Still worlds apart: The worldviews of adolescent males attending Protestant and Catholic secondary schools in Northern Ireland

This study draws together two research traditions: John Greer's pioneering research among pupils in Protestant and Catholic schools in Northern Ireland and Leslie J. Francis's research concerning teenage religion and values in England and Wales. A sample of 1,585 13- to 15-year-old male pupils attending Catholic schools (n = 712) and Protestant schools (n = 873) completed the Teenage Religion and Values Survey. The present analyses highlight the significant differences in world views between the Catholic and Protestant adolescents across eight domains defined as: religious beliefs, paranormal beliefs, church-related attitudes, attitudes toward sex and family life, law-related attitudes, school-related attitudes, locality-related attitudes, and personal anxiety and depression. These data confirm that in many key ways young people growing up in these two religious communities are still living worlds apart

Prayer, purpose in life, and attitudes toward substances: a study among 13- to 15-year-olds in England and Wales

This study set out to examine the association between prayer frequency, purpose in life and attitude toward substances, among a sample of 2,563 13- to 15-year-old secondary school pupils in England and Wales. Multivariate models controlling for sex, school year and personality (as defined by the Eysenkian dimensional model) demonstrated that higher levels of purpose in life are associated with greater prayer frequency, and that more proscriptive attitudes toward substances are associated with both higher levels of purpose in life and greater prayer frequency. These findings are consistent with a model suggesting that prayer frequency promotes a more negative view of substances both directly and indirectly through cultivating a greater sense of purpose in life

The relationship between denominational affiliation and spiritual health among weekly-churchgoing 13- to 15-year-old adolescents in England and Wales

THIS PAPER DRAWS on John Fisher’s formative definition of spiritual health as comprising good relationships within four domains (the personal, the communal, the environmental and the transcendental) and uses the operationalization of these constructs proposed by Francis and Robbins (2005). Comparisons are made between the responses of five groups of 13- to 15-year-olds who report weekly church attendance: 1,549 Anglicans, 1,458 Roman Catholics, 830 members of one of the Free Churches, 212 members of one of the Pentecostal churches, and 212 Jehovah’s Witnesses. The data demonstrate significant variations in the levels of spiritual health reported by weekly churchgoers according to denominational affiliation. The conclusion is drawn that denominational affiliation needs to be taken into account alongside frequency of church attendance in constructing a view of the relationship between Christian practice and spiritual health during the adolescent years

Public Health Versus Court-Sponsored Secrecy

Public health practice relies on access to information. Givelber and Robbins discuss the debate about court-sponsored secrecy: Whether or not courts should tolerate, edorse, or protect secrecy when the sequestered information might help protect the public health

Teachers at faith schools in England and Wales : state of research

This study begins by distinguishing between three kinds of ‘faith schools’ (known as schools with a religious character) within England and Wales: faith schools that operate within the state-maintained sector and had their origin in voluntary church-related initiatives prior to the Education Act 1870; ‘traditional’ independent faith schools, many of which had their roots in or before the nineteenth century; and ‘new’ independent faith schools, particularly Christian and Muslim schools, following the Rochester initiative in 1969. Second, this study draws attention to and summarises a quantitative research tradition established in 1982 concerned with identifying the attitudes and values of teachers working specifically within Anglican faith schools within the state-maintained sector, and with modelling the influence of personal and religious factors in shaping their attitudes. Third, this study reanalyses a new database profiling the views of subject leaders in religious education across a broad range of primary schools with a religious character in England. These new analyses demonstrate the different priorities given to different aims of religious education by teachers in this sector, and illustrates the relative influence of personal factors (age, sex and church attendance), professional factors (years teaching, qualifications, and continuing professional development) and contextual factors (type of school)

Attitude control system for sounding rockets Patent

Development of attitude control system for sounding rocket stabilization during ballistic phase of fligh

The affective dimension of religion and personal happiness among students in Estonia

A sample of 150 students in Estonia (119 from a secular university and 31 from a Lutheran theological institute) completed the Oxford Happiness Measure and the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity. The data show no significant correlation between these two variables; thus the findings challenge the generalizability to Estonia of the general findings from studies conducted in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Israel that consistently reported a positive association between the affective dimension of religion and personal happiness