Emyr Williams
Biographic Data
| ID | 4269741 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Emyr Williams |
| GIVEN NAMES | Emyr |
| FAMILY NAME | Williams |
| SIGNATURE | WILLIAMS E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wrexham University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Emotional religion? Exploring the religious beliefs and religious experiences of real vampires
It has been argued that the growing resurgence of contemporary vampire literature has resulted in the re-emergence of the vampire as a new sexy modern beast not seen in fear, but rather seen as a creature that is respected, desired and even wanted. Alongside the literature on fictional vampires, there is a subculture of “real” vampires who exist within a community that could be viewed as a new category of person. The current study utilises 216 qu…
The Relationship between Paranormal Belief and the hexaco Domains of Personality
The hexaco - pi - r (Ashton & Lee, 2007) has been presented as an alternative measure of the Five Factor Model, with the inclusion of the dimension of honesty/humility. This new measure of personality was utilised alongside the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale ( rpbs ) in a correlational design among 137 undergraduate students in Wales. Multiple regression analysis demonstrated that superstition was significantly negatively correlated with conscie…
Such a Dark Thing
There exists, within society, a continuing and enduring fascination with, and engagement in, the vampire milieu. Despite the seemingly negative connotations given to these creatures of the night, t
Pagan Prayer and Worship
This article reports on an exploratory qualitative project exploring how the concepts of "prayer” and “worship” are understood by those who identify as Pagan in the UK. There were more than four hundred completed responses to an online survey containing a modified version of the Attitude to prayer scale. We found that although respondents raised issues in relation to the use of the terms, “prayer” and “worship”, in relation to Pagan practice, the…
Illuminating a Resilient Rural Culture in Twentieth Century Y Fro Gymraeg Using Bourdieu's Bearn
This article uses Bourdieu's analysis of peasant life in the Bearn to illuminate a changing but resilient rural culture in mid-twentieth century Wales. Rather than finding their culture and language eroded by economic and social change, Welsh speaking participants in this biographical study used the education system to build upon their existing cultural capital previously cultivated through religious and informal civic institutions. A distinctive…
Attitude towards Christianity and New Age beliefs among undergraduate students in Slovenia
This study examines two conflicting hypotheses regarding the association between traditional religiosity and new age belief: the “worldview hypothesis” suggesting a positive association between these two sets of beliefs; and the “functional alternative hypothesis” suggesting a negative association between these two sets of beliefs. A sample of 1209 undergraduate students attending the University of Maribor, Slovenia, completed the Francis Scale o…
Preaching with all our souls
Preaching with all our souls: a study in hermeneutics and psychological type, by Leslie J. Francis and Andrew Village, London, Continuum, 2008, vii + 171pp., £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0826493262
The psychological type profile of practising Greek Orthodox churchgoers in London
Within the psychology of religion, there is growing interest in the theoretical and empirical contributions of psychological-type theory. For example, a series of studies, conducted using different measures of psychological type in several different cultural contexts, have begun to chart the psychological-type profile of practising Christian churchgoers. The aim of the present study was to profile a sample of practising Greek Orthodox Christians …
The psychological-type profile of practising British Druids compared with Anglican Churchgoers
This study employs psychological-type theory to profile practising British Druids and to compare their profile with that of Anglican churchgoers. A sample of 75 participants at a camp organised by The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids in celebration of the Mid-Summer Festival completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales. Compared with the profile of 327 Anglican churchgoers previously published by Francis, Duncan, Craig and Luffman, the Druids…
Implicit Religion and the Quest for Meaning
A range of theoretical perspectives postulate that religion, in both its implicit and explicit manifestations, is associated with the quest for meaning and purpose in life. This theoretical perspective is examined by the administration of the Purpose in Life Test (developed by Crumbaugh & Maholick) to a sample of 139 undergraduate students from Northern Ireland and Wales, alongside measures concerned with contrasting views of transcendence: the R…
Research Note
It is a common conception that traditional religious beliefs are giving way to non-traditional religious beliefs. Drawing on a sample of 279 13–16-year-olds in North Wales, this research note explores the relationship between rejecting traditional religious beliefs (operationalised by the Francis and Greer Rejection of Christianity Scale) and belief in non-traditional religious phenomena (operationalised by the Williams Index of Paranormal Belief…
Research Note
(2011). Research Note: Multi-faith Britain and Family Life: Changing Patterns of Marriage, Cohabitation, and Divorce among Different Faith Groups 1983–2005. Journal of Contemporary Religion: Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 33-41
The internal consistency reliability and construct validity of the New Indices of Religious Orientation (Niro) among cathedral worshippers in the United Kingdom
Building on the work of Francis among a sample of students, this study examined the psychometric properties of The New Indices of Religious Orientation among 432 worshippers in five Anglican cathedrals in England and Wales. The data demonstrated that all the indices achieved satisfactory alpha coefficients for both the full scale (extrinsic, 0.79; intrinsic, 0.76; and quest, 0.75) and the short form (extrinsic, 0.70, intrinsic, 0.79; and quest, 0…
Marriage, religion and human flourishing
This paper draws on the three waves of the European Values Survey across five countries (Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Spain and Sweden) to investigate the relationship between indicators of positive psychology (conceptualised as feelings of happiness and satisfaction with life), religiosity (conceptualised as self-assigned religious affiliation and self-reported religious attendance) and marital status. The results dem…
Does Religion Make a Difference? Assessing the Effects of Christian Affiliation and Practice on Marital Solidarity and Divorce in Britain, 1985–2005
Frequency of divorce and separation among 15,714 adults from the British Social Attitudes data set for 1985–2005 peaked at around 50 years of age, and increased significantly over the period of study. Ratios of marital breakdown were compared between those of no religious affiliation and Christian affiliates with different levels of church attendance. Frequent Christian attendees were 1.5 times less likely to suffer marital breakdown than nonaffi…
Applying Psychological Type Theory to Cathedral Visitors
This study uses Jungian psychological type theory to profile visitors to Chester Cathedral in England and St Davids Cathedral in Wales. Psychological type theory offers a fourfold psychographic segmentation of visitors, distinguishing between introversion and extraversion, sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling, and judging and perceiving. New data provided by 157 visitors to Chester Cathedral, considered alongside previously published data …
The Williams Scale of Attitude toward Paganism
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…
Neuroticism and Intensity of Religious Affect among Practising British Pagans
The Williams Scale of Attitude toward Paganism (as a particularised measure of the affective dimension of religion) was completed by seventy-five participants at a Pagan camp in celebration of the Midsummer Festival, together with the abbreviated form of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (including a recognised measure of neuroticism). The data demonstrated that, after controlling for sex differences (routinely found in indices of neu…
Living in Sin? Religion and Cohabitation in Britain 1985–2005
Frequency of cohabitation among 13,703 adults from the British Social Attitudes data set for 1985–2005 peaked at around 26–30 years of age and increased significantly over the period of study. Cohabitation frequency was compared between those of no religious affiliation and Christian affiliates who (a) attended church at least once a month, (b) attended church but less than once a month, and (c) never attended church. Active Christians were 3.2 t…
Changing patterns of religious affiliation, church attendance and marriage across five areas of Europe since the early 1980s
This study draws on three waves of the European Values Survey (conducted between 1981 and 1984, between 1989 and 1993, and between 1999 and 2004) across five countries for which full data are available (Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Spain, and Sweden) in order to address five research questions. Question one examined changes in religious affiliation. Across all five countries, the proportions of the non‐affiliated incre…
Church Attendance, Implicit Religion and Belief in Luck
This study was designed to examine the complex pattern of relationships between conventional religious practice (in the sense of church attendance), implicit religion (in the sense of persisting Christian beliefs and values, unsupported by church attendance), and alternative spirituality (in the sense of non-conventional beliefs). In this context implicit religion was operationalized in terms of attitude toward the explicit religion of Christiani…
Christianity, Paranormal Belief and Personality
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 co…
Introducing the Modified Paranormal Belief Scale
Previous empirical studies concerned with the association between paranormal beliefs and conventional religiosity have produced conflicting evidence. Drawing on Rice's (2003) distinction between classic paranormal beliefs and religious paranormal beliefs, the present study proposed a modified form of the Tobacyk Revised Paranormal Belief Scale to produce separate scores for these two forms of paranormal belief, styled ‘religious paranormal belief…
Measuring religious social capital
The theoretical construct of social capital remains contested in terms of conceptualisation and measurement. The present paper follows the convention of distinguishing between trust, bonding, bridging and linking social capital, to conceptualise how religious communities promote and develop social capital within a specifically religious cohort. Developing this construct of religious social capital further, this paper proposes a measure for use sp…
The Unconventional Beliefs of Conventional Churchgoers
A sample of 65 men and 93 women attending eight Anglican churches in Wales completed a questionnaire concerned with beliefs, attitudes and practices. Alongside conventional Christian belief, unconventional belief was assessed by eight items relating to good luck and eight items relating to bad luck. Alongside conventional Christian behaviour, unconventional behaviour was assessed by eight items relating to protection from bad luck or promotion of…
Living in Sin? Religion and Cohabitation in Britain 1985–2005
Frequency of cohabitation among 13,703 adults from the British Social Attitudes data set for 1985–2005 peaked at around 26–30 years of age and increased significantly over the period of study. Cohabitation frequency was compared between those of no religious affiliation and Christian affiliates who (a) attended church at least once a month, (b) attended church but less than once a month, and (c) never attended church. Active Christians were 3.2 t…
Illuminating a Resilient Rural Culture in Twentieth Century Y Fro Gymraeg Using Bourdieu's Bearn
This article uses Bourdieu's analysis of peasant life in the Bearn to illuminate a changing but resilient rural culture in mid-twentieth century Wales. Rather than finding their culture and language eroded by economic and social change, Welsh speaking participants in this biographical study used the education system to build upon their existing cultural capital previously cultivated through religious and informal civic institutions. A distinctive…
Personality and Paranormal Belief
When introverts ceased to be more religious
A sample of 279 12‐ to 16‐year‐old pupils completed the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity and the short‐form Junior Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised. Contrary to the findings of research using earlier junior versions of the Eysenck scales, the data demonstrate that introverts have ceased to be more religious
Adolescent television viewing and belief in vampires
A total of 1133 13–15‐year‐old pupils in six secondary schools in South Wales were invited to complete questions concerning vampire belief and amount of television watching. The data demonstrate that belief in vampires was positively associated with higher levels of television watching
Believing and Implicit Religion beyond the Churches
A sample of 1,133 year-nine and year-ten pupils (13–15 year-olds), attending six state-maintained secondary schools in South Wales, completed a survey concerned with beliefs in the afterlife, beliefs in supernatural forces, beliefs about good luck, beliefs about bad luck, beliefs about protection from harm, and fear of the supernatural. The analysis distinguishes between the belief patterns of females who belong to and attend a Christian group (t…
Believing and Implicit Religion beyond the Churches
A sample of 1,133 year-nine and year-ten pupils (13–15 year-olds), attending six state-maintained secondary schools in South Wales, completed a survey concerned with beliefs in the afterlife, beliefs in supernatural forces, beliefs about good luck, beliefs about bad luck, beliefs about protection from harm, and fear of the supernatural. The analysis distinguishes between the belief patterns of females who belong to and attend a Christian group (t…
Personality and Attitude toward Christianity among Churchgoers
A sample of 158 churchgoers attending eight Anglican churches in the United Kingdom completed the abbreviated Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire together with the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity to replicate a 1996 study by Carter, Kay, and Francis. Data confirm that scores on Attitude toward Christianity were significantly negatively related to Psychoticism, but to neither Extraversion nor Neuroticism scores
Attitude Toward Christianity and Paranormal Belief Among 13- To 16-Yr.-Old Students
A positive correlation (r = .19) was found among a sample of 279 13- to 16-year-old students in Wales between the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity and a new Index of Paranormal Belief. These data suggest that sympathy for Christianity is more likely to foster than to discourage belief in the paranormal
Attitude toward Christianity and Paranormal Belief among 13- to 16-Yr.-Old Students
A small but statistically significant positive correlation (r = .17) was found in a sample of 279 13- to 16-yr.-old students in Wales between scores on the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity and on a new Index of Paranormal Belief. These data suggest that there is little common variance between attitude toward Christianity and belief in the paranormal
Personality and Paranormal Belief
Measuring religious social capital
The theoretical construct of social capital remains contested in terms of conceptualisation and measurement. The present paper follows the convention of distinguishing between trust, bonding, bridging and linking social capital, to conceptualise how religious communities promote and develop social capital within a specifically religious cohort. Developing this construct of religious social capital further, this paper proposes a measure for use sp…
The Unconventional Beliefs of Conventional Churchgoers
A sample of 65 men and 93 women attending eight Anglican churches in Wales completed a questionnaire concerned with beliefs, attitudes and practices. Alongside conventional Christian belief, unconventional belief was assessed by eight items relating to good luck and eight items relating to bad luck. Alongside conventional Christian behaviour, unconventional behaviour was assessed by eight items relating to protection from bad luck or promotion of…
Changing patterns of religious affiliation, church attendance and marriage across five areas of Europe since the early 1980s
This study draws on three waves of the European Values Survey (conducted between 1981 and 1984, between 1989 and 1993, and between 1999 and 2004) across five countries for which full data are available (Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Spain, and Sweden) in order to address five research questions. Question one examined changes in religious affiliation. Across all five countries, the proportions of the non‐affiliated incre…
Church Attendance, Implicit Religion and Belief in Luck
This study was designed to examine the complex pattern of relationships between conventional religious practice (in the sense of church attendance), implicit religion (in the sense of persisting Christian beliefs and values, unsupported by church attendance), and alternative spirituality (in the sense of non-conventional beliefs). In this context implicit religion was operationalized in terms of attitude toward the explicit religion of Christiani…
Christianity, Paranormal Belief and Personality
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 co…
Introducing the Modified Paranormal Belief Scale
Previous empirical studies concerned with the association between paranormal beliefs and conventional religiosity have produced conflicting evidence. Drawing on Rice's (2003) distinction between classic paranormal beliefs and religious paranormal beliefs, the present study proposed a modified form of the Tobacyk Revised Paranormal Belief Scale to produce separate scores for these two forms of paranormal belief, styled ‘religious paranormal belief…
The internal consistency reliability and construct validity of the New Indices of Religious Orientation (Niro) among cathedral worshippers in the United Kingdom
Building on the work of Francis among a sample of students, this study examined the psychometric properties of The New Indices of Religious Orientation among 432 worshippers in five Anglican cathedrals in England and Wales. The data demonstrated that all the indices achieved satisfactory alpha coefficients for both the full scale (extrinsic, 0.79; intrinsic, 0.76; and quest, 0.75) and the short form (extrinsic, 0.70, intrinsic, 0.79; and quest, 0…
Marriage, religion and human flourishing
This paper draws on the three waves of the European Values Survey across five countries (Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Spain and Sweden) to investigate the relationship between indicators of positive psychology (conceptualised as feelings of happiness and satisfaction with life), religiosity (conceptualised as self-assigned religious affiliation and self-reported religious attendance) and marital status. The results dem…
Does Religion Make a Difference? Assessing the Effects of Christian Affiliation and Practice on Marital Solidarity and Divorce in Britain, 1985–2005
Frequency of divorce and separation among 15,714 adults from the British Social Attitudes data set for 1985–2005 peaked at around 50 years of age, and increased significantly over the period of study. Ratios of marital breakdown were compared between those of no religious affiliation and Christian affiliates with different levels of church attendance. Frequent Christian attendees were 1.5 times less likely to suffer marital breakdown than nonaffi…
Applying Psychological Type Theory to Cathedral Visitors
This study uses Jungian psychological type theory to profile visitors to Chester Cathedral in England and St Davids Cathedral in Wales. Psychological type theory offers a fourfold psychographic segmentation of visitors, distinguishing between introversion and extraversion, sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling, and judging and perceiving. New data provided by 157 visitors to Chester Cathedral, considered alongside previously published data …
The Williams Scale of Attitude toward Paganism
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…
Neuroticism and Intensity of Religious Affect among Practising British Pagans
The Williams Scale of Attitude toward Paganism (as a particularised measure of the affective dimension of religion) was completed by seventy-five participants at a Pagan camp in celebration of the Midsummer Festival, together with the abbreviated form of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (including a recognised measure of neuroticism). The data demonstrated that, after controlling for sex differences (routinely found in indices of neu…
Living in Sin? Religion and Cohabitation in Britain 1985–2005
Frequency of cohabitation among 13,703 adults from the British Social Attitudes data set for 1985–2005 peaked at around 26–30 years of age and increased significantly over the period of study. Cohabitation frequency was compared between those of no religious affiliation and Christian affiliates who (a) attended church at least once a month, (b) attended church but less than once a month, and (c) never attended church. Active Christians were 3.2 t…
Implicit Religion and the Quest for Meaning
A range of theoretical perspectives postulate that religion, in both its implicit and explicit manifestations, is associated with the quest for meaning and purpose in life. This theoretical perspective is examined by the administration of the Purpose in Life Test (developed by Crumbaugh & Maholick) to a sample of 139 undergraduate students from Northern Ireland and Wales, alongside measures concerned with contrasting views of transcendence: the R…
Research Note
It is a common conception that traditional religious beliefs are giving way to non-traditional religious beliefs. Drawing on a sample of 279 13–16-year-olds in North Wales, this research note explores the relationship between rejecting traditional religious beliefs (operationalised by the Francis and Greer Rejection of Christianity Scale) and belief in non-traditional religious phenomena (operationalised by the Williams Index of Paranormal Belief…
Research Note
(2011). Research Note: Multi-faith Britain and Family Life: Changing Patterns of Marriage, Cohabitation, and Divorce among Different Faith Groups 1983–2005. Journal of Contemporary Religion: Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 33-41
Preaching with all our souls
Preaching with all our souls: a study in hermeneutics and psychological type, by Leslie J. Francis and Andrew Village, London, Continuum, 2008, vii + 171pp., £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0826493262
Psychology (30 works) · Social Psychology (27 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (23 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (12 works) · Religious studies (11 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Christianity (10 works) · Political science (9 works)