Gaining Ground from a Family and Cultural Legacy: A Teen Mother's Story of Repairing the World

A multigenerational longitudinal study of teen mothering provided prospective data on the intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in parenting traditions and caregiving legacies. Families that included a teen mother were first interviewed intensively in 1988–1989 and were reinterviewed in 1993, 1997, 2001, and 2005. All studies in the series were based on the phenomenology of everyday practices and the assumption that the self is constituted by practical, historical, and embodied understandings. Data were analyzed using the hermeneutic approach.     

Camp Invention®: A Creative,Inquiry‐Based Summer Enrichment Program for Elementary Students

Camp Invention® is a hands‐on creativity and science day camp run in partnership with more than 400 schools nationwide. The curriculum integrates science, history, mathematics, the arts, and fun — promoting creative learning and teamwork through interactive activities. In 2001, the Center for Creative Learning conducted an extensive nationwide evaluation of the camp's effectiveness and impact, surveying 17,526 participants, including campers, parents, and staff. The results strongly supported the positive impact of Camp Invention, for both girls and boys in urban and suburban settings, on attitudes towards creativity, active learning, and exploration. Camp Invention's innovative curriculum blends many important aspects of science and invention with the challenge of stimulating children's creativity and imagination.     

Fictionality and Imagination,Revisited

I present and discuss a counterexample to Kendall Walton's necessary condition for fictionality that arises from considering serial fictions. I argue that although Walton has not in fact provided a necessary condition for fictionality, a more complex version of Walton's condition is immune from the counterexample.     

The Secularization of Confessional Protests: The Role of Religious Processes of Rationalization and Differentiation

In the 1830s, a series of single-issue protests mobilized hundreds of thousands of Americans across the nation. In these protests against social problems like slavery and drinking, men and women gathered together to bear witness against what they viewed as sins, and to demand that their fellow Americans join them in confession. These confessional protests launched and linked a national wave of social movements. The origins of these movements were religious and evangelical. However, for many activists, the outcome of these protests led to a repudiation of this religious source. The development of these confessional protests reveals keys to the processes of secularization. Drawing on the letters and diaries of six white leading anti-slavery activists, we demonstrate how religious processes of rationalization and differentiation led to secularization. We present this development as a reminder to social theorists that processes immanent to religion have been fateful forces driving secularization.     

Interpersonal Trust and Emotion as Antecedents of Cooperation: Evidence From Korea1

In this field study (n = 514), we examined the relationships among interpersonal trust, interpersonal emotion, cooperation, and the characteristics of both the trustor and trustee at work. We found that interpersonal trust and interpersonal emotion were positively related to willingness to cooperate among members working in teams. We also found that interpersonal emotion was positively related to interpersonal trust. Interpersonal trust and interpersonal emotion, in turn, were predicted by 3 trustee characteristics: ability, benevolence, and integrity. Together, interpersonal trust, interpersonal emotion, and trustee characteristics accounted for 70% of the variance in willingness to cooperate among the team members.     

The Creativity of Korean Leaders and its Implications for Creativity Education*

This research explores the promoting elements of Korean leaders' creative achievements, and provides implications for creativity education which are suitable in the Korean sociocultural context. In‐depth interviews focusing on their school life and personal growth were held with twelve leaders, four each in the fields of science, humanities, and art. The results of these interviews revealed that a solid basis of basic knowledge, the ability to connect domains from experience in various fields, challenge, and social contribution were the promoting elements for creative achievement. In addition, permissive parents, psychological support from teachers, and horizontal relationships in organizations were affective. Thus, for promoting creativity in Korean education, the importance of knowledge‐base, shared values, teamwork, and teacher role are discussed.     

The Religious Institutional Base and Violent Crime in Rural Areas

Research on the relationship between religion and crime has typically focused on individual religiosity and delinquency, or moral communities and crime at the macro level. This study extends prior research by delineating the sociological implications of a strong religious institutional base, and investigating the ties between the religious institutional base and violent crime across rural communities. Multivariate regression analysis of Uniform Crime Report data on violent crime, Census of Churches and Church membership data, and U.S. Census data circa 2000 reveal that rural violent crime rates on average are consistently lower where there are more churches per capita. This relationship holds net of the overall adherence rates, the presence of civically engaged religious adherents, and the presence of conservative Protestant adherents. Moreover, regional variations are evident, with the South and the Midwest—two highly religious regions of the country—sustaining most of the observed institutional effects.