Research examined the relative importance of peer groups for young adolescents as compared with diverse adult socialization agents--family, school, and community. The factors involved were teenagers' activities, preferences, feelings, and thoughts as to how they spend their leisure time, their preferences for help providers, and their sense of attachment to their community. These comparisons we...

The choice-constraint approach assumes that the choice of one’s friends will be determined by both individual choices and the constraints imposed by one’s interaction context. Trends towards homophily however, might counteract this effect if actors consistently seek interaction partners with the same background characteristics. In this study we investigate the impact of community level diversit...

BACKGROUND Muslims comprise 4.8% of the national population in the UK and also form a significant proportion of its ethnic minority population, with trends set to continue for the foreseeable future. With ethnic minority health inequalities deepening further, there is an apparent lack of strategies to effectively tackle this growing problem. Imams, Muslim religious leaders, represent a hitherto...

Addressing the cultural and religious beliefs around the issue of family planning has been a big challenge for the international development community. The concept of family planning has raised some concerns regarding its acceptability within Muslim populations. While some Muslim states and organisations have adopted a rather cautious approach to the issue, others have gone to the extent of inv...

Among many indigenous peoples of Amazonia, shamanism and Christianity co-exist as central cultural elements shaping the ways in which people interpret and interact with the world. Despite centuries of co-existence, the relationship between shamanism and Christianity has entered an especially dynamic era as many of Amazonia’s indigenous peoples abandon Catholicism for Evangelical and Sabbatarian...

The twenty-first century is often characterized as an era of unprecedented mobility and interconnectivity, but it is also marked by efforts to reinforce national borders and curtail human movement. Paradoxes of mobility and immobility in our increasingly unequal world come into sharp focus when viewed through the lens of religion. Sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of comparative relig...

Patients and physicians can inhabit distinctive social worlds where they are guided by diverse understandings of moral practice. Despite the contemporary presence of multiple moral traditions, religious communities and ethnic backgrounds, two of the major methodological approaches in bioethics, casuistry and principlism, rely upon the notion of a common morality. However, the heterogeneity of e...

Wedding invitations (WIs), as a uniquely socially and culturally constructed genre, provide a distinct opportunity  to  compare  the  sociocultural values of different  speech  communities  as reflected  in  the  textual  content  and  organization  of  the  different  moves.  Students  can  be exposed  to  this  genre  and  its  different moves  using  a  genre-based  pedagogy. Genre-based ped...

 New research on networks has put individual well connected agents at the centre of the spread of many social phenomena, including religious ideas.  England in the 1550s provides a model of how a society can be radicalized through heavy‐handed public persecution.  Much can be learnt from the spread of the medieval Cathar heresy by relatively few individuals, the ‘perfecti’. The inquisitors s...

This paper investigates the extent to which substantively distinct moral worldviews are associated with different rates and types of civic engagement. Following Lichterman (1995; 1996), we acknowledge that individualistic moral worldviews can and do motivate civic engagement. However, based on an analysis of survey data from a national probability sample of Americans, we find that, controlling ...