The teenage religion and values survey in England and Wales : an overview

The Teenage Religion and Values Survey was conducted throughout the 1990s among young people between the ages of 13 and 15 years. A total of 33,982 young people took part in the survey. As the next phase of this research begins for the twenty-first century this paper looks back at the survey conducted in the 1990s and considers two aspects of the research. First, this paper considers the methodology behind designing such a survey. Second, this paper considers some of the insights generated by the survey under five headings: personality, spiritual health, religious affiliation, belonging without believing, and church leaving

Growth or decline in the Church of England during the decade of Evangelism: did the Churchmanship of the Bishop matter?

The Decade of Evangelism occupied the attention of the Church of England throughout the 1990s. The present study employs the statistics routinely published by the Church of England in order to assess two matters: the extent to which these statistics suggest that the 43 individual dioceses finished the decade in a stronger or weaker position than they had entered it and the extent to which, according to these statistics, the performance of dioceses led by bishops shaped in the Evangelical tradition differed from the performance of dioceses led by bishops shaped in the Catholic tradition. The data demonstrated that the majority of dioceses were performing less effectively at the end of the decade than at the beginning, in terms of a range of membership statistics, and that the rate of decline varied considerably from one diocese to another. The only exception to the trend was provided by the diocese of London, which experienced some growth. The data also demonstrated that little depended on the churchmanship of the diocesan bishop in shaping diocesan outcomes on the performance indicators employed in the study

The psychological-type profile of lay church leaders in Australia

A sample of 845 lay church leaders (444 women and 401 men) from a range of 24 different denominations and movements (including house churches and independent churches) completed the Francis Psychological-Type Scales within the context of the 2006 Australian National Church Life Survey. The psychological-type profiles of these lay church leaders were almost identical to the type profiles of 1527 Australian churchgoers (936 women and 591 men) published in an earlier study by Robbins and Francis. The predominant types among female lay church leaders were ISFJ (21%), ESFJ (21%), and ISTJ (18%). The predominant types among male lay church leaders were ISTJ (28%), ISFJ (17%), ESTJ (13%), and ESFJ (12%). The SJ temperament accounted for 67% of the female lay church leaders and for 70% of the male lay church leaders. The strengths and weaknesses of the SJ leadership style are discussed

Group-theoretic models of the inversion process in bacterial genomes

The variation in genome arrangements among bacterial taxa is largely due to the process of inversion. Recent studies indicate that not all inversions are equally probable, suggesting, for instance, that shorter inversions are more frequent than longer, and those that move the terminus of replication are less probable than those that do not. Current methods for establishing the inversion distance between two bacterial genomes are unable to incorporate such information. In this paper we suggest a group-theoretic framework that in principle can take these constraints into account. In particular, we show that by lifting the problem from circular permutations to the affine symmetric group, the inversion distance can be found in polynomial time for a model in which inversions are restricted to acting on two regions. This requires the proof of new results in group theory, and suggests a vein of new combinatorial problems concerning permutation groups on which group theorists will be needed to collaborate with biologists. We apply the new method to inferring distances and phylogenies for published Yersinia pestis data.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, in Press, Journal of Mathematical Biolog

Possible High-Redshift, Low-Luminosity AGN Activity in the Hubble Deep Field

In the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), twelve candidate sources of high-redshift (z > 3.5) AGN activity have been identified. The color selection criteria were established by passing spectra of selected quasars and Seyfert galaxies (appropriately redshifted and modified for "Lyman forest" absorption), as well as stars, observed normal and starburst galaxies, and galaxy models for various redshifts through the filters used for the HDF observations. The actual identification of AGN candidates also involved convolving a Laplacian-of-Gaussian filter with the HDF images, thereby removing relatively flat galactic backgrounds and leaving only the point-like components in the centers. Along with positions and colors, estimated redshifts and absolute magnitudes are reported, with the candidates falling toward the faint end of the AGN luminosity function. One candidate has been previously observed spectroscopically, with a measured redshift of 4.02. The number of sources reported here is consistent with a simple extrapolation of the observed quasar luminosity function to magnitude 30 in B_Johnson. Implications for ionization of the intergalactic medium and for gravitational lensing are discussed.Comment: 10 pages LaTex plus 2 separate files (Table 1 which is a two-page landscape LaTex file; and Figure 6 which is a large (0.7 MB) non-encapsulated postscript file). Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journa

FAIR, POSTFAIR, AND NOFAIR: A COMPARISON OF CROPPING ALTERNATIVES FOR THE SOUTHERN GREAT PLAINS

The Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 was promoted as legislation that would enable and encourage farmers to base planting decisions on market incentives rather than commodity programs. Data from a designed experiment are used to compare the economics of three cropping systems for alternative commodity programs.Crop Production/Industries,

Young people's attitudes to religious diversity : quantitative approaches from social psychology and empirical theology

This essay discusses the design of the quantitative component of the ‘Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity’ project, conceived by Professor Robert Jackson within the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, and presents some preliminary findings from the data. The quantitative component followed and built on the qualitative component within a mixed method design. The argument is advanced in seven steps: introducing the major sources of theory on which the quantitative approach builds from the psychology of religion and from empirical theology; locating the empirical traditions of research among young people that have shaped the study; clarifying the notions and levels of measurement employed in the study anticipating the potential for various forms of data analysis; discussing some of the established measures incorporated in the survey; defining the ways in which the sample was structured to reflect the four nations of the UK, and London; illustrating the potential within largely descriptive cross-tabulation forms of analysis; and illustrating the potential within more sophisticated multivariate analytic models

Predicting Proton-Air Cross Sections at sqrt s ~30 TeV, using Accelerator and Cosmic Ray Data

We use the high energy predictions of a QCD-inspired parameterization of all accelerator data on forward proton-proton and antiproton-proton scattering amplitudes, along with Glauber theory, to predict proton-air cross sections at energies near \sqrt s \approx 30 TeV. The parameterization of the proton-proton cross section incorporates analyticity and unitarity, and demands that the asymptotic proton is a black disk of soft partons. By comparing with the p-air cosmic ray measurements, our analysis results in a constraint on the inclusive particle production cross section.Comment: 9 pages, Revtex, uses epsfig.sty, 5 postscript figures. Minor text revisions. Systematic errors in k included, procedure for extracting k clarified. Previously undefined symbols now define

The Williams Scale of Attitude toward Paganism: development and application among British Pagans

This article builds on the tradition of attitudinal measures of religiosity established by Leslie Francis and colleagues with the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity (and reflected in the Sahin-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Islam, the Katz-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Judaism, and the Santosh-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Hinduism) by introducing a new measure to assess the attitudinal disposition of Pagans. A battery of items was completed by 75 members of a Pagan Summer Camp. These items were reduced to produce a 21-item scale that measured aspects of Paganism concerned with: the God/Goddess, worshipping, prayer, and coven. The scale recorded an alpha coefficient of 0.93. Construct validity of the Williams Scale of Attitude toward Paganism was demonstrated by the clear association with measures of participation in private rituals