A REASSESSMENT OF STATISTICAL POWER ANALYSIS IN HUMAN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

This study conducted a statistical power analysis of 64 articles appearing in the first four volumes of Human Communication Research, 1974–1978. Each article was examined, using Cohen's revised handbook, assuming nondirectional null hypotheses and an alpha level of .05. Statistical power, the probability of rejecting a false null hypothesis, was calculated for small, medium, and large experimental effect sizes and averaged by article and volume. Results indicated that the average probability of beta errors appears to have decreased over time, providing a greater chance of rejecting false null hypotheses, but this also raised several power-related issues relevant to communication research in general.     

Working with Mental Health Service Users to Change Mental Health Services

During the last ten years in the UK, service user consultation and collaboration has gradually entered the vocabulary of people providing and purchasing mental health services. However, we are not convinced that much needed change in mental health services will be achieved as a function of increased commitment to market consumerism. We argue here that service user consultation and collaboration should take account of the effects of social inequalities on mental health and on mental health services. This perspective highlights the need for fundamental change in mental health services, and helps us to appreciate the strength of resistance to change, and to understand some of the dynamics involved. We describe here how this perspective has motivated and shaped our own efforts to collaborate responsibly with service users to change mental health services.     

Not in My Backyard: Studies of Other Religions in the Context of SSSR—RRA Annual Meetings

In the early years of the two associations, relatively few papers or sessions focused on religions other than Christianity or on religion outside North America, with the partial exception of Judaism. The combined effects of organizational growth and events in the surrounding world, however, led to progressively more treatment of “other” religions and the religions of “others.” Beginning in the mid‐1960s, specific themes of “otherness” established themselves in the meeting programs, including African‐American religion, women and religion, new religions, and Latin American/Latino/a religion. In the 1980s attention spread to the religions of Africa, Eastern Europe, East Asia, the Caribbean, among other places. Although the process is far from complete, its acceleration during the 1990s allows one to predict that it will continue.     

Against Desert as a Forward-Looking Concept

Fred Feldman and, more recently, David Schmidtz have challenged the standard view that a person's desert is based strictly on past and present facts about him. I argue that Feldman's attempt to overturn this 'received wisdom' about desert's temporal orientation is unsuccessful, since his examples do not establish that what a person deserves now can be based on what will occur in the future. In addition, his forward-looking account introduces an unnecessary asymmetry regarding desert's temporal orientation in different contexts. Schmidtz advances a promissory account of desert, only part of which presents a strong challenge to the received wisdom. After disambiguating the two main elements of his account, I examine Schmidtz's arguments for forward-looking desert. I find these arguments to be unconvincing because they seem to either rely on past or present facts about people, including people's dispositions, or they give us desert without desert bases. I briefly examine the relationship between desert and merit, and I argue that some dispositions might be desert bases and others might be merit bases. I conclude the paper with a summary of the arguments against desert as a forward-looking concept.     

LITURGICALLY TRAINED MEMORY: A READING OF SUMMA THEOLOGIAE III.83

Drawing on Ciceronian rhetorical tropes, Thomas Aquinas treats the rite of the Eucharist in terms of the classical ars memoriae. The Eucharist, for Aquinas, is the schooling in desire whereby we are trained to order the associations of our memory to their proper objects in terms of their relations to God. He thus conceives of the liturgy of the Mass as rhetoric proper, which truly teaches, moves and delights. Since memory is the condition of all thought, as both Thomas and Augustine claim, the Eucharist is the “site” of all theological production, and therefore the liturgy is the art of memory of which all other similar arts are derivative.