Dearly Departed: How Often Do Congregations Close?

We establish for the first time a national mortality rate for religious congregations by determining the 2005 status of congregations in the 1998 National Congregations Study sample. The annual mortality rate for religious congregations is 1 percent, which is among the lowest mortality rates ever observed for any type of organization. This unusually low mortality rate probably indicates an organizational population whose weakest members live on in a weakened state rather than an organizational population that is unusually robust all the way down to its most vulnerable members.     

MAKING IT EXPLICIT AND CLEAR: FROM “STRONG” TO “HYPER‐” INFERENTIALISM IN BRANDOM AND PEIRCE

Abstract: This article explores how Robert Brandom's original “inferentialist” philosophical framework should be positioned with respect to the classical pragmatist tradition. It is argued that Charles Peirce's original attack (in “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man” and other early papers) on the use of “intuition” in nineteenth‐century philosophy of mind is in fact a form of inferentialism, and thus an antecedent relatively unexplored by Brandom in his otherwise comprehensive and illuminating “tales of the mighty dead.” However, whereas Brandom stops short at a merely “strong” inferentialism, which admits some non‐inferential mental content (although it is parasitic on the inferential and can only be “inferentially articulated”), Peirce embraces a total, that is, “hyper‐,” inferentialism. Some consequences of this difference are explored, and Peirce's more thoroughgoing position is defended.     

Effects of participation in a longitudinal study of dating

Participation in interviews has the potential to change beliefs about dating relationships. Changes in beliefs should vary as a function of how much participants think and talk about their relationships. Participants (N= 464) were randomly selected for an interview study from households in a large Southwestern U.S. city. Participation should have positive effects on beliefs when thinking or talking is high and negative effects when thinking or talking is low. As predicted, talking moderates the association between participation and conflict, and thinking moderates the effects of participation on satisfaction and friendship‐based love. Results differed for men and women. Under conditions of low talk and high thinking, participation has negative effects. Implications of the effects of participation are discussed.     

THE INFLUENCE OF TRAINING METHOD AND TRAINEE AGE ON THE ACQUISITION OF COMPUTER SKILLS

This experiment examined the influence of training method and trainee age on performance during training in the acquisition of computer software skills. A behavioral modeling training method yielded consistently superior computer software mastery compared with a nonmodeling approach. Older trainees exhibited significantly lower performance than did younger trainees in both the modeling and the nonmodeling training conditions. Findings are discussed in terms of strategies for overcoming older worker technological obsolescence.