Engaging religious experience in stroke rehabilitation

In this article, I respond to the problem of engaging with religious experience in health care environments. In particular, I illuminate the relational aspects of religious experience in the context of stroke rehabilitation by providing a commentary on data gathered from existing qualitative research and personal narratives in the acute and rehabilitation phases of stroke recovery. In so doing, I address the necessary balance of empathy and alterity in the art of resonant listening. I also provide some critical reflections on interdisciplinary approaches to engaging with religious experience with reference to a largely overlooked group of health care professionals—hospital chaplains.     

A randomized wait-list controlled analysis of the implementation integrity of team-initiated problem solving processes

Members of Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) teams from 34 elementary schools participated in a Team-Initiated Problem Solving (TIPS) Workshop and follow-up technical assistance. Within the context of a randomized wait-list controlled trial, team members who were the first recipients of the TIPS intervention demonstrated greater implementation integrity in using the problem-solving processes during their team meetings than did members of PBIS Teams in the Wait-List Control group. The success of TIPS at improving implementation integrity of the problem-solving processes is encouraging and suggests the value of conducting additional research focused on determining whether there is a functional relation between use of these problem-solving processes and actual resolution of targeted student academic and social problems.     

The burden of social proof: shared thresholds and social influence

Social influence rises with the number of influence sources, but the proposed relationship varies across theories, situations, and research paradigms. To clarify this relationship, I argue that people share some sense of where the "burden of social proof" lies in situations where opinions or choices are in conflict. This suggests a family of models sharing 2 key parameters, one corresponding to the location of the influence threshold, and the other reflecting its clarity--a factor that explains why discrete "tipping points" are not observed more frequently. The plausibility and implications of this account are examined using Monte Carlo and cellular automata simulations and the relative fit of competing models across classic data sets in the conformity, group deliberation, and social diffusion literatures.     

Youth Group Cliques: How Religious Goals Can Disguise Discriminatory Group Dynamics

This paper provides an in-depth, qualitative analysis of two Christian youth groups. Researchers conducted personal interviews with participating youth and their youth ministers and collected extensive field notes on participant observations of youth group events. Findings indicate the presence of youth group cliques with clear delineations about which participants are youth group insiders and which are outsiders. Results show that insider participants are typically socioeconomically-advantaged youth, while outsiders are typically youth from disadvantaged backgrounds. Despite the existence of these exclusionary practices within both groups, leaders in the two cases demonstrate differing levels of awareness of and response to these dynamics. This paper explores the specifics of both cases, illuminating who is targeted for exclusion within these groups and how this targeting varies across the two congregational contexts. Implications of these findings are that religious youth groups may perpetuate broader socioeconomic divisions. Specifically, the analysis reveals that rather than forming benign cliques, youth group members may be discriminating against others based on their relative socioeconomic advantage.     

Exploratory Bi-factor Analysis: The Oblique Case

Bi-factor analysis is a form of confirmatory factor analysis originally introduced by Holzinger and Swineford (Psychometrika 47:41?C54, 1937). The bi-factor model has a general factor, a number of group factors, and an explicit bi-factor structure. Jennrich and Bentler (Psychometrika 76:537?C549, 2011) introduced an exploratory form of bi-factor analysis that does not require one to provide an explicit bi-factor structure a priori. They use exploratory factor analysis and a bifactor rotation criterion designed to produce a rotated loading matrix that has an approximate bi-factor structure. Among other things this can be used as an aid in finding an explicit bi-factor structure for use in a confirmatory bi-factor analysis. They considered only orthogonal rotation. The purpose of this paper is to consider oblique rotation and to compare it to orthogonal rotation. Because there are many more oblique rotations of an initial loading matrix than orthogonal rotations, one expects the oblique results to approximate a bi-factor structure better than orthogonal rotations and this is indeed the case. A surprising result arises when oblique bi-factor rotation methods are applied to ideal data.     

Negotiating boundaries in the definition of life: Wittgensteinian and Darwinian insights on resolving conceptual border conflicts

What is the definition of life? Artificial life environments provide an interesting test case for this classical question. Understanding what such systems can tell us about biological life requires negotiating the tricky conceptual boundary between virtual and real life forms. Drawing from Wittgenstein’s analysis of the concept of a game and a Darwinian insight about classification, I argue that classifying life involves both causal and pragmatic elements. Rather than searching for a single, sharp definition, these considerations suggest that life is a cluster concept with fuzzy boundaries and that there are multiple legitimate ways to make the notion precise for different scientific purposes. This pluralist, realist account avoids unnecessary border disputes by emphasizing how science negotiates such questions in relation to theory and evidence. I also discuss several objections to this approach, including a “moral hesitation” some have to allowing broader application of the concept of life to include artificial life.