Religious Participation and Civic Engagement in a Secular Context: Evidence from Sweden on the Correlates of Attending Religious Services

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - The aim of the present study is to investigate the potential link between religious participation and civic engagement in...     

Das Deprivationskonzept in der Rechtsextremismusforschung

Economic deprivation and unemployment is — especially in the public debate — a very popular model if one tries to explain the development of right wing extremism. In the scientific discussion the evaluation of the concept is controversial. The results of empirical studies range from median to no effects at all. One reason for this heterogeneity of results may be due to the variance of different concepts that are in use. Therefore the present study tries to develop a systematic view on different concepts of deprivation. In the empirical analyses a comparative test of the explanatory power of these concepts is presented. It is shown that only collective, especially collective emotional deprivation has a significant impact on ethnocentric attitudes. However, deprivation on the individual level is related to ethnocentrism if social contexts are framed by situations of real economic conflicts.     

Ehrenamt in Deutschland und Großbritannien – Sprungbrett zurück auf den Arbeitsmarkt?

The article examines the influence of volunteering on re-employment chances of the unemployed in Germany and Great Britain. On the basis of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and the British Household Panel Study (BHPS), random effect logit models are used to show a positive influence of volunteering on the labour market chances mainly for young unemployed British males. The article develops a theoretical explanation for these findings based on human and social capital theories as well as on the Varieties of Capitalism approach. This enables the relevance of volunteering in the labour market to be evaluated, not only with respect to the volunteer’s sex and age but also with respect to the institutional context factors.     

Is There a Primary Mom? Parental Perceptions of Attachment Bond Hierarchies Within Lesbian Adoptive Families

Basic tenets of attachment theory were evaluated in a qualitative study of 15 lesbian couples with internationally adopted children, focusing on parental perceptions of a primary mother-child attachment within the families. Interviews with 30 mothers examined variables affecting the hierarchy of parenting bonds, including division of labor, time with the child, and parental legal status. All children developed attachments to both mothers, but 12 of the 15 had primary bonds to one mother despite shared parenting and division of labor between the partners. Quality of maternal caretaking was a salient contributing factor; no significant relationship existed between primary parenting and parental legal status.     

Book reviews

Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations. Gavriel Salomon (Ed.), Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 275 pages, $49.95.

The Computer as Medium. Peter Bøgh Andersen, Berit Holmqvist, & Jens F. Jensen (Eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 495 pages. $54.95.     

Modelling count data with overdispersion and spatial effects

In this paper we consider regression models for count data allowing for overdispersion in a Bayesian framework. We account for unobserved heterogeneity in the data in two ways. On the one hand, we consider more flexible models than a common Poisson model allowing for overdispersion in different ways. In particular, the negative binomial and the generalized Poisson (GP) distribution are addressed where overdispersion is modelled by an additional model parameter. Further, zero-inflated models in which overdispersion is assumed to be caused by an excessive number of zeros are discussed. On the other hand, extra spatial variability in the data is taken into account by adding correlated spatial random effects to the models. This approach allows for an underlying spatial dependency structure which is modelled using a conditional autoregressive prior based on Pettitt et al. in Stat Comput 12(4):353–367, (2002). In an application the presented models are used to analyse the number of invasive meningococcal disease cases in Germany in the year 2004. Models are compared according to the deviance information criterion (DIC) suggested by Spiegelhalter et al. in J R Stat Soc B64(4):583–640, (2002) and using proper scoring rules, see for example Gneiting and Raftery in Technical Report no. 463, University of Washington, (2004). We observe a rather high degree of overdispersion in the data which is captured best by the GP model when spatial effects are neglected. While the addition of spatial effects to the models allowing for overdispersion gives no or only little improvement, spatial Poisson models with spatially correlated or uncorrelated random effects are to be preferred over all other models according to the considered criteria.