Religious Identity, Religious Attendance, and Parental Control

Using a national sample of adolescents aged 10–18 years and their parents (N = 5,117), this article examines whether parental religious identity and religious participation are associated with the ways in which parents control their children. We hypothesize that both religious orthodoxy and weekly religious attendance are related to heightened levels of three elements of parental control: monitoring activities, normative regulations, and network closure. Results indicate that an orthodox religious identity for Catholic and Protestant parents and higher levels of religious attendance for parents as a whole are associated with increases in monitoring activities and normative regulations of American adolescents

Social and cultural origins of motivations to volunteer a comparison of university students in six countries

Although participation in volunteering and motivations to volunteer (MTV) have received substantial attention on the national level, particularly in the US, few studies have compared and explained these issues across cultural and political contexts. This study compares how two theoretical perspectives, social origins theory and signalling theory, explain variations in MTV across different countries. The study analyses responses from a sample of 5794 students from six countries representing distinct institutional contexts. The findings provide strong support for signalling theory but less so for social origins theory. The article concludes that volunteering is a personal decision and thus is influenced more at the individual level but is also impacted to some degree by macro-level societal forces

Virtual money, practices and moral orders in Second Life

Virtual monies present a limit case in debates about money's moral and political entanglements between sociologists, anthropologists, and economists. Digitized virtual monies seem ephemeral, almost ideal typical examples of money as a pure medium of exchange. This paper begins with the premise that virtual monies are as value-laden and morally entangled as any other form of money. This assertion is demonstrated by exploring how one type of virtual money, the Linden dollar (L$), and some of its associated practices are bound up with research participants' moral categories and judgments in the virtual world of Second Life (SL). Participants' accounts of virtual money practices are linked to moral attributes, sometimes in stark ‘good’ or ‘bad’ dichotomies, but also in more nuanced terms. These framings reproduce classifications of people and practices along a continuum with virtuousness at one end and maliciousness or harm at the other, passing through various states of possible moral dubiousness. For respondents, these two judgments go together; people are what they do with money. As a result, respondents decide what ‘people like that’ deserve. Evaluating someone's money practices means assessing the person. Participants' accounts of Linden dollar practices overlap with explanations of what SL is and how residents should live there. In SL, money is a form of material culture through which appropriate ways of being in the world are debated and reproduced

A cross-national examination of motivation to volunteer: religious context, national value patterns, and nonprofit regimes

Although motivation to volunteer (MTV) is one of the most frequently researched topics in the field of volunteering research, few studies have compared and explained MTV cross-nationally. Using data from the 1990 World Values Surveys, this study examines if and how specific societal characteristics are asso-ciated with self-reported motivations to volunteer, focusing on national religious context, dominant value patterns, and institutional variations in terms of welfare state regimes and characteristics of the nonprofit sector. Across all countries stud-ied, people who volunteered expressed both altruistic and self-oriented motiva-tions, but we observed important cross-national variations in the emphasis put on both motivational dimensions. Besides the influence of individual-level character-istics, we found partial evidence for a contextual understanding of motivation to volunteer. With respect to religion, we expected a beneficial relationship with al-truistic motivations. While such a positive relationship was found at the individual level, the evidence for a religious national context was ambiguous: on the one hand, no relationship was found between extensive religious networks and support for altruistic motivations; on the other, strong religious beliefs among the general population were negatively associated with both altruistic and self-interested MTV. The prevalence of a post-material value pattern did not represent a threat to feelings of altruism, and produced mixed findings concerning self-interested MTV. Finally, welfare states with lower social spending, a large nonprofit sector with little revenue from government, and an active citizenry, in terms of a high rate of volunteering, stimulated the expression of altruistic motivations

Jimmy Swaggart's Secular Confession

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version is available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02773940902766748 .Following the exposure of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s illicit rendezvous with a New Orleans prostitute, the Assemblies of God simultaneously orchestrated a massive attempt to silence those who would discuss the tryst and arranged the most widely publicized confession in American history theretofore. The coincidence of a “silence campaign” with the vast distribution of a public confession invites us to reconsider the nature of the public confession. For what place has a public confession, the discourse of disclosure par excellence, in a silence campaign? This question is best answered, I argue, if we understand public confession not as a stable a-historical form, but as a practice that is informed by multiple, competing traditions. I argue that by situating Swaggart’s performance in a philosophically modern and secular tradition of public confession we can understand both its complicity in a silence campaign and, more generally, the political logic of the modern public confession

A Developmental Perspective on Community Service in Adolescence

A substantial number of U.S. adolescents currently participate in community service and there is increased national interest in service programs. This article assesses the assumption of developmental benefits to service participants by critically reviewing 44 empirical studies. It offers a theoretical framework for understanding the findings by connecting them to identity development and delineating three pertinent concepts: agency, social relatedness, and moral-political awareness. These concepts are applied to studies that investigate: ( 1) the characteristics and motivations of participants, ( 2) the effects of service, and ( 3) the process of service. The findings support the conclusion that service activities which provide opportunities for intense experiences and social interactions are often associated with prosocial development. The findings also point to the need for more studies focused on particular service programs and on relationships between service providers and those served