The Purpose-in-Life Scale (PILS): internal consistency reliability,concurrent validity and construct validity among Catholic priests in Italy

ABSTRACT

The Purpose in Life Scale was designed to provide a 12-item unidimensional measure of purpose in life employing a five-point Likert rating for each item. The present study supports the psychometric properties of the Italian translation of this instrument among 155 Catholic priests (mean age?=?46 years, SD?=?12.16). Internal consistency reliability generated an alpha coefficient of .90. The first factor generated by principal component analysis accounted for 49.5% of variance. Concurrent validity against the Purpose in Life Test was supported by a correlation of .63. Construct validity was supported by a correlation of .54 with the Satisfaction in Ministry Scale and by a correlation of ?.51 with the Scale of Emotional Exhaustion in Ministry. These properties commend the scale for future use among Catholic priests.     

From 3 to 20: The early training project: By S. W. Gray,B. K. Ramsey,and R. A. Klaus. Baltimore: Univ. Park Press, 1982. xi + 344 pp., $27.95

A perspective on the controversy over the effects of early childhood intervention is provided. Gray, Ramsey, and Klaus' book is reviewed. The results of the study are commented upon, and implications for the continuing controversy about the effects of early childhood intervention are suggested.     

The interreligious dimension of reasoning about God's existence

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Maureen L. Condic: Untangling twinning: what science tells us about the nature of human embryos

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -     

Investigating the Reliability of the Sentence Verification Technique

Reading comprehension plays an important role in achievement for all academic domains. The purpose of this study is to describe the sentence verification technique (SVT) (Royer, Hastings, &; Hook, 1979 Royer, J. M., Hastings, C. N., &; Hook, C. (1979). A sentence verification technique for measuring reading comprehension. Journal of Reading Behavior, 11(4), 355–363. doi:10.1080/10862967909547341[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) as an alternative method of assessing reading comprehension, which can be used with a variety of texts and across diverse populations and educational contexts. Additionally, this study adds a unique contribution to the extant literature on the SVT through an investigation of the precision of the instrument across proficiency levels. Data were gathered from a sample of 464 fourth-grade students from the Northeast region of the United States. Reliability was estimated using one, two, three, and four passage test forms. Two or three passages provided sufficient reliability. The conditional reliability analyses revealed that the SVT test scores were reliable for readers with average to below average proficiency, but did not provide reliable information for students who were very poor or strong readers.     

Campus conspiracies: security and intelligence engagement with universities from Kent State to counter-terrorism

ABSTRACT

Security and intelligence agency concerns with universities range from the commissioning and protection of security-sensitive research, the ongoing recruitment of staff and students for covert security and intelligence work, as well as prominent counter-terrorist concerns. This is an ethically charged terrain of moral ambiguity which raises issues not only of academic freedom and freedom of speech but a less explored, cross-disciplinary complex of intelligence-led interactions from protection of campus property and personnel to ideological battles at the heart of the Academy itself. Current-day counterterrorism on campus agendas is, then, only an intensified aspect of an historical but ongoing and likely future interface between universities and security and intelligence agencies. Drawing on exemplars from the Kent State University shootings on 4 May 1970 at the height of the Vietnam War to the present era of globalised counter-terrorism, the article uses securitisation theory to conceptualise the historical, contemporary and future parameters of university engagements with the security and intelligence agencies as ‘Incidental’, ‘Incendiary’, and ‘Inevitable’.