Religiosity and Perceived Future Ascetic Deviance and Delinquency among Mormon Adolescents: Testing the "This-Worldly" Supernatural Sanctions Thesis

Previous religiosity-delinquency research primarily explores hellfire belief and aspects of religious social bonding. Both hellfire belief and religious social bonding have been hypothesized to reduce delinquency. Borrowing from classical deterrence theory, there are strong theoretical reasons for believing that an additional dimension of religiosity—namely, belief in "this-worldly" supernatural sanctions (i.e., belief that God rewards and punishes in this life)—may also be inversely related to adolescent delinquency. This dimension of religiosity has not been explored in past empirical research. This article addresses this lack by specifically testing whether belief in this-worldly supernatural sanctions is related to subjectively perceived future ascetic deviance and delinquency among a sample of 1,393 adolescent members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e., the Mormons). Logistic regression results indicate that, along with religious social bonding, belief in this-worldly supernatural sanctions has an independent effect on perceived future ascetic deviance (e.g., alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use) and perceived future delinquency (e.g., property and personal offenses) when controlling for relevant demographic and theoretical variables.     

Comparing gang and individual rapes in a community sample of urban women

Little research has compared victims of gang and individual rapes, with only a few studies of college and police samples. This study compared gang (e.g., multiple offender) and individual (e.g., single offender) rapes in a large, diverse sample of female victims from the community. Comparisons of trauma histories (e.g., child sexual abuse), assault characteristics (e.g., offender violence) and outcomes (sexual acts, physical injuries), and current functioning (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder, lifetime suicide attempts) showed that gang rape victims were worse off overall compared with victims of single offenders. In terms of help seeking, there were few differences in informal support seeking, but gang rape victims perceived their social networks more negatively. Gang rape victims reported to police, medical, and mental health sources more often than single-offender victims and received more negative social reactions from those they told about their assaults. Suggestions for future research and intervention with gang rape victims are provided.     

Self-reports of information seeking: Is social desirability in play?

Social desirability, the likelihood of individuals to overreport behaviors they perceive to be approved by others, is often cited as a limitation in research but rarely controlled in a systematic manner. Social desirability can influence self-reported behaviors (e.g., voting behavior) and communication variables (e.g., argumentativeness). Information seeking may be susceptible to the effects of social desirability as knowledge and information are generally desired, and thus may be prone to overreporting. This article presents results from two online, information-seeking tracking studies investigating the influence of social desirability on self-reported information seeking. Participants indicated how much time they actually spent seeking information on a website. Unbeknownst to participants, their website use was being tracked using Google Analytics. This article compares actual time spent seeking information to reported information-seeking time. Results suggest that participants overreport information seeking in these two studies; social desirability may explain this result.     

Families With Children and Adolescents: A Review,Critique, and Future Agenda

This decade's literature on families with children and adolescents can be broadly organized around the implications for youth of family statuses (e.g., family structure) and family processes (e.g., parenting). These overlapping bodies of research built on past work by emphasizing the dynamic nature of family life and the intersection of families with other ecological settings, exploring race/ethnic diversity, identifying mechanisms connecting family and child/adolescent factors, and taking steps to address the threats to causal inference that have long been a problem for family studies. Continuing these trends in the future will be valuable, as will increasing the number of international comparisons, exploring “new” kinds of family diversity, and capturing the convergence of multiple statuses and processes over time.     

Understanding the philosophical positions of classical and neopragmatists for mixed methods research

Pragmatism is the most popular philosophy/paradigm in the international field of mixed methods research (MMR). This article therefore introduces, describes, and contrasts the philosophies of the most well known pragmatists, including the three most important classical pragmatists (Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey) and two neopragmatists (Richard Rorty and Susan Haack). It is shown that Rorty and James fit well with qualitatively driven MMR (i.?e., MMR where the qualitative component of the study is primary); Peirce fits well with quantitatively driven MMR (i.?e., MMR where the quantitative component is primary); and Dewey fits well with MMR that attempts to treat qualitative and quantitative research/philosophy equally (i.?e., equal-status mixed methods research). Importantly, it is shown here that pragmatism offers a way out of many philosophy of science quagmires facing social researchers and it offers a promising philosophy for mixed methods research practice.     

Attrition rate in infant fNIRS research: A meta-analysis

Understanding the trends and predictors of attrition rate, or the proportion of collected data that is excluded from the final analyses, is important for accurate research planning, assessing data integrity, and ensuring generalizability. In this pre-registered meta-analysis, we reviewed 182 publications in infant (0–24 months) functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) research published from 1998 to April 9, 2020, and investigated the trends and predictors of attrition. The average attrition rate was 34.23% among 272 experiments across all 182 publications. Among a subset of 136 experiments that reported the specific reasons for subject exclusion, 21.50% of the attrition was infant-driven, while 14.21% was signal-driven. Subject characteristics (e.g., age) and study design (e.g., fNIRS cap configuration, block/trial design, and stimulus type) predicted the total and subject-driven attrition rates, suggesting that modifying the recruitment pool or the study design can meaningfully reduce the attrition rate in infant fNIRS research. Based on the findings, we established guidelines for reporting the attrition rate for scientific transparency and made recommendations to minimize the attrition rates. This research can facilitate developmental cognitive neuroscientists in their quest toward increasingly rigorous and representative research.     

Research on the Nature and Determinants of Marital Satisfaction: A Decade in Review

Scientific study of marital satisfaction attracted widespread attention in the 1990s from scholars representing diverse orientations and goals. This article highlights key conceptual and empirical advances that have emerged in the past decade, with particular emphasis on (a) interpersonal processes that operate within marriage, including cognition, affect, physiology, behavioral patterning, social support, and violence; (b) the milieus within which marriages operate, including microcontexts (e.g., the presence of children, life stressors and transitions) and macrocontexts (e.g., economic factors, perceived mate availability); and (c) the conceptualization and measurement of marital satisfaction, including 2‐dimensional, trajectory‐based, and social‐cognitive approaches. Notwithstanding the continued need for theoretical progress in understanding the nature and determinants of marital satisfaction, we conclude by calling for more large‐scale longitudinal research that links marital processes with sociocultural contexts, for more disconfirmatory than confirmatory research, and for research that directly guides preventive, clinical, and policy‐level interventions.     

The Career Development Quarterly: A 22‐Year Publication Pattern Metastudy

Patterns of articles published in The Career Development Quarterly (CDQ) from 1990 to 2011 were reviewed in this metastudy. Author characteristics (e.g., gender, employment setting, nation of domicile) and article characteristics (e.g., topic, type, design, sample, sample size, participant type, statistical procedures and sophistication) were described and analyzed for trends over time. Significant changes were noted in increased proportions of female authors, international contributors, research articles, more sophisticated research designs, and decreased numbers of practitioner‐authors. These trends highlight a robust journal that continues to evolve to address changing career development and counseling challenges.     

eHealth recruitment challenges

Little is known about effective eHealth recruitment methods. This paper presents recruitment challenges associated with enrolling African-American girls aged 8–10 years in an eHealth obesity prevention program, their effect on the recruitment plan, and potential implications for eHealth research.Although the initial recruitment strategy was literature-informed, it failed to enroll the desired number of girls within a reasonable time period. Therefore, the recruitment strategy was reformulated to incorporate principles of social marketing and traditional marketing techniques. The resulting plan included both targeted, highly specific strategies (e.g., selected churches), and more broad-based approaches (e.g., media exposure, mass mailings, radio advertisements).The revised plan enabled recruitment goals to be attained. Media appeared to be particularly effective at reaching the intended audience. Future research should identify the most effective recruitment strategies for reaching potential eHealth audiences.     

A Social Ecology of Bias-Based Bullying of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth: Toward a Conceptualization of Conversion Bullying

Homophobic bullying is pervasive and deleterious, and a source of extensive health and mental health disparities affecting sexual and gender minority youth (SGMY). Investigations conducted over the past two decades across the social ecology of SGMY indicate individual (e.g., gender), microsystem (e.g., schools), and exosystem level (e.g., community norms) factors associated with homophobic bullying. Emerging evidence at the macrosystem level demonstrates the powerful influence of laws, policies, and ideologies on the population health of sexual minority adults. Based on social ecological theory and emerging evidence at the macrosystem level, we advance a conceptualization of the religious social ecology of homophobic bullying and articulate the construct of conversion bullying, a form of bias-based bullying that may be unique to SGMY. Conversion bullying is manifested in the invocation of religious rhetoric and rationalizations in repeated acts of peer aggression against SGMY that cause harm, based on the premise that same-sex attractions and behaviors are immoral or unnatural and with implicit or explicit communication that one should change one's sexuality to conform to heteronormative ideals. We describe implications of conversion bullying for social work practice, education, social policy, and research.     

Family Matters: Research on Family Ties and Health, 2010 to 2020

Family ties have wide-ranging consequences for health, for better and for worse. This decade review uses a life course perspective to frame significant advances in research on the effects of family structure and transitions (e.g., marital status) and family dynamics and quality (e.g., emotional support from family members) on health across the life course. Significant advances include the linking of childhood family experiences to health at older ages, identification of biosocial processes that explain how family ties influence health throughout life, research on social contagion showing how family members influence one another's health, and attention to diversity in family and health dynamics, including gender, sexuality, socioeconomic, and racial diversity. Significant innovations in methods include dyadic and family-level analysis and causal inference strategies. The review concludes by identifying directions for future research on families and health, advocating for a “family biography” framework to guide future research, and calling for more research specifically designed to assess policies that affect families and their health from childhood into later life.     

The Relative Salience of Physiognomic Cues in Differentiating Faces: A Methodological Tool

This research utilized a novel methodology to explore the relative salience of facial cues to age, sex, race, and emotion in differentiating faces. Inspired by the Stroop interference effect, participants viewed pairs of schematic faces on a computer that differed simultaneously along two facial dimensions (e.g., race and age) and were prompted to make similarity judgments about the faces along one of the dimensions (e.g., race). On a second round of trials, judgments were made along the other dimension (e.g., age). Analysis of response speed and accuracy revealed that participants judged the race of the faces more quickly and with fewer errors compared to their age, gender, or emotional expression. Methodological and theoretical implications for studying the role of facial cues in social perception are discussed.     

Equity versus equality: Spectators,stakeholders and groups

Justice figures prominently in a wide variety of economically important contexts that involve both third parties and involved parties, e.g., in environmental regulation, international trade, and legal proceedings. The primary rivals for fairness rules over the distribution of a fixed good are equality and equity (i.e., allocations that are proportional to contributions). This paper reports the results of a dictator experiment in relation to a large variety of factors that might affect these rules, including performance on a real effort task, in-group identity, subject pools, allocative power, cultural orientation and demographic variables. We find impersonal third parties (i.e., Spectators) allocating anonymously for others favor equity. Subjects who share personal stakes anonymously with recipients (i.e., Stakeholders) allocate amounts between equity and equality. Stakeholders, who meet and communicate with their recipients (i.e., In-groups), allocate even more equally than anonymous stakeholders to their own recipients and behave more selfishly toward other subjects (i.e., Out-groups). These findings are robust with respect to subject pool, a measure of culture, and demographic variables, which seldom matter. We conclude that there is considerable agreement about these fairness rules, when parties are well informed, although there remain important differences across subject pools in the willingness to act on those rules.     

自雇者与受雇者的社会资本差异研究

研究社会资本在地位获得模型中的地位和作用时有两个难点必须理清。一是社会资本的概念和测量问题,二是劳动力市场内的不同就业状态(例如自雇与受雇)是否会对不同方法测量到的当前社会资本的生成产生影响。这对于全面理解社会资本理论以及社会资本在地位获得模型中的作用非常重要。本研究论证了当前几类社会资本测量工具在设计原理和测量功能上存在不同,研究者可根据研究目的和测量情境来设计和使用恰当的测量工具。本研究使用2009年中国大城市社会网与求职调查中的广州数据,应用多个回归模型分析了通过三种方法测量到的讨论网社会资本、拜年网社会资本和饭局网社会资本在自雇者与受雇者两个群体间的差异。研究发现,首先,自雇者与受雇者的讨论网社会资本不存在差异;其次,相对于受雇者,自雇者更主动地去投资并拥有更多的拜年网社会资本和饭局网社会资本。     

Meta-Analyses of the Intra- and Interpersonal Outcomes of Interpersonal Coordination

Interpersonal coordination, the extent to which social partners coordinate each other’s postures and mannerisms, acts as a “social glue” that serves both individual and social goals, such as producing prosocial behaviors and facilitating harmonious interactions. Research in this area has become prominent in a variety of domains both within and outside of psychology, forming a sizeable literature dedicated to investigating the causes and consequences of interpersonal coordination. We conducted a series of meta-analyses on studies that treated interpersonal coordination as an independent variable, in order to measure its effect on several intrapersonal (e.g., mood, need to belong) and interpersonal (e.g., prosocial behavior) outcomes, as well as several potential moderators (e.g., percentage of female participants) that may affect the strength of the effect. Overall, the results demonstrated that the positive effects of interpersonal coordination are robust, with a few exceptions specific to intrapersonal outcomes. These findings provide a much-needed quantitative summary of the literature on interpersonal coordination, and highlight areas that merit future research.     

Better together? Cooperation between youth welfare office and child and adolescent psychiatry: A methodological approach

Previous international literature describes a lack of systematic research about cross-institutional cooperation in social and health services although the need is indicated. More and more children and adolescents have complex psychosocial needs. Thus, they require help from different institutions and professions to receive optimal care. However, there is a great need of improvement of the cooperation between institutions in social (e.g. Youth Welfare Office) and health services (e.g. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (CAP), even in Germany. Therefore, an official Agreement of Cooperation (AoC) between these institutions was implemented as a first attempt to enhance and structure cross-institutional work in Dresden, Germany. This methodological paper describes the corresponding evaluation project that includes cross-sectional and longitudinal assessments. It thereby focuses on the employees' and families' satisfaction as well as the psychosocial development and mental health of children at the intersection of the aforementioned institutions before and after the implementation of the AoC. In addition, it gives a review of literature about cross-institutional work.     

An organization-environment framework for assessing program implementation

Evaluations of health programs are typically conducted from a rational bureaucratic framework in which client change and client outcome are seen as logical outcomes of program activity. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for examining organizational consequences of program implementation. Factors in the internal environment (e.g., the hospital) and the external environment (e.g., the community) which contribute to the program's success or failure, are considered. Observational and structured interview data are used to compare two state funded perinatal projects, one an organizational "success" and the other a costly failure. Attributes of external environments which may be important to successful implementation include demand for services, provider competition, access to information, social beliefs, and professional commitment. Important features of the internal environment include host organization commitment and conflict, and structural attributes: complexity, formalization, centralization, and coordination. The paper concludes with theoretically-based questions which serve as guidelines for process evaluation.     

The Best of Ties,the Worst of Ties: Close,Problematic, and Ambivalent Social Relationships

This study builds on research addressing intergenerational ambivalence by considering emotional ambivalence toward the wider social network. Men and women ages 13 to 99 (N = 187) completed diagrams of their close and problematic social relationships. Social ties were classified as solely close, solely problematic, or ambivalent, based on network placement (n = 3,392 social contacts). Multilevel models revealed that individuals viewed certain close familial ties (e.g., spouse, son or daughter, parent, sibling) with greater ambivalence than they viewed more distal family ties, friendships, or acquaintances. Participants classified more acquaintances than other relationships as solely problematic. Feeling closer to a social partner was associated with increased ambivalence. Older adults were more likely to classify their relationships as solely close than as ambivalent, in comparison with younger adults. Discussion focuses on tension and closeness in familial and nonfamilial relationships.     

Processes of Religious and Spiritual Influence in Adolescence: A Systematic Review of 30 Years of Research

This is a systematic review of 30 years (1988‐2017) of empirical research on processes of religious/spiritual influence in adolescence. We followed a multi‐step process that resulted in 241 studies organized according to eight research questions and the corresponding methods and analyses typically used to address them. We coded these studies based on the dimensions of religiosity/spirituality and the youth outcomes involved. In some cases (quantitative studies of mediation and moderation, as well as qualitative studies) we also coded a third process variable. Results of the coding process revealed a number of interesting patterns. First, religiosity/spirituality is generally adaptive for adolescents, protecting them from negative outcomes (e.g., risk behaviors and mental illness), and promoting positive youth development and flourishing. Nevertheless, in some contexts, religiosity/spirituality may be at least partially maladaptive. Second, there is some evidence, from experimental and longitudinal studies, that relations between religiosity/spirituality and adaptive outcomes are causal. Third, there are numerous complex and dynamic processes by which religiosity/spirituality relate to youth outcomes. In terms of mediation studies, the most salient mediating processes seem to involve religiosity/spirituality dimensions, peers, values/attitudes, and social control/norms. Fourth, religiosity/spirituality is multidimensional, involving various interwoven facets at the individual and ecological levels. Private or personal aspects of religiosity/spirituality (e.g., religious/spiritual importance) tend to be more salient predictors of outcomes than public aspects of religiosity/spirituality (e.g., religious worship service attendance). The results of this systematic review point to promising directions for future research. First, more research is needed studying a broader range of dimensions of religiosity/spirituality, processes of influence, and outcomes. In terms of religiosity/spirituality, much of the prior work has focused on overall religiosity/spirituality, and religious/spiritual behaviors (e.g., worship service attendance). In terms of outcomes, the emphasis has been on religiosity/spirituality protecting against maladaptive outcomes (e.g., substance use). Second, more research is needed examining the role of culture, and using more rigorous methods (e.g., experience sampling, experimental design, longitudinal design, or mixed methods). This systematic review provides a detailed analysis of what is known regarding processes of religious/spiritual influence in the lives of adolescents, and hopefully better positions researchers to move the field forward.