When was secularization? Dating the decline of the British churches and locating its cause1

Dating the decline of Christianity in Britain has a vital bearing on its explanation. Recent work by social historians has challenged the sociological view that secularization is due to long‐term diffuse social processes by asserting that the churches remained stable and popular until the late 1950s and that the causes of decline lie in the social and cultural changes associated with the 1960s. We challenge this interpretation of the evidence. We also note that much of the decline of the churches is explained not by adult defection but by a failure to keep children in the faith. Given the importance of parental homogamy for the successful transmission of religious identity, the causes of decline in one generation may well lie in the experiences of the previous generation. We focus on the disruptive effects of the 1939–45 war on family formation and use survey data to argue for a staged model of decline that is compatible with the conventional gradual view of secularization.     

Audience Design and Context Discrepancy: How Online Debates Lead to Opinion Polarization

This article examines how the technical layout of some online platforms shapes the way individuals engage in public debate online. To do so, the research studies an empirical case of how public debating on Weibo—China's equivalent to Twitter—leads to opinion polarization. The technical layout of Weibo strongly influences how users debate with others. The thread‐based message structure fragments the interactional context, preventing users from gaining a clear picture about other discussants and the ongoing conversation. Weibo's technical design, which enables simultaneous interactions with multiple audiences (of which many users are unaware), further complicates the debates. Consequently, users become confused about their audience and where their replies are targeted, and subsequent interpersonal tension sparks as they adopt interactive strategies (sharing personal experiences, adding situational elaborations, and seeking solidarity through opinion) to reduce this confusion. Ironically, these strategies often serve to further polarize opinions. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/U5qdm6eiQ1M .     

MEASURING SELF-PERCEIVED RACIAL AND ETHNIC DISCRIMINATION IN SOCIAL SURVEYS

The aim of this article is to encourage a research agenda that attends to methodological considerations regarding measuring self-perceived racial and ethnic discrimination in social surveys. Toward this end, the author compared validity of alternative measures of discrimination. The first measure asks whether something unfair or bad has happened because of race and ethnicity, whereas the second measure asks about generic unfair events independent of attribution to race or ethnicity. In a probability sample of 586 Black respondents living in the Detroit metropolitan area interviewed in 1995, it was found that the prevalence of self-perceived racial and ethnic discrimination depended on question framing. Moreover, different respondents were likely to respond affirmatively to explicit versus generic measures of discrimination; importantly, the mental health consequences of self-perceived racial and ethnic discrimination varied by question framing. The results confirmed that the prevalence, correlates, and psychological impact of self-perceived discrimination should be evaluated on the basis of measurement sensitivity.     

BOURDIEU'S CONCEPT OF REFLEXIVITY AS METALITERACY

For Bourdieu, the extent to which agents can attain knowledge of, and negotiate, various cultural fields is dependent upon, and explicable in terms of, two epistemological types. The first is a practical sense (the ‘logic of practice’), while the second involves a sort of conscious comprehension that he names ‘reflexivity’. Bourdieu defines reflexivity as an interrogation of the three types of limitations (of social position, of field and of the scholastic point of view) that are constitutive of knowledge itself. But the reflexive relation to the habitus, the demands and influences exerted by cultural fields, and one's own practices within those fields, cannot be understood simply as something that is obtained by the subject; rather, any reflexive relation to the doxa and illusio of the field must be a constitutive part of that field. This paper identifies a number of principles taken from Bourdieu's work that clarify how, where and why the reflexive ‘surpassing’ of literacy might occur. But we also suggest, contra Bourdieu, that only fields that are informed or characterized by the scholastic point of view are likely to be characterized by the set of conditions constitutive of reflexive knowledge; and that the scholastic point of view is therefore, simultaneously, both a potential impediment to, and a condition (almost necessary) of the production of reflexive knowledge.     

Expectation–maximization algorithm for system-based lifetime data with unknown system structure

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - In science and engineering, we are often interested in learning about the lifetime characteristics of the system as well as those of the components that made...     

Nonstationary regression models with a lagged dependent variable

This paper studies regression models with a lagged dependent variable when both the dependent and independent variables are nonstationary, and the regression model is misspecified in some dimension. In particular, we discuss the limiting properties of leastsquares estimates of the parameters in such regression models, and the limiting distributions of their test statistics. We show that the estimate of the lagged dependent variable tends to unity asymptotically independent of its true value, while the estimates of the independent variables tend to zero. The limiting distributions of their test statistics are shown to diverge with sample size.     

Toolkit for assessing the readiness of local safeguarding children boards: origins,ingredients and applications

A central plank in the transformation of children's services in England and Wales is the creation on a statutory footing of Local Safeguarding Children Boards in every local authority area. The focus of the boards will be on the promotion, multiagency coordination and scrutiny of services to safeguard and promote children's welfare. They replace Area Child Protection Committees, which were judged to be ineffective. This paper presents the origins, ingredients and applications of an audit and preparation Toolkit designed to support the establishment of the new boards. The Toolkit was developed from the findings of a survey of 204 members of 16 ACPCs by the first author, and has been tested and refined through work with a large number of ACPCs. This survey identified problematic aspects of interagency collaboration that will need remedying if the new boards are to succeed where the previous committees failed. These include: the board's strategic relationship to wider children's planning fora; operational definition of the term ‘safeguarding’; collective accountability; level of membership; performance management capacity; service user consultation. The ingredients of the Toolkit are described in relation to the findings of the survey. The paper concludes with a discussion of the applications and approaches to be considered in using the Toolkit. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.