Browsing by Author "Thomson, Robert A., 1977-"
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Item The effects of homeschooling on participation in drinking alcohol among adolescents and emerging adults.(2014-06-11) Thomson, Robert A., 1977-; Jang, Sung Joon.; Sociology.; Baylor University. Dept. of Sociology.Parents often choose to homeschool their children for reasons that, if their goals are accomplished, should contribute to relatively low levels of substance use among their children. Specifically, many parents desire to foster family- and religiously-centered values, while they are also concerned about the potential of negative peer pressure in public schools. In this paper, I use data from three waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) to study the relationship between homeschooling and alcohol use. As hypothesized, I find that homeschool students do tend to drink less than public and private school students. Religiosity was found to be the strongest explanation of the observed group difference in cross-sectional analyses, while prior drinking was the dominant predictor in longitudinal analyses. In addition, concepts related to social bonding theory partially explain group differences, whereas those related to social learning and general strain tended to suppress them.Item Religion and differential justice.(2017-03-14) Thomson, Robert A., 1977-; Froese, Paul.Historical processes of domination and discrimination have contributed to the emergence of racial stratification in the United States. Differential enforcement of criminal justice on racial minorities have demonstrably contributed to the perpetuation of a racial hierarchy. Religious culture, too, has been differentially shaped by a history of racial dominance and oppression. Framed by Weber’s distinctions between religion of the privileged and religion of the disprivileged, three studies on the roles of religion and differential justice are included herein. First, using data collected among a random sample of U.S. adults at a time when incidents of police-minority violence were prominent in public discourse, I assess the relationship of politics, religion, and media consumption on attitudes about the police. Confidence in police was found to be positively related to religious attendance and viewing FOX News Channel and negatively related to political liberalism, religious salience, and viewing other TV news (e.g., PBS, BBC). Fear of police brutality, though, was positively associated with viewing MSNBC and other TV news. In the second study, I assess the role of black Protestant churches in civil society by estimating the effects of county-level affiliation rates on crime rates in the South. Applying spatial analyses to data from the 2010 Religious Census and Uniform Crime Reports, Black Protestant affiliation rates were found to be negatively associated with county-level property crime arrest rates, but unrelated to violent crime arrest rates. Affiliation rates were also found to be protective in counties with low median income and high resource disadvantage. While they also buffered the effects of prior property crime arrest rates, they exacerbated prior violent crime arrest rates. In the third study, I investigated whether religious participation buffers the negative effect of past incarceration using panel data collected from 1979 to 2002. While religious participation decreased the expected count of self-reported and medically diagnosed health outcomes among black and Hispanic former inmates, it was a substantial risk factor for white ex-cons. Implications for critiques of religion offered by Karl Marx and Richard Dawkins are discussed.