnographic study explores this critical barrier through field observations as an emergency medical technician (EMT) and environmental scans across diverse neighborhoods. We aim to examine how inaccessible housing design delays emergency response and increases physical risk for both patients and responders. Preliminary findings suggest that residential entryway steps are prevalent and pose a risk for individuals with lowered mobility, in line with these hypotheses. Analyses of how this relates to response time and risk levels are ongoing. By situating housing inaccessibility within the context of emergency care, this research reframes accessibility as not only a matter of daily convenience but also of critical, potentially life-threatening situations. This research will call for integrated policy reform and architectural redesign to ensure that all homes are accessible for emergency situations.

In partnership with the Community Engagement and Social Change Senior Capstone I am collaborating with Visual Communications, a nonprofit film collective and archive based in Little Tokyo, which was founded in 1970 with the focus of supporting Asian American and Pacific Islander visual and media storytellers. In this project, I intend to analyze VC’s extensive archival collection, which documents Asian Pacific communities across LA, specifically reviewing images pertaining to food preparation, consumption, celebration, and community. My research question centers on, How does food, documented in Visual Communications’ community archives, act as cultural care, embodiment, and resilience for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders living in diasporic Los Angeles? To engage with this topic, I will analyze Visual Communications’ archives, specifically their still images pertaining to food preparation, consumption, community, and celebration. I will reference these images as visual data to understand how food over generations represents the connection of people. I will use select images from their archival collection to guide interviews with, five-seven, VC community members (staff members, program participants, etc) to contextualize and complexify the impact of these images. In these interviews, we will discuss these images and their connection to care, embodiment, and resilience. The conclusion of this research will take form in a paper arguing the centrality of community archives and food as a catalyst of cultural resilience.