Merging the Religious Congregations and Membership Studies: A Data File for Documenting American Religious Change

The decennial religious congregations and membership studies are a popular data source for analyzing local religious composition and diversity, but several methodological challenges hinder merging the datasets for longitudinal analyses. In this paper, we introduce strategies for addressing four of the most serious challenges: religious mergers and schisms, changes in membership standards within certain groups, missing data and changes in county boundaries. In doing so we successfully merge the 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010 collections and build new longitudinal datasets of congregational and membership counts at the state and county levels. These changes increase religious group representation from 48 to 76, reduce bias from missing data, allow for the more reliable inclusion of 20–23 million adherents in each year, and improve overall ease of use. We also document instances when corrections were not possible and alert readers to the limitations of the merged files when measuring change among certain groups. The new longitudinal files are accessible from theARDA.com.     

A Theory of Necessities

Journal of Philosophical Logic - We develop a theory of necessity operators within a version of higher-order logic that is neutral about how fine-grained reality is. The theory is axiomatized in...     

Increasing Vegetable Consumption in Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Pre-meal Presentation: A Preliminary Analysis

This study examined the effect of pre-meal presentation on the consumption of vegetables in a sample of 16 students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These 16 students (75% male; mean age?=?13 years; age range 8–18 years) were enrolled in a private school serving children with autism. School staff offered participants 10 small pieces of two vegetables during lunch (baseline) or prior to lunch (pre-meal presentation). Observers recorded the number of bites students consumed. We used an A–B–A–B design to examine the effects of pre-meal presentation. Results were evaluated using a mixed-method, individual- and group-level, analysis. Pre-meal presentation resulted in increased vegetable consumption for 9 of the 16 participants. A reversal to baseline demonstrated expected decreases in bites consumed, and the subsequent return to intervention demonstrated expected increases in bites consumed. One-way repeated measures ANOVA compared bites consumed per session across 10 four-session study blocks and found significant differences between these two conditions. Paired comparisons revealed no change in bites consumed per session from baseline to intervention block #1, but significant increases from baseline to intervention #2 and all subsequent intervention blocks. Our results suggested pre-meal presentation can serve as a low-cost, low-effort intervention for increasing vegetable consumption for some children with ASD.

     

The intersubjective responsibility of durational trauma: Contributions of Bergson and Levinas to the philosophy of trauma

Continental Philosophy Review - In public discourse trauma is predominantly framed as an overwhelming event undergone by the individual. In this article I first provide a brief genealogy to trace...     

The Logic of Opacity

We explore the view that Frege's puzzle is a source of straightforward counterexamples to Leibniz's law. Taking this seriously requires us to revise the classical logic of quantifiers and identity; we work out the options, in the context of higher‐order logic. The logics we arrive at provide the resources for a straightforward semantics of attitude reports that is consistent with the Millian thesis that the meaning of a name is just the thing it stands for. We provide models to show that some of these logics are non‐degenerate.     

A Meta-Analysis of Task and Training Characteristics that Contribute to or Attenuate the Effectiveness of the After-Action Review (or Debrief)

This study expands on Keiser and Arthur’s (2021) meta-analysis of the after-action review (AAR), or debrief, by examining six additional task and training characteristics that contribute to or attenuate its effectiveness. The findings based on a bare-bones meta-analysis of results from 83 studies (134 ds [955 teams; 4,684 individuals]) indicate that the effectiveness of the AAR (overall d = 0.92) does indeed vary across the pertinent characteristics. The primary impact of this study pertains to the practical implementation of AARs; notably, the findings indicate that the AAR is particularly effective in task environments that are characterized by a combination of high complexity and ambiguity in terms of offering no intrinsic feedback. The types of tasks—often project and decision-making—that more commonly entail these characteristics are frequently used in industries that do not traditionally use the AAR. The results also suggest that more recent variants of the AAR (i.e., a reaction phase, a canned performance review) do not meaningfully add to its effectiveness. These findings are combined with those from prior meta-analyses to derive 11 empirically-based practical guidelines for the use of AARs. In sum, this study highlights the complexity of the AAR that results from the independent and interdependent influence among various components and characteristics, the examination of the effects of novel and ostensibly distinct variants or approaches to AARs, and the extension of AARs to tasks and contexts in which they are less commonly used.