Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Reflections towards an Explorative Theology1

Abstract: The postmodern critique has rendered traditional justifications of the practice of research incredible. Further, the status of theological research, in which ‘the discovery of new facts’ or the like is at best ambiguous as an aim, must be under question. This article argues that the aim of theological research is to discover what life lived as if theological claims were true might look like.     

THE BRITISH ABILITY SCALES SPEED OF INFORMATION PROCESSING SUBTEST: WHAT DOES IT MEASURE?

Summary . Recent theory and research has focused on the relationship between speed of performing elementary cognitive operations and general intelligence. The developers of the British Ability Scales (BAS) included the Speed of Information Processing (SOIP) subtest as a measure of mental processing speed. To test the validity of the SOIP subtest, a group of 12-year-old children were given the BAS short-form, including the SOIP subtest, and a series of electronically timed reaction time (RT) tasks. Correlations between RT and SOIP were higher than correlations between RT and other BAS subtests, suggesting convergent and discriminant validity. A hierarchical factor analysis of the data shows that the BAS SOIP subtest is related more to speed of apprehension (RT) than to speed of making the motor response, or movement time (MT).     

Predicting 13-year-olds' drinking using parents' self-reported alcohol use and restrictiveness compared with offspring's perception

This study examined whether offspring's perception of parental frequency of alcohol use and restrictiveness towards offspring's alcohol use could be used as a substitute for parental self-reports. Offspring's perception were compared with parents' self-reported alcohol use and restrictiveness in ability to predict offspring's own alcohol use. Respondents were 924 offspring, 642 fathers and 729 mothers. Correlations between fathers' and mothers' self-reported frequency of drinking alcohol and offspring's reports of parental frequency of drinking alcohol ranged from 0.55 to 0.70. Fathers' and mothers' self-reported alccohl use and restrictiveness explained less than two per cent of the variance in their offspring's alcohol use in regression analyses, while offspring's perception of parental drinking frequency and restrictiveness exaplained about eight per cent of the variance in offspring's alcohol use. These results represent a challenge to studies of young adolescents which interpret offspring's reports of parents' alcohol use as a surrogate measure 'of parents' self-reported alcohol use.     

An application of a discriminant analysis, based on the weighted H-index—a reanalysis

Abstract.— A discriminant-analysis method for dichotomized data, based on the weighted H -index as the similarity measure between two persons, is introduced. The weight assigned each item is a strictly increasing function of the absolute value of its D -estimate. Here, only power functions are used. The method which is called the WHIDD-analysis, is applied to some clinical data (Jonsson, 1975). The power of 3 produces a correct classification of all 32 persons in the validation group.     

Adolescents'' alcohol use related to perceived norms

A questionnaire survey was carried out among 898 Norwegian adolescents age twelve to twenty. The study focused on the relation between adolescents' alcohol use on one side and estimated drinking norms (peers' drinking) together with attributed opinion norms (parents' and friends' acceptance of adolescents' alcohol use) on the other. On average, 5% of students in 7th, 8th, and 9th grade reported weekly alcohol use. They overestimated the number of fellow students using alcohol every week seven-fold. Students' estimates were significantly related to self-reported alcohol use. Even in high-school (10th, 11th and 12th grade) where 29% reported weekly alcohol use, students overestimated number of weekly drinkers among friends and fellow students by two-fold. Contrary to the results from a previous study conducted in Norway, in this study opinions attributed to both friends and parents about adolescents' alcohol use were significantly related to the students' own alcohol use. Estimated behavior norms and attributed opinion norms explained 46% of the observed variance in students' self-reported frequency of drinking. In a health promotion context, these results point to the importance of correcting student misconceptions about how often friends and fellow students drink alcohol.