“City Air Makes Free”: A Multi-Level, Cross-national Analysis Of Self-efficacy

Abstract

Ohio State University. His current research focuses on the interaction of physical environments, social environments, and the individual.

Tolerance in the City: The Multilevel Effects of Urban Environments on Permissive Attitudes

“…Secondly, including urban factors at the societal level in the analysis permitted us to examine the claim that urbanization is not just a local phenomenon, but an important part of a larger social context (Maine, 1862/; Tönnies, 1887/; Wirth, ). With only a few exceptions (e.g., J. S. Carter, ; Debies‐Carl & Huggins, ) very few empirical studies have investigated this claim previously. In our study, we found several distal indicators of urban environments to be significantly related to tolerance.…”

“…However, it is also possible that urbanism operates beyond the environment immediately experienced by the individual. Specifically, macro‐level transformations that operate at a societal level may also influence individual attitudes (for a complete discussion of this argument, see Debies‐Carl & Huggins, ). A full test of urban tolerance must take this perspective into account.…”

“…Inspired in part by Fischer's work, many studies in recent years have demonstrated that cities have significant effects on their residents net of demographic composition (e.g., Debies‐Carl & Huggins, ; Geis & Ross, ; Tittle & Grasmick, ). Several studies have specifically tested the hypothesis that urbanites are more tolerant of differences in others than their rural counterparts.…”

Religion and the Sense of Control in Cross-National Perspective: The Importance of Religious Context

“…Previous scholarship has often used the Personal Mastery Scale, a seven-item scale (Pearlin and Schooler 1978). However, some prior research has relied on a single item, showing no specific problems with regard to this measurement of the sense of control (Debies-Carl and Huggins 2009). Although I acknowledge that using an index with multiple indicators is more desirable, use of a single-item measure can be helpful because it is a direct assessment of the sense of control that is easy to interpret.…”

“…Control variables include several measures of respondents’ demographic characteristics and other measures that previous research found to be associated with the sense of control (Debies-Carl and Huggins 2009; Gecas 1989). As individual-level controls, I control for gender that is measured as a dichotomous variable, where 1 = “female” and 0 = “male.” Age is measured as a continuous variable (in years).…”