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Much of the survey research on religion/spirituality and mental health in the U.S. must be assumed to capture stable respondent traits when it is possible temporary states are actually being record...

One of the most important decisions in any study of spirituality is the method used to collect information about spiritual life. This methodological choice frames later conceptual analysis—making possible some types of conclusions but preventing others. Accordingly, methodological innovation in the study of spiritualty holds the promise of conceptual innovation. This chapter puts forth three methodological innovations available to spirituality researchers. They are (1) using smartphones to collect experience-sampling method data about day-to-day spiritual experiences, (2) conducting field experiments in which spiritual experiences are randomly assigned, and (3) analyzing big data to observe societal-wide trends and patterns in spiritual expressions. Each of these methods promises to produce rich and novel data that hold the potential for conceptual breakthroughs in our understanding of spiritual processes.

According to criminal justice theories, perceptions of procedural and distributive justice drive opinions on fairness, subsequently affecting behavior. We contend that such perceptions also affect the emotional states of incarcerated individuals, identifying court experiences as the focus of our study. Through fieldwork at a male maximum-security prison, we find that inmates expressed negative emotional responses associated with three factors: trial, public defenders, and appeals. Participants described perceived fairness through personal comparisons to alternative procedures and outcomes often connected to socioeconomic resources and related perceptions to emotions such as frustration, regret, resentment, and hopelessness. We situate our findings within theories of fairness and inmate adjustment research.

An experience sampling study with a large community sample (N = 3327) furnished data on trait and state self-control in everyday life. State measures were self-reports of ego-depleting events (restraining self, effortful decisions, and pushing self to do unwanted tasks) and feelings of depletion (emotional overreactions, difficulty making up mind, less mental energy). People with high trait self-control reported fewer such feelings and events than others. Poor sleep quality and interpersonal conflict were strong predictors of depleted feelings, and indeed the combination of very poor sleep and high interpersonal conflict led to a dramatic spike in reports of extremely depleted feelings. Depleted feelings were positively correlated with being young, female, politically non-extreme, and less well educated, and with finding life less meaningful, as well as with multitasking and hurrying. They increased across the day despite drops after meal times, thus attesting to the value of food and sleep. Pain and illness also raised them. Among other implications, the data suggest a composite picture of the daily life of someone with low trait self-control: frequently rushing and hurrying, not thinking about what they are doing, and just responding automatically to the current situation, as well as suffering aftereffects of interpersonal conflict and poor quality sleep.

People experience meaning in various ways across different secular and sacred situations. However, scholars know relatively little about the situational contexts in which meaning occurs. In this article, we first explored the daily contexts of meaning using data collected by a unique, 2-week experience sampling method through participants’ smartphones. Meaning levels were highest during religious and spiritual practices, as well as during traditional work hours. They were also higher with some activities, such as talking to other people, than other activities, such as playing video games. Second, we examined how feelings of meaningfulness were related to sacred states, parsing out which preceded the other. Sacred states, in which people were aware of God or a higher being, tended to come before feelings of meaning rather than the reverse. From these analyses, meaning emerged as richly patterned in everyday life and closely associated with—and often a consequence of—sacred awareness.

We explore how people experience the sacred in their everyday lives using a recently developed research technique—smartphone-based experience sampling method (S-ESM). The primary goal of our experience-driven approach is to explore the contours and variations of spiritual awareness within people's day-to-day lives. We seek to better understand when and where spiritual awareness is likely to arise, and the contexts in which it is rare. Our smartphone-based data allow us to track the many contexts in which an awareness of the sacred occurs, as reported in real time during people's normal daily activities. We parse out how immediate contextual factors and how people's more habitual behaviors are related to their spiritual experiences. This illuminates a wide range of factors that influence spiritual experiences that have not received much scholarly attention, and enables us to connect cutting-edge quantitative methods with qualitative scholarship on spirituality. We hope this will open the door to the development of new theories of situated spiritual experience.

People with higher levels of self-control experience fewer stressful life events, but little is known about the reciprocal relationships between self-control and stressful life experiences. This study aimed to test linkages between daily stressors and self-control depletion. We collected web-based survey data twice daily for 14 days from 1,442 participants across the United States and used multilevel modeling to examine relations between daily stressors and self-control depletion. Daily stressors predicted subsequent self-control depletion and self-control depletion predicted daily stressors. Further, the overnight effects remained for self-control depletion on stressors but diminished for the effects of stressors on self-control depletion. Depletion had its weakest impact on participants who reported high mean levels of stressors. These results suggest that stressful events and self-control depletion may create negative spirals, but that these negative spirals can be mitigated by sleep. Further research ...

The Mediterranean migrant crisis has resulted in the highest population displacement since the Second World War. In 2016 alone, over one million made the journey across the sea. Since 2013 over 15,000 have died as a result of this journey. Small vessels such as wooden fishing boats and RIBs are commonly used by smugglers as transport. These are often unseaworthy and filled with numbers of passengers far exceeding their intended capacity. When failure occurs, rescues are typically conducted by the nearest available vessel. These vessels are often ill-equipped for a large-scale Search and Rescue (SAR) operation making it highly dangerous for all involved. The size and quantity of lifeboats available are often insufficient for the large numbers of people to be rescued; as a result, repeat journeys are required, making the rescue process slow, inefficient and hazardous. This paper outlines a novel solution to this problem. A concept design is presented for a rapidly expandable lifeboat capable of holding large numbers of passengers, whilst still fitting into the operational envelope of common davits. The unique inflatable design can be deployed quickly from a range of vessels and aeroplanes offering an immediate platform from which disembarkation onto a suitable vessel can be achieved. CONOPS are outlined along with the required capabilities of the design. Drop stitch technology is identified as a viable means of manufacturing the large inflatable platforms. Finally, the paper discusses an alternative solution, retrofitting existing enclosed lifeboats with the solution to offer a more cost-effective alternative. &nbsp

This article describes a field experiment in which we sent fictitious résumés to advertised job openings throughout the American South. We randomly altered the résumés to indicate affiliation in one of seven religious groups or a control group. We found that applicants who expressed a religious identity were 26 percent less likely to receive a response from employers. In general, Muslims, pagans, and atheists suffered the highest levels of discriminatory treatment from employers, a fictitious religious group and Catholics experienced moderate levels, evangelical Christians encountered little, and Jews received no discernible discrimination. We also found evidence suggesting the possibility that Jews received preferential treatment over other religious groups in employer responses. The results fit best with models of religious discrimination rooted in secularization theory and cultural distaste theory. We briefly discuss what our findings suggest for a more robust theory of prejudice and discrimination in society.

This article describes a field experiment in which we sent fictitious resumes to advertised job openings in New England, in the Northeast region of the United States. We randomly altered the resumes to indicate affiliation in one of seven religious groups or a control group. Resumes that mentioned any religious affiliation received about one-quarter fewer phone calls than did the control group but there were no significant difference in e-mails received. Muslim applicants received one-third fewer responses from employers, either as phone calls or e-mails, than did the control group. There was also evidence of discrimination against atheists, Catholics and pagans. These findings are consistent with theoretical models of secularization and cultural distaste theory.

This article explores behavioural norms and consequences of their transgression during Mainline Protestant and Catholic church services in the Northeastern United States. We utilize Erving Goffman's essay “On Face-Work” as our primary theoretical orientation. Based on fieldwork conducted at twelve different churches in two Northeastern states, we found multiple types of social disruptions, sanctions, and attempted repairs occurring in services. Our findings highlight the normative complexity of religious services and have implications for a variety of collective endeavours.

Previous research has found that there is a good deal of stability in departmental prestige, but has not considered its long-term dynamics. This paper investigates a hypothesis implied by some accounts in the sociology of science and organizational theory: that there will be a permanent component of prestige associated with the department or university. The data are the ratings of graduate departments of sociology between 1965 and 2007 using a measure of prestige constructed from hiring patterns. There is no evidence of a permanent component for individual departments, but there is evidence of a permanent difference between departments in “elite” universities and those in other universities. Despite change in rankings within each group, the difference between the groups remained constant over the period. That is, there appear to be enduring barriers that limit the mobility of individual departments.

This study examines the relationship between educational attainment and various dimensions of religiosity. On the basis of a network closure argument, we hypothesize that the relationship between education and religiosity varies by religious tradition. Analyzing data from the 1972 – 2006 General Social Survey, we found that educational attainment predicted increased attendance at religious services, decreased levels of prayer, increased inclination to view the Bible as a book of fables, and decreased inclination to view the Bible as the literal word of God. These relationships, however, significantly interacted with religious tradition. Increased education largely resulted in greater religiosity among evangelical Protestants, black Protestants, and Catholics but not among mainline Protestants and the nonaffiliated. Overall, this study shows that education does not uniformly decrease religiosity and highlights the importance of considering religious tradition in future research.

In recent years, there have been efforts to develop latent class models for trajectories. The semiparametric mixed Poisson regression (SMPR) model has been used in many empirical studies, but there have been few attempts to evaluate the robustness of the estimates from this model. The authors use simulated data to evaluate the performance of the SMPR model under a variety of assumptions. They find that estimates are sensitive to the conditional distribution of counts and misspecification of the shape of the trajectory. When there is only one underlying trajectory and overdispersion is present, the SMPR model frequently finds multiple groups, which often appear to differ in shape as well as level. The tendency can be substantially reduced by use of the zero-inflated Poisson distribution in conjunction with top-coding of large counts. The article concludes with a discussion of other extensions and alternatives to the standard SMPR model that might provide more robust estimates.

Studies of race and crime have emphasized the effects of social disadvantage and discrimination on increasing crime among African Americans. The authors extend this literature by examining various beliefs and institutions that have developed within African American communities that, in contrast, decrease criminal behavior. A model of cross-canceling, indirect effects between race and crime was developed and tested with data from the National Youth Survey. The results demonstrate that some factors, such as single-parent families, lowered educational attainment, and crime-ridden neighborhoods, increase criminal behavior among African American respondents relative to Whites. However, other factors, such as increased religiosity, strong family ties, and lowered alcohol consumption, decrease crime. These findings highlight the complex effects of race on crime.

The criminal career paradigm parcels offenders’ careers into multiple dimensions, including participation, frequency, persistence, seriousness, career length, and desistance, and each dimension may have different causes. In a forceful critique of this perspective, Gottfredson and Hirschi claim that low self-control equally predicts all dimensions of criminal behavior and that its effect holds steady across types of people, including both men and women. This study examines the link between low self-control and the career dimensions of participation, frequency, persistence, and desistance from crime. Analyses also investigate whether self-control distinguishes between persistence and desistance. Using data from 985 participants in the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Human Development Study, the authors found overall support for Gottfredson and Hirschi’s position.

This article examines health care utilization among injection drug users. Based on previous health care models, we identify various attitudes and personal characteristics that have been found to affect health care utilization in the general population, and we examine their effect with this at-risk group. They include trust in physicians, self-esteem, self-efficacy, social isolation, and depression. We examined survey data collected from 374 injection drug users in New Haven, Connecticut. Our findings indicated that trust in physicians significantly increased health care utilization, and depression decreased it. We also found that HIV+ respondents as well as those with health insurance utilized health care more often. These findings broaden the generalizability of existing health care utilization models, and they inform efforts to increase health care among vulnerable populations such as injection drug users.

Society’s efforts to deter crime with punishment may be ineffective because those individuals most prone to commit crime often act impulsively, with little thought for the future, and so they may be unmoved by the threat of later punishment. Deterrence messages they receive, therefore, may fall on deaf ears. This article examines this issue by testing the relationship between criminal propensity, perceived risks and costs of punishment, and criminal behavior. The authors analyzed data from the Dunedin (New Zealand) Study, a longitudinal study of individuals from birth through age26(N = 1,002). They found that in fact, deterrence perceptions had their greatest impact on criminally prone study members.

Previous studies have explained the transition from criminal propensity in youth to criminal behavior in adulthood with hypotheses of enduring criminal propensity, unique social causation, and cumulative social disadvantage. In this article we develop an additional hypothesis derived from the life-course concept of interdependence: The effects of social ties on crime vary as a function of individuals' propsensity for crime. We tested these four hypotheses with data from the Dunedin Study. In support of life-course interdependence, prosocial ties, such as education, employment, family ties, and partnerships, deterred crime, and antisocial ties, such as delinquent peers, promoted crime, most strongly among low self-control individuals. Our findings bear implications for theories and policies of crime.

Do religious beliefs and behaviors deter criminal behavior? The existing evidence surrounding the effect of religion on crime is varied, contested, and inconclusive, and currently no persuasive answer exists as to the empirical relationship between religion and crime. In this article, the authors address this controversial issue with a meta-analysis of 60 previous studies based on two questions: (1) What is the direction and magnitude of the effect of religion on crime? (2) Why have previous studies varied in their estimation of this effect? The results of the meta-analysis show that religious beliefs and behaviors exert a moderate deterrent effect on individuals' criminal behavior. Furthermore, previous studies have systematically varied in their estimation of the religion-on-crime effect due to differences in both their conceptual and methodological approaches.

This article examines the social-selection and social-causation processes that generate criminal behavior. We describe these processes with three theoretical models: a social-causation model that links crime to contemporaneous social relationships; a social-selection model that links crime to personal characteristics formed in childhood; and a mixed selection-causation model that links crime to social relationships and childhood characteristics. We tested these models with a longitudinal study in Dunedin, New Zealand, of individuals followed from birth through age 21. We analyzed measures of childhood and adolescent low self-control as well as adolescent and adult social bonds and criminal behavior. In support of social selection, we found that low self-control in childhood predicted disrupted social bonds and criminal offending later in life. In support of social causation, we found that social bonds and adolescent delinquency predicted later adult crime and, further, that the effect of self-control on crime was largely mediated by social bonds. In support of both selection and causation, we found that the social-causation effects remained significant even when controlling for preexisting levels of self-control, but that their effects diminished. Taken together, these findings support theoretical models that incorporate social-selection and social-causation processes.