Christian Affiliation,Christian Practice,and Attitudes to Religious Diversity: A Quantitative Analysis among 13- to 15-year-old Female Students in the UK

Within the context of the “Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity” project at the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, this study examines the association between self-assigned Christian affiliation, self-reported Christian practice, and attitudes towards religious diversity among a sample of 5,748 13- to 15-year-old female students attending schools in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The two hypotheses being tested are that, among female students, nominal Christians do not differ in their attitudes towards religious diversity from unaffiliated students and that church attendance leads to less tolerance of other religious groups. The data partly support the first hypothesis but not the second. Churchgoing Christian female students are more interested in and more tolerant of other religious groups. The data also draw attention to the perceived importance of religious education in schools for shaping views on religion and on religious diversity among unaffiliated students, nominal Christians, and practising Christians. Both the Christian churches and religious education in school seem to have an important part to play in nurturing a tolerant and inclusive religiously diverse society in the UK.     

Transformative Learning: A Case for Using Grounded Theory as an Assessment Analytic

Transformative Learning Theory and pedagogies leverage disruptive experiences as catalysts for learning and teaching. By facilitating processes of critical analysis and reflection that challenge assumptions, transformative learning reframes what counts as knowledge and the sources and processes for gaining and producing it. Students develop a broader range of perspectives on and entry points for learning and behavior change engaging cognition, embodiment, aesthetics, emotions, and ethics (see Mezirow 1991 and Figures 1 and 2). The open‐inquiry, multi‐modal nature of transformative learning defies most traditional assessment strategies. This article demonstrates that grounded theory offers the rigorous qualitative analysis needed to document and track transformative learning outcomes in practice. By applying a grounded theory approach to data from over eighty student portfolios across several iterations of a Religion and Ecology course at Emory University, this article demonstrates a successful and replicable assessment of transformative learning pedagogies.     

Linking clergy psychological type profile and church growth in the Diocese of Chester: a pilot study

Two recent studies (one in England and one in Australia) have linked church growth and church decline with the psychological type profile of church leaders. The present study, conducted within the Diocese of Chester, compares the psychological type profile of two groups of clergy who had served in the same parishes for five years or more: 29 leading declining churches and 19 leading growing churches. The data found a significantly higher preference for perceiving among those leading growing churches, although there were no significant differences in terms of the orientations, the perceiving process, or the judging process.     

Introducing the Congregational Bonding Social Capital Scale: a study among Anglican churchgoers in south London

As social capital theory comes to play a part in quantitative congregational studies, so there is the need for established and tested measures of different forms of social capital to be available for inclusion in surveys. This article reports on the psychometric properties of the newly proposed Congregational Bonding Social Capital Scale (CBSCS) tested among 23,884 adult churchgoers throughout the Anglican Diocese of Southwark in south London. The data support the internal consistency reliability and construct validity of this 7-item measure.     

Systems factorial technology with R

Systems factorial technology (SFT) comprises a set of powerful nonparametric models and measures, together with a theory-driven experiment methodology termed the double factorial paradigm (DFP), for assessing the cognitive information-processing mechanisms supporting the processing of multiple sources of information in a given task (Townsend and Nozawa, Journal of Mathematical Psychology 39:321–360, 1995). We provide an overview of the model-based measures of SFT, together with a tutorial on designing a DFP experiment to take advantage of all SFT measures in a single experiment. Illustrative examples are given to highlight the breadth of applicability of these techniques across psychology. We further introduce and demonstrate a new package for performing SFT analyses using R for statistical computing.     

Resilience Among Women with HIV: Impact of Silencing the Self and Socioeconomic Factors

In the U.S., women account for over a quarter of the approximately 50,000 annual new HIV diagnoses and face intersecting and ubiquitous adversities including gender inequities, sexism, poverty, violence, and limited access to quality education and employment. Women are also subjected to prescribed gender roles such as silencing their needs in interpersonal relationships, which may lessen their ability to be resilient and function adaptively following adversity. Previous studies have often highlighted the struggles encountered by women with HIV without focusing on their strengths. The present cross-sectional study investigated the relationships of silencing the self and socioeconomic factors (education, employment, and income) with resilience in a sample of women with HIV. The sample consisted of 85 women with HIV, diverse ethnic/racial groups, aged 24–65 enrolled at the Chicago site of the Women’s Interagency HIV Study in the midwestern region of the United States. Measures included the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale -10 item and the Silencing the Self Scale (STSS). Participants showed high levels of resilience. Women with lower scores on the STSS (lower self-silencing) reported significantly higher resilience compared to women with higher STSS scores. Although employment significantly related to higher resilience, silencing the self tended to predict resilience over and above the contributions of employment, income, and education. Results suggest that intervention and prevention efforts aimed at decreasing silencing the self and increasing employment opportunities may improve resilience.     

Bullshit as a practical strategy for self-deceptive narrators

This paper argues that bullshit is a practical resource for self-deceiving individuals, or those who merely prefer to avoid self-examination, insofar as it is able to provide a mask for poor doxastic hygiene. While self-deception and bullshit are distinct phenomena, and bullshit does not cause self-deception, bullshit disrupts the capacity to interrogate the motivational biasses that fuel deception. The communicative misdirection engaged in by ordinary social bullshitters is applied reflexively by the self-deceiver to distort, evade, and obfuscate the self-deceiver's self-accounting. This discussion presupposes a broadly narrative approach to self-awareness and discusses how a motivated susceptibility to bullshit offers an explanation how our reports about ourselves can be frequently at odds with reality, and suggests that a complacency about rational validation of belief outside of self-certainty, i.e., the prevalence of bullshit, is even more of a threat than Frankfurt thought it to be.