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Women on Waves and unintended polarisation

October 22, 2008 Science 2 Comments

Recently, I have been giving some thought on what might constitute polarisation of attitudes. Especially, I’m interested in whether or not the debate on induced abortion in American society has become more polarised. The recent news on the presence and activities of Women on Waves in Valencia, Spain, has spurred some more thought on this.

A lot has been written about this, as well as on what exactly should be interpreted as polarisation. Methodologically inclined literature seems to be debating this to some extent, but at least agree that it has to do with an increasingly broad distribution of attitudes or opinions. In less technical terms, this means that the opinions of large number of people in society differ in increasing amounts. so, we’re talking about polarisation of the general public, instead of the polarised activities of either pro-life, or pro-choice organisations.
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Paradoxical negative spill-over of Catholics’ attitudes on induced abortion

August 28, 2008 Science 2 Comments


ResearchBlogging.org

Even though it is rather widely known in sociology that individual actions can have unexpected or seemingly contradictory outcomes on the societal level, I always get that little tingly feeling of discovery when reading about such a seemingly paradoxical mechanism. Interestingly, Jelen et al. have found one regarding the attitudes of Catholics on induced abortion.

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Welcome to Curving Normality

Curving Normality is an academic blog maintained by Rense Nieuwenhuis. He uses this blog to write about the social sciences in general, fascinating journal papers, useful data, interesting books, statistics using R. In addition, his personal academic activities are shared here, as well.