A hypothesized need to form and maintain strong, stable interpersonal relationships is evaluated in light of the empirical literature. The need is for frequent, nonaversive interactions within an ongoing relational bond. Consistent with the belongingness hypothesis, people form social attachments readily under most conditions and resist the dissolution of existing bonds. Belongingness appears to have multiple and strong effects on emotional patterns and on cognitive processes. Lack of attachments is linked to a variety of ill effects on health, adjustment, and well-being. Other evidence, such as that concerning satiation, substitution, and behavioral consequences, is likewise consistent with the hypothesized motivation. Several seeming counterexamples turned out not to disconfirm the hypothesis. Existing evidence supports the hypothesis that the need to belong is a powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive motivation.

The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation.

Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

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Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

Publisher Summary This chapter addresses the universals in the content and structure of values, concentrating on the theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries, and its four basic issues: substantive contents of human values; identification of comprehensive set of values; extent to which the meaning of particular values was equivalent for different groups of people; and how the relations among different values was structured. Substantial progress has been made toward resolving each of these issues. Ten motivationally distinct value types that were likely to be recognized within and across cultures and used to form value priorities were identified. Set of value types that was relatively comprehensive, encompassing virtually all the types of values to which individuals attribute at least moderate importance as criteria of evaluation was demonstrated. The evidence from 20 countries was assembled, showing that the meaning of the value types and most of the single values that constitute them was reasonably equivalent across most groups. Two basic dimensions that organize value systems into an integrated motivational structure with consistent value conflicts and compatibilities were discovered. By identifying universal aspects of value content and structure, the chapter has laid the foundations for investigating culture-specific aspects in the future.

Universals in the Content and Structure of Values: Theoretical Advances and Empirical Tests in 20 Countries

This paper attempts to further theoretical and empirical understanding of adherent and constituent mobilization by proposing and analyzing frame alignment as a conceptual bridge linking social psychological and resource mobilization views on movement participation. Extension of Goffinan's (1974) frame analytic perspective provides the conceptualltheoretical framework; field research on two religious movements, the peace movement, and several neighborhood movements provide the primary empirical base. Four frame alignment processes are identified and elaborated: frame bridging, frame amplification, frame extension, and frame transformation. The basic underlying premise is that frame alignment, of one variety or another, is a necessary condition for participation, whatever its nature or intensity, and that it is typically an interactional and ongoing accomplishment. The paper concludes with an elaboration of several sets of theoretical and research implications.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2095581.pdf

Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation.

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Introduction to Social Network Methods

Finally, social scientists have begun to attempt to understand religious behavior rather than to discredit it as irrational, ignorant, or foolish--and Rodney Stark and Roger Finke have played a major role in this new approach. Acknowledging that science cannot assess the supernatural side of religion (and therefore should not claim to do so), Stark and Finke analyze the observable, human side of faith. In clear and engaging prose, the authors combine explicit theorizing with animated discussions as they move from considering the religiousness of individuals to the dynamics of religious groups and then to the religious workings of entire societies as religious groups contend for support. The result is a comprehensive new paradigm for the social-scientific study of religion.

http://www.dlfiles24.com/pdf90/168935849-acts_of_faith_explaining_the_human_side_of_religion_roger_finke.pdf

Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion

Religion and society in tension

In The Churching of America, 1776-2005 Roger Finke and Rodney Stark once again revolutionize the way we think about religion in America. Extending the argument that the nation's religious environment acts as a free market economy, this extensively revised and expanded edition offers new research, statistics, and stories that document increased participation in religious groups in the twenty-first century. Adding to the thorough coverage of \"\"mainline\"\" religious groups, new chapters chart the remarkable development and growth of African American churches from the early nineteenth century forward. Finke and Stark show how, like other \"\"upstart sects,\"\" these churches openly competed for adherents and demonstrate how American norms of religious freedom allowed African American churches to construct organizational havens with little outside intervention. This edition also includes new sections on the ethnic religious communities of recent immigrants - stories that echo those told of ethnic religious enclaves in the nineteenth century. Bringing together timely new information and evidence, this provocative book insists, more than ever, on a major reevaluation of established ideas about American religious institutions. Written with lively prose, it will stir debate within church and academic communities, as well as among laypersons interested in the history of religion in America.

The Churching of America 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy.

Religion is alive and well in the modern world, and the social-scientific study of religion is undergoing a renaissance. For much of this century, respected social theorists predicted the death of religion as inevitable consequence of science, education, and modern economics. But they were wrong. Stark and Bainbridge set out to explain the survival of religion. Using information derived from numerous surveys, censuses, historical case studies, and ethnographic field expeditions, they chart the full sweep of contemporary religion from the traditional denominations to the most fervent cults. This wealth of information is located within a coherent theoretical framework that examines religion as a social response to human needs, both the general needs shared by all and the desires specific to those who are denied the economic rewards or prestige enjoyed by the privileged. By explaining the forms taken by religions today, Stark and Bainbridge allow us to understand its persistence in a secular age and its prospects for the future.

The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation

Materials derived from observation of a West Coast millenarian cult are employed to develop a "value-added" model of the conditions under which conversion occurs. For conversion a person must experience, within a religious problem-solving perspective, enduring, acutely-felt tensions that lead him to define himself as a religious seeker; he must encounter the cult at a turning point in his life; within the cult an affective bond must be formed (or pre-exist) and any extra-cult attachments, neutralized; and there he must be exposed to intensive interaction if he is to become a "deployable agent." ALL men and all human groups have ultimate values, a world view, or a perspective furnishing them a more or less orderly and comprehensible picture of the world. Clyde Kluckhohn remarked that no matter how primitive and crude it may be, there is a "philosophy behind the way of life of every individual and of every relatively homogeneous group at any given point in their histories." 1 When a person gives up one such perspective or ordered view of the world for another we refer to this process as conversion.2 Frequently such conversions are between popular and widely held perspectives-from Catholicism to Communism, or from the world view of an underdeveloped or primitive culture to that of a technically more advanced society, as from the Peyote Cult of the Southwest Indians to Christianity. The continual emergence of tiny cults and sects in western industrial nations makes it clear, however, that sometimes persons relinquish a more widely held perspective for an unknown, obscure and often, socially devalued one. In this paper we shall outline a model of the conversion process through which a group of people came to see the world in terms set by the doctrines of one such obscure and devalued perspective-a small millenarian religious cult. Although it is based on only a single group, we think the model suggests some rudiments of a general

Rodney Stark

Papers

Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion

Religion and society in tension

The Churching of America 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy.

The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation

Becoming a world-saver: a theory of conversion to a deviant perspective