Catholic Answers Forum - Yet Another Collection Of Links

Another collection of links from CAF, a forum that always proves engaging (in a bleak and lamentable way).

I have some questions
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=960254

Did/would you ask your father to walk you down the aisle at your wedding?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=960293

What does Catholic/Christian femininity mean to you?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=960228

Annulmnent before Divorce?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=960407

Lesbian teacher at preschool we love
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=960481

Gentlemen: Top 10 Qualities When Choosing a Wife
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=960621

I am embarrassed, and I am angry.
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=960788

Annulment Reasons
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=960874

Ex girlfriend is getting married
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=961144

APA
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=961273

Engagement preparation?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=961406

Dating Outside Your Race
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=961398

Helping family when they are living together unmarried and in adultery?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=961408

Pregnant, boyfriend has a family
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=961456

Addressing morals with my girlfriend
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=961583

Would YOU marry anyone who has a history of sex abuse - as the perp?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=961581

Communication problems in marriage
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=961619

Should I just accept that i'm not meant for marriage?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=961702

Single women with married male friends -- good idea, or bad idea?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=961779

The Future of Marriage
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=961814

Catholic Answers Forum - Another Collection Of Links

CAF is back at it (or rather, they continued non-stop, but I had only suspended my attention for sanity reasons). The previous collection can be found here.

Anyhow, some links of recent discussions on CAF - some have a noticeable lack of appreciation of irony.


So I get enough courage to ask her out .........and.......she's busy.
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=932190

What do I say now?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=931569

Panicking again and under pressure... should I settle in marriage?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=931590

Am I being too hard on my husband?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=932258

Sexual concessions to married couples and homosexuality
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=864991

Civil marriage and annullment
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=932620

Retrouvaille
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=932630

NFP vs. Vasectomy
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=932651

Club or Program for Teen Girls?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=932984

Are most marriages invalid?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=932932

its hard..
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=932838

What other attacks on the Traditional Family?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=933279

Which prayer is good for finding a real partner?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=933045

Matrimony or Bust
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=933247

What to do when you have a low libido and still need to please your husband
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=933266

19yr old daughter, sex, boyfriend & free will
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=917224

[GSS] Age At First Marriage By Political Views

Using the GSS, I created three charts detailing historical distribution of political views and age at first marriage for each (and all) category of political views. I restricted the age of respondents to 18-40.

The question for political views was:

67a. We hear a lot of talk these days about liberals and conservatives. I'm going to show you a seven-point scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged from extremely liberal - point 1 - to extremely conservative - point 7. Where would you place yourself on this scale?

The scale is the following (I grouped 1-3 and 5-7 for legibility):

1  EXTREMELY LIBERAL
2  LIBERAL
3  SLIGHTLY LIBERAL

4  MODERATE

5  SLGHTLY CONSERVATIVE
6  CONSERVATIVE
7  EXTRMLY CONSERVATIVE


For age at first marriage:

4a. If ever married: How old were you when you first married?


Historical distribution of political views from 1974 to 2012:

The mean of age at first marriage by year for each group of political views (1986-2006):

Mean of age at first marriage by year for all groups (1986-2006):

Assorted Marriage Data From The GSS

Eleven charts of data from the GSS (1972-2012) detailing happiness, marriage, and divorce data. The age, age of first marriage, and marital cohort variables have been recoded for legibility.


The questions:

4a. If ever married: How old were you when you first married?

13. Respondent's age

157. Taken all together, how would you say things are these days - would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?

158. Taking all things together, how would you describe your marriage?

1291. Were you ever divorced?¹

1652. Marriage cohort of the respondent.



Ever divorced by age of respondent:

Ever divorced by marital happiness:

Ever divorced by marital cohort:

Marital happiness by age at first marriage:

Marital happiness by marital cohort:

Marital happiness by year (all Rs):

Marital happiness by year (female):

Marital happiness by year (male):

General happiness by year (all Rs):

General happiness by year (female):

General happiness by year (male):

------ 1. (NB: Only for years 1988 and 1994). I'll update the post with a better variable soon.

Catholic Answers Forum - A Collection Of Links

As is usual for CAF nowadays, the level of crypto-feminism and crypto-Marxism has become increasingly more obvious (and soon the crypto- modifier will have to be dropped). Here is a collection of links from CAF illustrating the decline.


Had a pretty terrible 5 year anniversary...need advice on forgiveness and what to do.
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=911407

Wife is afraid of going to Mass
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=911286

Are You Catholic and Divorced? Share Your Experience with the New York Times
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=910965

Handling a Break-up
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=911078

Marriage help
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=911054

Those who have overcome trials in MARRIAGE, how do you fix emotional betrayal?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=910592

Anti-Women Quotes from Early Christian Figures
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=910659

Importance of Shared Hobbies in Marriage
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=910745

Those who have overcome trials in courtship, how do you fix emotional betrayal?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=909814

out-of-wedlock birth
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=784630

Wife Admits Affair with a Woman - What Do I Do???
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=909655

From Russia the anti-family poison spread, and now from Russia comes the antidote
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=909604

Blaming The Victim
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=820293

Meeting Catholic girls on campus
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=910538

Birth Control views?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=909988

Is husband condemned? 1 Timothy 5:8
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=910062

Where do you find Good Catholic woman/man now a days?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=910177

Failing marriage
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=910225

I am the wife and the provider...
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=903711

Jealous of husband
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=908874

Never had romance stage of Marriage
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=909762

Please pray for a very devastated man.
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=906927

spouse vs. parents
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=909424

Abusive Father Update
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=909451

Women’s college redefines ‘women’
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=908140

twice Divorced Marriage in Church
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=909311

When the difficult person in  your life is your spouse...
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=909276

annulment question
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=909281

my husband loves another woman and can't choose
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=908287

NEED Advice - My Parents or My Lover?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=888937

Should I tell Wife of Affair
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=908242

Religious, Ethnic, And Linguistic Fractionalization And Intentional Homicide Rate

I read a comment somewhere (probably on Twitter) that suggested that various types of fractionalization increased violence in a country (or were at least correlated with it). I have decided to test that theory - this post is the first on this particular idea.

For the homicide data I went to Wikipedia [1], which had the intentional homicide rate for most countries of the world. The data were from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

For the fractionalization data I went to Wikipedia [2], which had the ethnic, linguistic and/or religious fractionalization scores of 215 countries based on research done by Alberto Alesina (et al) [3]. That being said, I have learnt not to trust Wikipedia, and in this particular case my distrust was warranted. There are a number of missing values in Alesina's dataset, which were incorrectly entered into Wikipedia as a score of 0.00 (that is, no fractionalisation at all). The linguistic fractionalization score of Rwanda (according to Wikipedia) is definitely not 0.00, for example. In fact, only one country had a single score of 0.00 (in the original dataset), and that was the ethnic fractionalization score for the Comoros.


Alesina et al introduce the subject this way:

Ethnic conflict is an important determinant of the political economy of many nations and localities. Many believe that it leads to political instability, poor quality of institutions, badly designed of economic policy and disappointing economic performance.

In a cross-country setting, Easterly and Levine (1997) have shown that per capita GDP growth is inversely related to ethnolinguistic fractionalization in a large sample of countries. In particular, they argued that much of Africa’s growth failure is due to ethnic conflict, partly as a result of absurd borders left by former colonizers. As a result of that paper, a measure of ethnic fractionalization has become a “standard” control in regressions explaining cross-national differences in economic success. A related literature, early examples being Canning and Fay (1993) and Mauro (1995), has discussed the impact of ethnic fragmentation on government activities and quality of institutions. La Porta et al. (1999), in a broad empirical study of the determinants of the quality of government, suggest that ethnic fractionalization matters, even though variables related to legal origins may be more important.

A large literature on US localities show that in more ethnically fragmented communities, public goods provision is less efficient, participation in social activities and trust is lower, and economic success, measured by growth of city sizes, is inferior. Evidence that trust does not travel well across racial lines is also supported by experimental evidence.

While existing measure of racial (or ethnic) fragmentation for the US are reasonably well accepted, since they are based upon detailed and reliable census data, cross-country measures have been widely debated. Easterly and Levine (1997) use indices based on ethnolinguistic classification provided by sources from the former Soviet Union, the Atlas Narodov Mira of 1964. These data rely largely on linguistic distinctions, which may obscure other aspect of ethnicity like racial origin, skin color, etc. Interestingly, studies within the United States do not look at language in the racial classification. If they did, blacks and whites would be classified in the same language group. As we discuss below, this example shows that although useful, language is not the only way to look at ethnicity.

They continue on with more discussion, specific cases, and methods. The paper is 66 pages long (with tables) - it is quite an interesting read.

Anyhow, once I prepared the data, I used the Spearman rank correlation to see if there was a relation between homicide rate and one of the fractionalization scores. My results are the following:


"Ethnic Fractionalization" vs "Homicide Rate"

p value: < 0.001

Spearman's R statistic: 0.09

Degrees of Freedom (df): 182

"Linguistic Fractionalization" vs "Homicide Rate"

p value: 0.114

Spearman's R statistic: -0.058

Degrees of Freedom (df): 187

"Religious Fractionalization" vs "Homicide Rate"

p value: 0.062

Spearman's R statistic: 0.091

Degrees of Freedom (df): 198

Some of the paper's results:

On economic growth, we broadly confirm the results by Easterly and Levine (1997). In fact the negative effect of ethnic fragmentation on growth is reinforced with the new data, and we are able to highlight the differences between ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization.

[...]

While ethnic and linguistic fractionalization are associated with negative outcomes in terms of quality of government, religious fractionalization is not; in fact, if anything, this measure displays a positive correlation with measures of good governance; this is because measured religious fractionalization tends to be higher in more tolerant and free societies, like the United States, which in fact displays on the of the highest level of religious fractionalization. This result has no bearing, however, on the question of whether certain religious denominations are correlated with better politico-economic outcomes, an issue recently explored by Barro and McLeary (2002).

My analysis is fairly unsophisticated, so I'll have to find better data and/or better methods, particularly lower level data. Besides that, the fractionalization scores are based on data that are sometimes quite old (sometimes 20 years older than the homicide data, which is mainly from 2011-2012).

Regarding lower level data: while it appears the religious fractionalization scores took into account Shia and Sunni membership, some scores were off by quite a bit compared to the ones I calculated using data available prior 2003 (e.g. for Iran, I used figures from a book by Brenda Shaffer [5]). I will have to look into this further.

----

[1] List of countries by intentional homicide rate. (2014, August 11). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:32, August 21, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate&oldid=620830328

[2] List of countries ranked by ethnic and cultural diversity level. (2014, June 1). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:46, August 21, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_ranked_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level&oldid=611048847

[3] Alesina, Alberto, et al. "Fractionalization." Journal of Economic growth 8.2 (2003): 155-194.

[4] Shia–Sunni relations. (2014, August 19). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 01:34, August 22, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations&oldid=621944812

[5] Shaffer, Brenda. Borders and brethren: Iran and the challenge of Azerbaijani identity. MIT Press, 2002.

[GSS] Frequency Of Sex By Age And Marital Status

Using the GSS, I created two charts illustrating the frequency of sexual activity by respondent's age and marital status (for all respondents from 1972 to 2012). I recoded the variable for age for readability. I also created a chart for sexual frequency for all married respondents over time (by GSS year) - it's fairly stable. Finally, I created two charts for relationship status by frequency of sexual activity (flipping row and column for the second one - data are the same for the two charts).


Sex frequency by respondent's age - married:

Sex frequency by respondent's age - single:

Sex frequency by survey year - married:

Relationship status by sex frequency - single (i.e. unmarried):

Sex frequency by relationship status - single:

----

Questions:

Frequency of sex: About how often did you have sex during the last 12 months?

Relation to last sex partner: The last time you had sex, was it with someone you were in an on-going relationship with, or was it with someone else? Remember that by "sex" we mean only vaginal, oral, or anal sex.