The merton thesis: Oetinger and German Pietism,a significant negative case

The Merton thesis identifies two movements — English Puritanism and German Pietism — as causally significant in the development of the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. It attributes this connection to a strong compatibility between the values of ascetic Protestantism and those associated with modern science. This article questions Merton's conclusion regarding one of these movements, German Pietism, by arguing that the Pietist ethos stood in sharp conflict with what Merton has called the normative structure of science. One manifestation of this conflict involves Friedrich Oetinger's articulation of a contending religious-mystical conception of science, which assigned a central place to feeling, intuition, the role of the divine, and a qualitative approach to nature. This conception of science, it is argued, provides the clearest indication of the conceptual and valuative distance that tended to separate Pietists from the new science of the 17th and 18th centuries.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1990 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, in Virginia Beach.     

Seasonal patterns of fertility measures: theory and data

The distribution of births by month exhibits a seasonal pattern in most populations. The monthly marital fertility rate for an area of Bangladesh provides a good example of the seasonal periodicity. Seasonal patterns of measures of reproduction in a population of married women are considered. Equations are developed that predict the seasonal patterns of these alternative measures under the assumption that the fertility rate (R) follows a trigonometric curve. This is followed by an empirical analysis of the measures in a Bangladesh population that has a pronounced seasonal fertility. The investigation is intended both to validate the theoretical framework developed in the 1st part of the paper as well as to determine whether seasonal variation in actual populations is sufficiently large to affect the alternative measures significantly. 4 measures are considered: pregnancy prevalence (PP)--the proportion of married women who are pregnant at the survey date; mean open birth interval (MOI)--the time from the last live birth to the date of the survey for parous women and from the time of marriage to the date of the survey for nulliparous women; mean closed interval-birth (MCIB)--the mean interval between the last 2 live births for married women who have a birth in the period immediately preceding the survey date; and mean closed interval-woman (MCIW)--the mean interval between the last 2 live births for women who have had at least 2 children by the time of the survey. It is assumed that the seasonal pattern of the fertility rate of a population follows a cosine curve and that there is no trend in annual fertility from year to year. The lag and relative variability of the other measures are considered in comparison with the fertility rate curve. The predictions from this theoretical effort, when compared with observed patterns and trigonometric regression results for each measure in data from Bangladesh, are shown to be quite accurate. The figure and regression results show that R, PP, and MOI have definite seasonal periodicity, but MCIB and MCIW do not display any seasonal patterns. If there is a secular trend in fertility in addition to seasonality, these relationships between the seasonal patterns of the measures may no longer hold. There is a disadvantage to using closed interval measures, for they are unable to detect effects of limiting of childbearing in a population since they are based only on information from women who have births.     

Contraceptive behavior among unmarried young women: A theoretical framework for research

Adoption of the most effective methods of contraception requires individual decision-making and negotiation with contraceptive providers. In order to take account of both behavioral elements, a two-dimensional framework for understanding contraceptive adoption and continuation by unmarried young is proposed, incorporating a "social-psychological model" of individual decision-making and an "interpersonal model" of factors affecting provider-client interaction. The social-psychological model is based on an earlier value-expectancy theory of behavior motivation as applied to health-related behaviors. The interpersonal model is derived from conflict-bargaining perspectives on professional-client interaction; it is suggested that expectations for this interaction are based on a limited number of internalized "models": the "professional"; the "bureaucratic"; the "commercial"; and the "parental." Insofar as client and professional "models" disagree, communication may break down and client understanding and/or acceptance of provider advice cannot be assured. The components of the social-psychological and interpersonal models are described in detail, and a combined framework is proposed.     

The FARSEEING real-world fall repository: a large-scale collaborative database to collect and share sensor signals from real-world falls

Background

Real-world fall events objectively measured by body-worn sensors can improve the understanding of fall events in older people. However, these events are rare and hence challenging to capture. Therefore, the FARSEEING (FAll Repository for the design of Smart and sElf-adaptive Environments prolonging Independent livinG) consortium and associated partners started to build up a meta-database of real-world falls.

Results

Between January 2012 and December 2015 more than 300 real-world fall events have been recorded. This is currently the largest collection of real-world fall data recorded with inertial sensors. A signal processing and fall verification procedure has been developed and applied to the data. Since the end of 2015, 208 verified real-world fall events are available for analyses. The fall events have been recorded within several studies, with different methods, and in different populations. All sensor signals include at least accelerometer measurements and 58 % additionally include gyroscope and magnetometer measurements. The collection of data is ongoing and open to further partners contributing with fall signals. The FARSEEING consortium also aims to share the collected real-world falls data with other researchers on request.

Conclusions

The FARSEEING meta-database will help to improve the understanding of falls and enable new approaches in fall risk assessment, fall prevention, and fall detection in both aging and disease.

     

Youth emancipation and perceived job insecurity of parents and children

We test whether job insecurity of parents and children affect children’s moving-out decisions. Macroeconomic estimates for 13 European countries over 1983–2004 show that coresidence increases by 1.7 percentage points (PP) following a 10 PP rise in the share of youths perceiving their job to be insecure and declines by 1.1 PP following the same increment in insecurity for older workers. Microeconometric evidence for Italy in the mid-1990s shows that the probability of moving out increases by about half a percentage point for a one-standard-deviation increase in paternal insecurity and by one-third of a percentage point for a one-standard-deviation decrease in children’s insecurity.     

Kontexteffekte in Familien – Angleichung von Paaren und intergenerationale Transmission am Beispiel Religiosität

The present contribution shows conceptual and methodological approaches for the study of social context effects within families. Family members mutually constitute the social context in which family behavior and personality development take place. Social influence in families becomes evident empirically in family members’ significant similarity concerning a wide variety of characteristics. The present study focuses on intrafamily convergence with regard to religiousness. In an empirical illustration, both (a) horizontal intracouple alignment and (b) vertical intergenerational transmission processes are examined. Besides the finding that experiences during religious socialization in the parental home have a stronger impact than partner influences in adulthood, our analyses show that social context effects are more pronounced the stronger the cohesion of the respective interaction dyad is (e.g., according to measures of relationship quality).     

Assessing physical activity in inpatient rehabilitation—sensor-based validation of the PAIR

Increased physical activity is positively associated with better health in community-dwelling older persons. It is unclear whether physical activity also influences success of inpatient rehabilitation. For the assessment of physical activity in inpatient rehabilitation the Physical Activity in Inpatient Rehabilitation Assessment (PAIR), a short questionnaire based on five questions, was developed and preliminary validated. In this study, the PAIR was validated against a sensor-based physical activity measurement. Seventy functionally impaired and cognitively mostly intact patients of a German geriatric inpatient rehabilitation clinic who had undergone hip surgery (n?=?62 women, median age?=?83 years) participated. Physical activity was measured using the PAIR and a sensor-based activity monitor (Physilog ®; BioAGM, CH). Assessments were conducted at admission (T1) and 2 weeks later (T2) during the rehabilitation process. To assess concurrent and predictive validity, Spearman correlations and linear regression models were calculated using sensor-based walking activity and uptime activity (walking and standing time) as dependent variables. Criterion-related concurrent validity using physical activity sensors was weak to moderate. Correlations were slightly higher at T2 (r?=?0.45-0.53) than at T1 (r?=?0.44-0.46). The objectively measured variance of physical activity, explained by the PAIR, ranged from 25 to 43 %. PAIR activity scores and sensor-based walking or total activity increased in a dose-dependent manner, confirming the scoring system of the PAIR. The application time was usually less than 2 min. The validity of the PAIR is weak to moderate when compared to a sensor-based activity monitor and comparable to existing physical activity assessments for community-dwelling older adults.     

Enriching Absorptive Capacity through Social Interaction

Absorptive capacity is frequently highlighted as a key determinant of knowledge transfer within multinational enterprises. But how individual behaviour translates into absorptive capacity at the subsidiary level, and how this is contingent on subsidiaries' social context, remains under‐addressed. This not only limits our understanding of the relationship between individual‐ and organizational‐level absorptive capacity, but also hampers further research on potentially relevant managerial and organizational antecedents, and limits the implications we can draw for practitioners who seek to increase their organization's capacity to put new knowledge to use. To address this shortcoming we conduct an in‐depth comparative case study of a headquarters‐initiated knowledge transfer at two subsidiaries of the same multinational enterprise. The findings demonstrate that social interaction is a prerequisite for subsidiary absorptive capacity as it enables employees to participate in the transformation of new knowledge to the local context and the development of local applications. The findings also illustrate how organizational conditions at the subsidiary level can impact subsidiary absorptive capacity by enabling or constraining local interaction patterns. These insights contribute to the absorptive capacity literature by demonstrating the scale and scope of social interaction as a key link between individual‐ and organizational‐level absorptive capacity.     

The Chicago School,So-Called

Many sociologists believe in the myth of a Chicago School, a unified and coherent body of thought and research practice carried on at the University of Chicago from the 1920s through the 1960s. Chicago never constituted such a coherent system and is better understood as a school of activity, a group of people who cooperated in the day-to-day running of a major department.