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Correlates of Continued Church Membership Intention: An Empirical Study of Religion in Ghana
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This study examines the factors influencing continued church membership intention in Ghana, focusing on the key correlates of this behavior. Using structural equation modeling (SEM) the survey data collected were analyzed. The findings highlight charismatic leadership, religious experience, corporate social responsibility, personal needs fulfillment, tangibles, and message credibility as significant determinants of continued church membership intention. Furthermore, the study identifies a willingness to donate as a consequential outcome. The proposed integrative model not only offers scholars essential constructs for future theoretical exploration but also provides church managers with a comprehensive framework to enhance membership retention strategies. This research serves as a critical foundation for both academic and practical advancements in understanding the dynamics of church membership
Envisaging intergenerational spaces for co-creating creative writing: developing reflective functioning for positive mental health
Get PDFIn this paper we take an ecological view of children’s development in line with The World Health Organisation (2020) to argue that preventive interventions should move beyond separating the microsystems of school and home to create new intergenerational spaces for nurturing mental wellbeing. Using the 5A’s theory of creativity (Glăveanu, 2013), we draw upon our experiences of creative writing to explore how intergenerational spaces that facilitate co-creating creative writing between parents and carers and their children as actors develops reflective functioning, secures attachment and promote positive mental health. This original idea is explored further with experts from diverse landscapes of practice (Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, 2015) through a World Café and focus group discussion. Thematic analysis of these discussions conceptualises intergenerational spaces as complex, contradictory and dynamic: addressing potential barriers to actor participation caused by the microsystems of school and home; creating emotional and physical security; being underpinned by pedagogical freedom and structure; involving the writing of different artifacts for competing audiences. For those, including schools, looking beyond performativity and neoliberalism to promote positive mental health in more holistic ways, this paper offers a useful starting point for thinking about what intergenerational spaces that facilitate co-creating creative writing might look like
Into the Meme Stream: The Value and Spectacle of Internet Memes
Get PDFThis paper ‘tracks’ memes, forms of networked, pictorial/caption humour and social commentary – as well as cultural labour, through a process of value change: the ‘meme stream’. This is a process of incorporation of cultural resistance and labour into, and by, the dominant forces of capital that facilitate them: social media networks and their advertisers. We use Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance alongside Debord’s Spectacle to argue that as memes move, increasing their audience as they go, they lose resonance with a dedicated audience but gain exposure with a more diffuse audience, which is detrimental to the expression of political, countercultural, or socially provocative positions. We use Doge as our explanatory structural example. Our contribution is to demonstrate that the systems that allow for the flow and movement of memes reduce their expressive content, shifting them toward a template that is impotent for cultural, social, or political critique
A shorter version of the revised Francis Psychological Type and Emotional Temperament Scales (FPTETS-R)
Get PDFThe Francis Psychological Type and Emotional Temperament Scales (FPTETS) operationalize the psychological-type model of personality alongside emotional temperament. The scales have been widely used in research as continuous variables that explain a wide range of religious beliefs and attitudes. The full instrument consists of five ten-item scales so a shorter version would be useful in longer surveys where completion time needs to be minimized. This study uses data from 700 Church of England clergy who completed the revised version of the FPTETS to reduce the ten-item scales to six-item scales. Ant colony optimization was found to be a better way of selecting the final items than reliability optimization alone because it balanced individual scale reliabilities with maintaining the factor structure of the overall instrument. The selected scales were validated using data from 1194 lay people from Church of England, and two samples of 884 clergy and 2765 lay people from the Episcopal Church (USA). The short scales are commended for use where the need is for continuous scale scores rather than producing psychological typologies
Contributions from lived experience counsellors, therapists, and ethicists
No full textThis chapter presents contributions from experienced authors, academics, trainers, researchers, practitioners, ethicists, and activists in the counselling and mental health professions; all of them individuals who have engaged with ethical challenges and demands across diverse working contexts. Contributors met with the authors for a research conversation, in which they considered contemporary ethical challenges facing the counselling professions practitioners. The contributors’ voices and perspectives on navigating relational ethics form a rich and multi-dimensional depiction of ethics in life and lived relationships - both within and outside of our profession, as central organising principles that influence our ways of being
Global age-sex-specific mortality, life expectancy, and population estimates in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations, 1950–2021, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic: a comprehensive demographic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021
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Considering the mystery of professionalism: Further Education in the UK.
Get PDFThe paper considers the concept of professionalism, within the UK Further Education (FE) through an analysis of the literature. The paper identifies professionalism as a key feature of the changing landscape within UK FE since the Further and Higher Education Act (1992) which incorporated FE Colleges, allowing them levels of autonomy and discretion not seen before. With it, came new staffing contracts and changes to the expectations of a ‘professionalised’ staff teams. This paper suggests that despite 30 years having passed since incorporation, FE Colleges and their management still struggle with the concept of professionalism and its reality, noting particularly the dysfunctional nature of the sector and its difficulty in having a defined identity
The Geo-Positioning of Turkey in Eurasia in the 21st Century
Get PDFLooking through the lens of critical geopolitics, the article challenges Turkey’s so-called ‘bridge’ position
and the binary opposition of Europe and Asia by arguing that the vision of Turkish foreign policy has been
imagined geographically and geopositioned contextually. In this article, for the first time, I apply the term
‘geopositioning’ to describe Turkey’s ‘in-between’ geographical location between Europe and Asia by
evaluating geostrategic, geoeconomics and geopolitical variables together from a new perspective. I argue that
Turkey’s evolving foreign policy towards Eurasia is a consequence of the Ankara governments’ search for an
alternative vision that led to geopositioning in post-Cold War international relations. Therefore, the article
critically analyses whether the goals of Turkish foreign policy were shaped by material or ideational interests
and how they influenced Turkey’s geopositioning in Eurasia. For the last two decades, the change of traditional
Turkish foreign policy by evolving multi-dimensionally and engaging actively in the Caucasus, Central Asia, the
Middle East, and North Africa has been the empirical evidence of such geopositioning. After describing a new
theoretical framework in the introduction and summarizing emerging opportunities in post-Cold War
international politics, the second part examines the implementation of multidimensional foreign policy under the
Justice and Development Party (AKP) leadership since 2002. The article concludes that the geopositioning of
Turkey in the twenty-first century has been shaped by both material and ideational interests and evolved
paradoxically around collaboration and competition with Russia, China, and Iran