The Religious Context of Welfare Attitudes

This article examines the influence of three dimensions of religion—belonging (faith tradition membership), behaving (frequency of service attendance), and context (one's relationship to aggregate population characteristics)—on attitudes toward multiple forms of state‐provided social protection, or welfare attitudes. To do so, this article uses data from 17 countries surveyed in the 2006 “Role of Government” wave of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). Results from mixed effects regression show that contextual effects are highly predictive of welfare attitudes. Nations that are more religiously heterogeneous are less supportive of state protection, while nations that are more homogeneous, particularly Catholic nations, are more supportive. Results hold net of fractionalization, political institutional measures, and economic characteristics. At the individual level, all three dimensions of religiosity are predictive of welfare attitudes. These patterns suggest that in rich Western democracies, religion continues to play an important role in structuring the moral economies.     

Building reciprocity: the dialectic processes of creating a grounded theory and the emergence of a theoretical framework

We reflect on and illustrate with concrete examples the various systematic and creative steps taken along the process of grounded theory (GT). This process led to the emergence of a theoretical framework centered on building reciprocity as a way of collaborating with socio-economically disadvantaged communities and a means for facilitating poverty-reduction initiatives. This article aims to present the systematic processes of analysis that lie behind the theoretical framework and to reflect on the lessons learned along the path to creating a GT. In this way, the emergence of the theoretical framework is examined along the different inductive and analytic steps, and the interrelation between concepts is discussed. Theoretical sensitivity, pacing, sampling, coding, memoing, and sorting in this research are illustrated and brought to light.     

Learning at the Margin: New Models of Strength

SUMMARY

This article was originally presented at the April, 2000 Learning from Women Conference sponsored by the Harvard Medical School and the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute. It explores the ways in which marginalization and the use of power-over maneuvers and privilege contribute to disconnection at a personal and societal level. Strength in vulnerability is proposed as an alternative to strength in isolation. The author suggests that courage is created in connection and the distorting effects of the myth of the separate-self must be challenged in order to appreciate the power of connection. This article examines specific ways to resist the disconnecting and disempowering effects of hyper-individualistic values both in and out of therapy.