The authors explored the relationship between religious involvement and intimate partner violence by analyzing data from the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households. They found that: (a) religious involvement is correlated with reduced levels of domestic violence; (b) levels of domestic violence vary by race/ethnicity; (c) the effects of religious involvement on domestic violence vary by race/ethnicity; and (d) religious involvement, specifically church attendance, protects against domestic violence, and this protective effect is stronger for African American men and women and for Hispanic men, groups that, for a variety of reasons, experience elevated risk for this type of violence.

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Sociologists widely acknowledge that uncertainty matters for decision making, but they rarely measure it directly. In this article, we demonstrate the importance of theorizing about, measuring, and analyzing uncertainty as experienced by individuals. We adapt a novel probabilistic solicitation technique to measure personal uncertainty about HIV status in a high HIV prevalence area of southern Malawi. Using data from 2,000 young adults (ages 15 to 25 years), we demonstrate that uncertainty about HIV status is widespread and that it expands as young adults assess their proximate and distant futures. In conceptualizing HIV status as something more than sero-status itself, we gain insight into how what individuals know they don’t know influences their lives. Young people who are uncertain about their HIV status express desires to accelerate their childbearing relative to their counterparts who are certain they are uninfected. Our approach and findings show that personal uncertainty is a measurable and meaningful phenomenon that can illuminate much about individuals’ aspirations and behaviors.

Despite consistent evidence that religious congregations provide health-related programs for their members and residents of the local community, little is known about the distribution of congregation-based health programs across the United States. Using a nationally representative sample of US congregations (n = 1230) we employ bivariate analysis and logistic regression to identify patterns in the sponsorship of health-related programs by religious congregations; we then propose and test various explanations for these observed patterns. Our findings contradict the impressions given by case studies and the program evaluation literature and suggest: a) that congregation-based health programs may not be serving the neediest communities; and b) that congregations are not taking advantage of mechanisms intended to facilitate the provision of health-related services by religious congregations.

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