Kyle Longest

• PhD
• Chair at Furman University

Background Religion and science are typically portrayed as fundamentally at odds and in competition over truth claims. Yet recent studies have shown that many Americans, including scientists, do not necessarily hold such a straightforward perspective on this complicated relationship. The majority of current studies have been limited in fully captur...

Early religion scholars stressed the importance of institutionalized “rites of passage” to integrate and reinvigorate groups themselves. Surprisingly, little work, however, has explored the efficacy of such rites for the religious lives of individuals. Although research has examined the transformative role of semi‐institutionalized rites like short...

A number of recent studies have examined the connection between pornography use and relationship outcomes for Americans already in marriages. The current study takes this research in a different direction by examining (1) whether pornography use may be associated with entrance into marriage during early adulthood and (2) whether this association is...

Using panel data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, we examine the effect of beliefs about evolution in high school on several postsecondary educational outcomes. Results indicate that net of a host of background factors and potential alternative explanatory factors, there are significant associations between beliefs about evolution and...

Research indicates that religiosity inhibits adolescent and young adult sexual behavior, but few studies examine how religious contexts may shape sexual behavior. When religious contexts are considered, studies rarely test multiple spheres of religious influence simultaneously. Moreover, little research examines how either individual religiosity or...

Social scientists know very little about the consequences of exposure to scientific knowledge and holding different perspectives on science and religion for individuals' religious lives. Drawing on secularization and post-secular theories, we develop and test several hypotheses about the relationships among exposure to scientific knowledge, perspec...

Writing intensive first-year seminars are well situated within the curriculum to teach about issues like cheating and plagiarism. Although most research on academic integrity focuses on how—and how much—students cheat, we take a different approach. We assess whether participation in writing intensive first-year seminars produces measurable changes...

Fostering students’ intellectual curiosity is a common goal of first-year seminar programs—especially in liberal arts settings. The authors propose an alternative method to assess this ambiguous, value-laden concept. Relying on data gathered from pre- and posttest in-depth interviews of 34 students enrolled in first-year seminars, they construct an...

Although business creation has become increasingly central to management theory, the process mechanisms by which individuals start businesses and resolve preliminary doubts about their endeavors remain poorly understood. We propose new theory that examines one specific aspect of these mechanisms: the priorities founders emphasize when they begin to...

Previous research has emphasized the positive impact of supportive informal relations on workers in various occupational settings. Such support seems particularly important for workers who aspire to be self-employed, running their own businesses. Existing theory, however, offers little guidance regarding the mechanisms through which these supportiv...

Research on the importance of values often focuses primarily on one domain of social predictors (e.g., economic) or limits its scope to a single dimension of values. We conduct a simultaneous analysis of a wide range of theoretically important social influences and a more complete range of individuals' value orientations, focusing both on value rat...

Sociologists and scholars of composition have long argued that in order to get students to improve the quality of what they write, they need to change how they write. Here, the authors assess whether students’ participation in writing-intensive first-year seminars leads to changes in their writing process. Data collected via pretest and posttest in...

Numerous studies have shown that men and women react to experiences of stressors and a lack of protective resources in different ways, with women exhibiting high levels of internalizing health outcomes (e.g., psychological distress and ill health) and men showing higher levels of externalizing outcomes (e.g., substance abuse and aggression). Althou...

A wide-held assumption is that increased religiousness is associated with stronger perceptions of a conflict between religion and science. This article examines this assumption using four distinct questions asked on the third wave of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). Results indicate a variety of viewpoints for constructing the relat...

Given that persons starting new ventures often share ownership with one or more persons (Ruef, Aldrich, & Carter, 2003), determining the distribution of ownership among team members and how members contribute various sources to their startups has become more complicated. Teams are recognized as having larger pools of potential resources, including...

The study of adolescence and young adulthood has been markedly influenced by “grand narratives” that purport to offer encompassing descriptions of these periods of life. Most organismic theories of development – which view the biography as a progression through universal stages – count as grand narratives. According to such theories, all humans mus...

Much research on adolescent deviance has supported a theory of social control, asserting that the lack of ties to institutions (such as school and parents) increases an adolescent's likelihood of using illicit substances. Researchers in this tradition often posit religion as one among many sources of norm enforcement. Yet religion may impact adoles...

Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is an increasingly popular analytic strategy, with applications to numerous empirical fields. This article briefly discusses the substantive motivation and technical details of QCA, as well as fuzzy-set QCA, followed by an in-depth discussion of how the new program fuzzy performs these techniques in Stata. An...

The dialectic between the adolescent quest for autonomy and parents’ desire to regulate this quest are explored by examining the extent to which the association between adolescent work intensity and substance use is mediated and moderated by parenting practices. Results using data from the National Survey of Youth and Religion (N = 3,290) show that...

This is a module to reverse the order of a variable's values and maintain specified value labels. `revrs' is especially helpful for quickly recoding multiple categorical or ordinal response variables to follow a similar direction. Roger Newson's sencode package is required.

ABSTRACT The stress process model links stressors, scarce co ping resources, passive coping strategies, and low perceived social support to poo r physical and mental health outcomes. But

We utilize small groups literature and status characteristics theory to explain the effectiveness of entrepreneurial startup teams. We hypothesized that teams containing members with high status characteristics, such as prior entrepreneurial experience, will have higher levels functioning because these individuals are better able to provide contrib...