The Relationships Between Community Religious Beliefs and Community Level of Public Library Development in the United States: An Empirical Analysis

Author(s):  
Robert V. Williams ◽  
Jennifer W. Arns ◽  
Karen Miller ◽  
Patrick Roughen
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Rigoli

Research has shown that stress impacts on people’s religious beliefs. However, several aspects of this effect remain poorly understood, for example regarding the role of prior religiosity and stress-induced anxiety. This paper explores these aspects in the context of the recent coronavirus emergency. The latter has impacted dramatically on many people’s well-being; hence it can be considered a highly stressful event. Through online questionnaires administered to UK and USA citizens professing either Christian faith or no religion, this paper examines the impact of the coronavirus crisis upon common people’s religious beliefs. We found that, following the coronavirus emergency, strong believers reported higher confidence in their religious beliefs while non-believers reported increased scepticism towards religion. Moreover, for strong believers, higher anxiety elicited by the coronavirus threat was associated with increased strengthening of religious beliefs. Conversely, for non-believers, higher anxiety elicited by the coronavirus thereat was associated with increased scepticism towards religious beliefs. These observations are consistent with the notion that stress-induced anxiety enhances support for the ideology already embraced before a stressful event occurs. This study sheds light on the psychological and cultural implications of the coronavirus crisis, which represents one of the most serious health emergencies in recent times.


2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (36) ◽  
pp. 67-73
Author(s):  
Scot M Peterson

The penitentiary in the United States of America originated as a religious institution. Its roots lie in the belief that inmates could reform if they were given an opportunity to engage in reflection, prayer, Bible-reading and work, thus establishing a new personal foundation for functioning as productive members of the larger society. Not surprisingly, given American's predilection for maintaining a secular civil society, this original foundation for the prison eventually fell from favour, and American penological theories became more sociological or psychological in nature. The fact remains, however, that society in the United States is broadly religious, and prisons continue to address the religious beliefs of inmates and how to accommodate those beliefs in a penological setting. This comment provides a case study on this topic, based on littigation concerning the provision of kosher food to Orthodox inmates in the prisons in Colorado.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhasmina Tacheva ◽  
Anton Ivanov

BACKGROUND Opioid-related deaths constitute a problem of pandemic proportions in the United States, with no clear solution in sight. Although addressing addiction—the heart of this problem—ought to remain a priority for health practitioners, examining the community-level psychological factors with a known impact on health behaviors may provide valuable insights for attenuating this health crisis by curbing risky behaviors before they evolve into addiction. OBJECTIVE The goal of this study is twofold: to demonstrate the relationship between community-level psychological traits and fatal opioid overdose both theoretically and empirically, and to provide a blueprint for using social media data to glean these psychological factors in a real-time, reliable, and scalable manner. METHODS We collected annual panel data from Twitter for 2891 counties in the United States between 2014-2016 and used a novel data mining technique to obtain average county-level “Big Five” psychological trait scores. We then performed interval regression, using a control function to alleviate omitted variable bias, to empirically test the relationship between county-level psychological traits and the prevalence of fatal opioid overdoses in each county. RESULTS After controlling for a wide range of community-level biopsychosocial factors related to health outcomes, we found that three of the operationalizations of the five psychological traits examined at the community level in the study were significantly associated with fatal opioid overdoses: extraversion (β=.308, <i>P</i>&lt;.001), neuroticism (β=.248, <i>P</i>&lt;.001), and conscientiousness (β=.229, <i>P</i>&lt;.001). CONCLUSIONS Analyzing the psychological characteristics of a community can be a valuable tool in the local, state, and national fight against the opioid pandemic. Health providers and community health organizations can benefit from this research by evaluating the psychological profile of the communities they serve and assessing the projected risk of fatal opioid overdose based on the relationships our study predict when making decisions for the allocation of overdose-reversal medication and other vital resources.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Jong ◽  
Adam Baimel ◽  
Robert M Ross ◽  
Ryan McKay ◽  
Matthias Bluemke ◽  
...  

We present two datasets from a project about the relationship between traumatic life experiences and religiosity. These include data from 1,754 individuals in the United States (n = 322), Brazil (n = 205), China (n = 202), India (n = 205), Indonesia (n = 205), Russia (n = 205), Thailand (n = 205), and Turkey (n = 205). Surveys were consistent across samples: they include measures of traumatic life experiences, negative affective traits, existential security, life satisfaction, death anxiety, and various religious beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours. Psychometric evaluations of measures of supernatural belief and death anxiety were conducted.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 6-16
Author(s):  
Ruth Ortiz ◽  
Eusebio Ortiz Zarco ◽  
Gerardo Suárez Barrera

This research paper examines the commercial and monetary interdependence that has been built during the period 1990 - 2018 between two main economies of the world; this is an empirical analysis, based on a statistical scrutiny of economic indicators and Granger causalty tests. The result is a contribution to the understanding of the 21st century bundled international system, characterized by a changing global geopolitical environment, where the United States and China are the main actors.  


2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 399-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Fitzpatrick ◽  
Jeff Gruenewald ◽  
Brent L. Smith ◽  
Paxton Roberts

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