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Articles’ Summary and Critique

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Articles’ Summary and Critique

This paper summarizes and critiques the content of the research articles provided. In their

current research, Howard & Cogswell (2019) examined social courage's potential antecedents

from five diverse categories: personality, demographic, leadership, job, and cultural

characteristics. In attaining their findings, the researchers examine courage and undertake three

empirical studies to classify the bond of potential antecedents with potential intermediaries and

behavioral and social courage. Additionally, the results are incorporated with the previous

exploration besides the fact that the researchers provide recommendations for the sustained

research of the courage’s left side. According to the text, the main findings or results of the study

indicated that specific variables from all antecedent categories had a substantial connection with

social courage, indicating that malleable as well as fixed antecedents might trigger staff

members' social courage. For that reason, businesses deserve to consider varying aspects of the

workers and work setting to encourage social courage, while scholars must consider numerous

imminent research avenues to comprehend better social courage antecedents (Howard &

Cogswell, 2019).

There are several limitations of the research. For example, causality can never be firmly

reinforced with the methodology of the existing studies. Besides, although these studies might

provide backup for potential antecedents, they can never authoritatively classify the behavioral

and social courage antecedents. Moreover, the researchers took most of the practical scales from

previous studies. The initial scholars of these scales generated backing for their psychometric

legitimacy and properties. Therefore, the recurrent use of these measures and increasing proof

offer further backing for their rationality. However, some of these scales were modified from

past research, meaning that these scales' psychometric legitimacy and properties can never be
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assured. Some of these measures explored alleged social courage dangers and advantages that,

although used by the WSCS, requested participants to account for the scope of alleged

advantages and profits related to each behavior.

According to the authors, future research must reflect the time needed to change

behavioral and social courage practically, which might take months or years. They should even

utilize longitudinal study methods spanning this duration to examine impacts.

The research design is the part of the researchers' work that could be improved. The

researchers are referencing old articles from as late as 1993 to support the findings of their study.

A lot has happened from the 1990s to the twenty-first century, and there is the possibility that

their findings are not up-to-date. Thus, this part could be improved by consulting current peer-

reviewed articles to make the results of the research reliable. The researchers could have at least

referenced sources published ten years ago to date to guarantee that they do not miss anything

that happened lately.

On the other hand, Sharma & Singh (2019) directed their research to investigate the

mediating role of compassion, spirituality, appreciation, and self-sacrifice in the causal affiliation

between religiosity as well as fitness. The study's main findings showed that religiosity indirectly

fosters welfare via altruism and forgiveness causal pathways. Besides, Sharma & Singh (2019)

found spirituality to arbitrate the association between welfare and religiosity because religions

aim to nurture spirituality in their followers.

The researchers comprehensively interpret their research findings, helping the general

audience understand. This research establishes spirituality and religiosity's role in influencing

constructive welfare and virtues amongst people in Indian settings. It even generates experts and

impending scientists’ perceptions into examining spirituality, religious conviction, and optimistic
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virtues for encouraging people's psychological health, more so within Asian and the Indian

setting.

According to Sharma & Singh (2019), spirituality and religious conviction provide a

solid base for the optimistic welfare and virtuous experience. Participation in spiritual practices

steadily strengthens constructive virtues. Knowing the mechanisms by which spirituality

influences well-being is vital because it can stimulate imminent interventions whose goal is to

advance welfare within or outside of a spiritual setting. Within spiritual settings, these results

highlight that the spiritual practices and lessons which persuade and increase virtues can advance

followers’ well-being.

There are different limitations of this study. For instance, the research sample was narrow

since the researchers were predominantly young adults living in Delhi NCR. According to the

article, the authors should have even studied the socioeconomic status role as well as inter-

religion assessment. The other limitation of the research is that Sharma & Singh (2019)

references old articles, which could be useless because their content needs to be first updated

before being borrowed to donate to the findings of this research. As Sharma & Singh (2019)

note, future scholars can study the results’ generalizability across various demographic variables

comprising age, religious conviction, and socioeconomic status.

This research procedure could be improved whereby, the researchers sent e-mails to the

participants that contained the link for the research questionnaire. They even had to fill in the

research questionnaire via the provided URL. Then, researchers gathered the data filled and

saved it on an internet portal. This procedure could be improved by incorporating it with the one-

on-one interview because some participants could have ignored the e-mail sent to them since it
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was in link form. This was a risky procedure because the participants could have clicked a

phishing e-mail, where they would have become cyberattack victims.

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References

Howard, M. C., & Cogswell, J. E. (2019). The left side of courage: Three exploratory studies on the

antecedents of social courage. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 14(3), 324-340.

https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2018.1426780

Sharma, S., & Singh, K. (2019). Religion and well-being: The mediating role of positive virtues. Journal

of religion and health, 58(1), 119-131.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-018-0559-5