Leslie Francis

This article builds on the tradition of attitudinal measures of religiosity established by Leslie Francis and colleagues with the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity (and reflected in the Sahin-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Islam, the Katz-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Judaism, and the Santosh-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Hinduism) by introducing a new measure to assess the attitudinal disposition of Pagans. A battery of items was completed by 75 members of a Pagan Summer Camp. These items were reduced to produce a 21-item scale that measured aspects of Paganism concerned with: the God/Goddess, worshipping, prayer, and coven. The scale recorded an alpha coefficient of 0.93. Construct validity of the Williams Scale of Attitude toward Paganism was demonstrated by the clear association with measures of participation in private rituals.

Robbins, Francis, and Rutledge (1997) documented the personality profile of Church of England clergymen and clergywomen prior to the ordination of the first women to the priesthood in 1994, drawing on Eysenck's three-dimensional model of personality. They found that the personality profiles of clergymen and clergywomen were indistinguishable. The present paper reports a comparable study conducted in 2004 among 182 clergywomen and 540 clergymen serving in similar parochial posts in order to examine whether the ordination of women to the priesthood had impacted the overall personality profile of Anglican clergy. The data suggest that little change had taken place between the two cohorts of clergy studied. Once again clergywomen and clergymen appeared to be formed in the same image.

Studies concerning the changing landscapes of religiosity and spirituality in the lives of young people in England and Wales draw attention to decline in traditional religiosity and to growth in alternative spiritualities. The present study examined whether such alternative spiritualities occupy the same personality space as traditional religiosity. A sample of 2,950 13- to 16-year-old pupils attending 11 secondary schools in England and Wales completed the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity and an index of paranormal belief, alongside the abbreviated-form Junior Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised. The data demonstrated that these two forms of belief were related in different ways to Eysenck's dimensional model of personality space. While attitude toward Christianity occupied the space defined by low psychoticism scores (tender-mindedness) and high lie scale scores (social conformity), paranormal belief was related to high psychoticism scores (toughmindedness) and was independent of lie scale scores. These findings support the view that alternative spiritualities may be associated with different personalities.

A sample of 311 undergraduate students in Germany completed German translations of the short form Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire together with the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity. The data demonstrated that psychoticism is fundamental to individual differences in religiosity, while religiosity is independent of both extraversion and neuroticism. These findings are consistent with those from a series of studies employing the same measure of religiosity among school pupils, students and adults in the UK.

A sample of 523 newly ordained female Anglican clergy in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales completed the Eysenck Personality Profiler (EPP). The data demonstrated that the female clergy tended to be less extravert than women in general, less neurotic than women in general, and less toughminded than women in general. These findings help to clarify the way in which women clergy tend to project a characteristically masculine personality profile in respect of one major dimension of personality (neuroticism), but a characteristically feminine personality profile in respect of the other two major dimensions of personality (psychoticism and extraversion).

Federal disability anti-discrimination laws expect clinical trials to render study processes and sites accessible to potential participants, including through the provision of reasonable accommodations. Nonetheless, people with disabilities, and particularly people with mental illness, are often excluded from clinical trials. Supported decision-making, a strategy that allows people to select trusted others to help them understand and communicate decisions, is an important accommodation to further inclusion. However, because mental illness can be dynamic and vary widely in nature (e.g., diagnosis, symptom severity, functional impairment) and duration (e.g., short-term, intermittent, progressive, permanent), supported decision-making is neither a one-size-fits-all strategy nor one that can serve as a reasonable accommodation in every situation. While prior work on supported decision-making has focused predominantly on adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities or dementias, people with mental illness may also benefit from supported decision-making, although the variability in decision-making capacity in mental illness presents nuanced challenges. Here, we explore supported decision-making in the case of people with intermittent or episodic mental illness that may impact decision-making capacity to varying degrees at different times.

In recent decades, theorists of disability rights have made the moral and legal case for supported decision-making. Whereas surrogate decision-making, the long upheld legal standard, looks to a third party to make a decision for a person deemed to lack the capacity to make that decision for themselves, support in decision-making empowers that person to make their own decisions. In this article, we argue for a significant shift in the norms governing enrollment in clinical trials. Rather than assume that support is only appropriate for individuals who cannot independently make sufficiently informed enrollment decisions, we propose “support in decision-making for all” when research protocols are beyond a certain risk threshold. Drawing inspiration from the universal design movement and feminist insights about autonomy, we argue that making support in decision-making the presumption has substantial expressive and practical benefits, and better empowers all potential research participants to make more informed, autonomous decisions.

One thousand and seventy‐nine pupils aged between 13 and 16 years, from years three through five of Protestant and Catholic secondary schools in Northern Ireland, completed a survey of moral issues, together with a scale of attitude towards Christianity and a range of indices of religious behaviour. These data are employed to develop and to establish criteria of reliability and validity for a scale of traditional Christain moral values. Tentative scale norms indicate that pupils in Catholic schools hold more strongly to traditional moral values than pupils in Protestant schools, that girls hold more strongly to traditional moral values than boys, and that the acceptance of traditional moral values declines between the third and fifth years of the secondary school.

Working within the reader perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, a series of empirical studies have tested the theory that the readers’ psychological type preference between sensing and intuition (the two Jungian perceiving functions) shapes distinctive readings of biblical narratives. More recently, closer attention has also been given to differentiation within these two perceiving functions of sensing and intuition with regard to their introverted and extraverted orientation. Against this background, the present study examines the distinctive reading of the Johannine narrative of the wedding at Cana, a passage rich in materials to engage the perceiving functions, by two groups whose dominant or auxiliary functions were introverted sensing and introverted intuition. Contribution: Situated within the reader perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, the sensing, intuition, feeling, thinking (SIFT) method is concerned with identifying the influence of the psychological type of the reader in shaping the interpretation of text. The foundations of the SIFT approach distinguish amongst the four functions of sensing, intuition, feeling and thinking. The present study builds on this foundation by introducing the nuance of the orientation in which the function is expressed, in this case focusing specifically on introverted sensing and introverted intuition.

Rooted in the field of cathedral studies, this paper draws into dialogue three bodies of knowledge: Edward Bailey’s notion of implicit religion that, among other things, highlights the continuing traction of the Christian tradition and Christian practice within secular societies; David Walker’s notion of the multiple ways through which in secular societies people may relate to the Christian tradition as embodied within the Anglican Church and John Fisher’s notion of spiritual wellbeing as conceptualised in relational terms. Against this conceptual background, this paper draws on data provided by 1234 participants attending one of the Christmas Eve carol services in Liverpool Cathedral to explore the perceived impact of attendance on the spiritual health of people who do not believe in God and yet feel that Liverpool Cathedral is their cathedral, and it is this sense of belonging that brings them back at Christmas time. Contribution: Situated within the science of cathedral studies, this paper links in an original way three fields of discourse: Edward Bailey’s notion of implicit religion, David Walker’s notion of the four ways of belonging to God facilitated by the Anglican Church and John Fisher’s conceptualisation and operationalisation of the notion of spiritual wellbeing. The hypothesis developed from this original integration of theoretical perspectives is then tested empirically on data provided by 404 participants at carol services who do not believe in God.

In sports, the concept of a “level playing field” is much praised but not well understood. One way to construct the idea is in terms of the rules of the game: if the rules are public, consistently enforced, and respected by players, the game is fair. Another approach to construction is in terms of justice: some rules of the game are unfair and thus the field is not level. Interestingly, although the “rules of the game” metaphor is drawn from games to sports, the corresponding idea of a level playing field is not incorporated into the design of games. This chapter explores the relationship between ideas of a level playing field and rules of games. It argues that how games are constructed sheds light on constructivist accounts of level playing fields in sports. Games take many forms and are fluid rather than static; rules develop and change over time. Sports do so as well, responding to pressures for inclusion and fairness. There is no one perfectly level field; there are fields that are more or less level, in different directions and dimensions.

Understanding the intangible harms of privacy violations has proved daunting. Yet it is vitally important to understanding the value of privacy beyond economic harms of privacy loss. This chapter explores how violations of employee privacy affect the dignity of work as a lens for understanding intangible privacy harms. Employee privacy has drawn less attention in recent privacy discussions than informational privacy, even though it is seriously under protected in the U.S. today. Indeed, privacy has largely been linked to employment through the possibility that the information individuals reveal on social media may unwittingly affect their employment prospects and thus cause economic harm. Yet arguments for employee privacy—of information, space, and private lives—also draw on dignity in the sense of protection from vulnerability from loss of important human goods such as the ability to function as a citizen and the need for meaningful work. In this chapter, we explore these dignity-based justifications for employee privacy. We then use this discussion to illuminate when non-consensual uses of information drawn from individuals are particularly troubling with respect to the non-economic harms they may cause.

This chapter explains how severe cognitive impairment raises distinct normative and conceptual issues. It cites the importance of recognizing whether a person with an intellectual disability possesses or lacks autonomy. Context helps determine which of the notions of autonomy is most relevant to a problem, and can specify limits before a person's actions are judged to be autonomous. When we distinguish correctly the various complex conceptions of autonomy, we will realize these people have varieties of moral autonomies. For example, using calculators or seeking information does not lessen their autonomy; on the other hand, they seem to be learning to become more independent human beings. The chapter notes that since many people with cognitive disabilities make use of such assistive technical devices, they are more autonomous in a certain sense than we want to assume.

Injustice in surveillance may occur if surveillance is directed towards protecting the health of some but the data are gathered at the expense of others. Failures to surveille may be unjust if they leave people subject to health inequities. Such injustice in surveillance may undermine trust. This chapter explores injustice in surveillance and ethical responses. Primary examples are drawn from surveillance of environmental risks, especially those involving unclean or contaminated water. These injustices occur across the globe, from Flint, Michigan, in the United States to refugee camps in Bangladesh. The chapter also takes up the obligations of others when societies are failing to act justly, arguing for the importance of addressing corrosive disadvantages suffered especially by children but by other disadvantaged populations as well.

New data are being used and new actors are engaging in surveillance by, for, and about public health. This chapter surveys many of these developments: interoperable electronic health records, retained blood spots from newborn screening, biobanks and other genetic databases. patient registries, information gained in research, direct to consumer testing (including genetic testing), smartphones and smartphone apps, wearables and biosensors, and robots and smart devices. It explores the possibilities for bias introduced by the use of artificial intelligence and questions common assumptions about the permissibility of using deidentified data. It also considers how private sector actors such as social media platforms may further public health but have economic interests orthogonal to or in tension with public health. These developments in data use and analysis carry the potential for great benefit but also significant risks of harm. The chapter concludes that regulation is uneven at best and that increased oversight and transparency are imperative to avoid backlash and sustain trust in these novel forms of data use.

This chapter explores whether “host” countries—destinations for trafficking in persons—have special obligations to provide trafficked persons with support needed to escape trafficking and to deal with the damage it has caused. It demonstrates that anti-trafficking laws are seriously under-enforced in order to point out that trafficking presents an example of “partial compliance” theory in the classic Rawlsian sense of non-adherence to just laws. Although trafficking is also a problem of non-ideal theory, the chapter contends that the partial compliance aspects of trafficking generate a persuasive argument for special obligations to trafficked persons. These special obligations may include providing asylum, healthcare, food, and shelter, at least for an initial period of time. Unfortunately, confusion about whether obligations to trafficked persons rest loosely on non-ideal theory may explain some of the reluctance of host countries to provide those who have been trafficked with needed forms of support.

What is or should be the role of consent in public health? Should the role of consent be different if the public health action involves surveillance rather than efforts to change behavior to improve health? Should either individual or community consent be required for the exercise of surveillance? If community consent is required, what constitutes the community and how might it give consent? This chapter explores these difficult questions about consent and communities. It argues that the ethical considerations of respect for persons that lie behind informed consent can be reflected in the roles of public health, groups, communities, and populations in surveillance. Reflecting such respect, however, requires careful attention to the differing ways communities may be defined, in terms of political borders, geography, groups, identities, and interests. It also requires nuanced understanding of the different ways communities develop, interrelate, and function.

Traditional forms of surveillance addressed detecting outbreaks of dangerous contagious disease, case finding and contact tracing, and identifying environmental hazards. But public health today goes far beyond interpersonal contagion and environmental dangers to address patterns of ill health among the population. Increased rates of conditions such as diabetes or substance use disorders are called “epidemics” to be addressed by public health interventions including education, environmental design, economic incentives, regulation, and even prohibition. This chapter explores the ethics of this so-called “new” public health, arguing that paternalistic interference with behavior is justified only to prevent serious harm. Much information collection, however, aims not to protect individuals but to understand health or health disparities at the population level and thus is not properly regarded as paternalistic. The chapter also argues that interferences such as the requirement to wear masks in a pandemic are mistakenly perceived as protecting individuals against their own choices and are better viewed as protecting others from the possibility of harm.

In the winter and early spring of 2020, COVID-19 stunned the world. Across the globe, public health was slow to respond. Failures of surveillance—of gathering, understanding, and sharing information—drew part of the blame. These lapses were real and could have been anticipated. This volume addresses the ethical, political, and legal issues underlying difficulties in maintaining adequate surveillance for public health. It argues that public trust is essential to sustain surveillance. For trust to be warranted, publics must be assured that information will be used to promote health equitably. Transparency and oversight are needed to protect individuals against harm and groups against discrimination and stigma. Bringing together expertise from bioethics, law, political science, and public policy, the authors of this volume develop a comprehensive approach to sustaining surveillance in today’s changing, diverse, and unjust world.