Religiosity Profiles of American Youth in Relation to Substance Use, Violence, and Delinquency

Relatively little is known in terms of the relationship between religiosity profiles and adolescents’ involvement in substance use, violence, and delinquency. Using a diverse sample of 17,705 (49?% female) adolescents from the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, latent profile analysis and multinomial regression are employed to examine the relationships between latent religiosity classes and substance use, violence, and delinquency. Results revealed a five class solution. Classes were identified as religiously disengaged (10.76?%), religiously infrequent (23.59?%), privately religious (6.55?%), religious regulars (40.85?%), and religiously devoted (18.25?%). Membership in the religiously devoted class was associated with the decreased likelihood of participation in a variety of substance use behaviors as well as decreases in the likelihood of fighting and theft. To a lesser extent, membership in the religious regulars class was also associated with the decreased likelihood of substance use and fighting. However, membership in the religiously infrequent and privately religious classes was only associated with the decreased likelihood of marijuana use. Findings suggest that private religiosity alone does not serve to buffer youth effectively against involvement in problem behavior, but rather that it is the combination of intrinsic and extrinsic adolescent religiosity factors that is associated with participation in fewer problem behaviors.     

Examining the blue line in the rainbow: the interactions and perceptions of law enforcement among lesbian,gay, bisexual,transgender and queer communities

ABSTRACT

Despite the fact that LGBTQ individuals are at greater risk of victimization than the average citizen, the LGBTQ community’s relationship with law enforcement has been a turbulent one. Using a mixed-methods approach, including surveys, semi-structured interviews and observations of town hall meetings, and following the participatory action research framework, this study examines the interactions between the LGBTQ community and law enforcement, and the perceptions of police within the LGBTQ community. The current study demonstrates how members of the LGBTQ community continue to have negative experiences with police that adversely impact their perceptions of law enforcement. Moreover, the findings underline the importance of examining how multiple identities impact an individual’s experiences with and their perceptions of law enforcement. Expanding past research on this topic, this study offers an analysis based upon suggestions of the study’s participants of what steps must be taken in order to improve relations between these two groups.     

The Ethics of Restrictive Licensing for Handguns: Comparing the United States and Canadian Approaches to Handgun Regulation

The United States and Canada regulate firearms, particularly handguns, quite differently. With only a few state and local exceptions, the U.S. approach emphasizes the ability of most individuals to purchase, possess, and carry handguns. By comparison, Canada has a form of restrictive licensing for handguns that places a premium on community safety. The authors first review the potential individual and community level harms and benefits associated with these differing fre-arm policies. Using this information, they explore the ethical dimensions of the U.S. and Canadian approaches through three major themes of autonomy, prevention of harms, and social justice. The authors conclude that the Canadian approach is consistent with respect for the autonomy of persons, fosters the prevention of harms, and more appropriately furthers social justice.     

A Whiff of Cordite: Theodore Roosevelt and the Transoceanic Naval Arms Race, 1897–1909

Theodore Roosevelt's most enduring contribution to American power and influence in the world was in the promotion and construction of a blue water navy. Although much has been written about Roosevelt's notion of a uniquely American imperial vocation, as well as of his social Darwinist conception of Great Power competition, the priority he awarded to American naval power was based above all on a dispassionate and pessimistic interpretation of the direction of international affairs between 1890 and 1909. Bracketed by the inauguration of German Weltpolitik on the one hand and the Japanese naval triumph at Tsushima on the other, Roosevelt's naval policy was not the product of a romantic imperial imagination but rather of a wholly objective appreciation of the most fundamental imperative of American national security for the near and distant future.     

Therapists’ perceptions of the therapeutic alliance in “Mandatory” therapy with sex offenders

ABSTRACT

Research suggests that the therapeutic alliance (TA) plays an important part in successful therapy. The pantheoretical concept of the alliance (Bordin, 1979) assumes a client seeks to make a change and joins the therapist in a willing journey. However, treatment with sex offenders can entail various levels of coercion. Little is known about the process of the TA in therapy with sex offenders whose therapy could be seen as coerced or mandated. Thus, the aim of this research was to explore therapists’ perceptions of the TA with sex offenders whose therapy could be seen as “mandated” because it was part of their plan for release/rehabilitation. Eleven therapists were interviewed about their experiences and a qualitative thematic analysis elicited five themes: dynamics of forced work, explicit terms of working, persuasive encouragement to engage, connecting with the human element and preservation and protection. Implications for practice are discussed alongside recommendations for future research.     

Beyond reason and hysteria: Towards a postmodern model of communication and control in science

This article takes the controversy over ‘Mad Cow Disease’ ('BSE') in Britain as the starting point to reflect on postmodern contexts for the production, circulation and control of scientific discourse. It looks at two competing models of scientific rationality, modernist and postmodernist, as they function in contexts we call ‘postmodern’. With BSE? the Government began with the modernist project of combating hysteria with calm reasonableness, thereby helping to produce the hysteria they feared. But science, far from being entirely rational or unitary, is a set of relatively independent discourses? including ‘entropie’ discourse: discursive black holes which are strictly policed but never fully contained—the unconscious of science? where scientific creativity and popular paranoia meet. Where modernist science defends against the crisis of unreason to prevent it from happening, postmodern science (chaos theory, fuzzy logic) accepts the normality of crisis? chaos and unpredictability, which are not coincidentally coming to characterise the postmodern world. The problems of modernist science are not purely epistemological. The postmodern alliance of modernist science and global agribusiness has meant unprecedented assaults on nature, producing a ‘return of the (biotic) repressed’ that, in turn, becomes the content of the discursive repressed of science itself. To contend with these processes, we need postmodern theories of science—including the anomalous? the improbable in the analysis—as was not done with BSE until too late? because current science refused to accept the possible existence of a phenomenon that was empirically unproven and did not fit in. Of equal importance is to include popular discourses among the full set of available sources of scientific ‘truth’. Films like Outbreak and popular science like The Hot Zone express a popular paranoia that discourses of science urgently need to attend to. The study of popular culture should become an integral part in a new postmodern sociology of science.     

A women's international quarterly over 30 years. Are the arguments to be feminine or feminist?

Women Speaking (first entitled Speaking of Women) was published from 1951 to 1982. Its aim—to encourage women to make their voices heard on public issues—involved discussion of legal, educational and occupational discriminations, evidenced internationally by contributors involved in the struggle to overcome such handicaps in their own countries and through the United Nations Organisation. ‘East’ or ‘West’ the problems are found to be the same, even if immediate priorities differ, and the Journal's stance became radical feminist: ‘…sexism underlies all other ims, and Nationalist, socialist, communist, “Churchist” (Christian or Islamic) movements are at best peripheral and at worst deadly to human progress unless the universal problem of women's oppression is faced’ (editorial July 1980). Patterns of thought which from infancy undermine women's self-confidence stem from belief in a male God; hence a central interest in the struggle for ordination of women to the priesthood. At the outset the editors posited the achievement of peace between nations as the ultimate goal of women's emancipation and their prominence in movements towards this end have been consistently chronicled. The question, however, remains: is it in women's nature, any more than in men's, to seek peace? In the earliest and the last issues may be found the answer ‘Yes’, expressed in almost identical terms. But the last editor argues that in the sum total of interrelated issues we should rather affirm the human need and potentiality in both sexes for cooperative living.