Characteristics of health and well-being in former Jehovah’s Witnesses in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: This study collected quantifiable data on the characteristics, health, and well-being of individuals who left or were expelled from a fundamentalist Christian faith community in Austria, Germany, or Switzerland.Methods: Data were collected using an online survey.Results: This study assessed a sample of former Jehovah's Witnesses (N = 424, M age = 42.14, SD age = 12.57, 65% female).Most participants (66%) were born into this faith community.Half the sample left voluntarily, 21% were expelled, and 31% left due to having experienced abuse or maltreatment.One third reported suicidal thoughts; 10% had attempted suicide.The sample (especially women) reported relatively high levels of child maltreatment, moderate current health, clinically significant symptoms, high levels of stress, and low quality of life.Participants who left due to abuse or maltreatment reported more symptoms and child maltreatment.Discussion: Women and survivors of child maltreatment may represent particularly vulnerable sub-groups of former Jehovah's Witnesses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".