Volume 61, Issue 2 pp. 374-388
Research Note

What Aspects of Religiosity are Associated with Values?

Philip Schwadel

Corresponding Author

Philip Schwadel

Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Correspondence should be addressed to Philip Schwadel, Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 740 Oldfather Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0324. E-mail: [email protected]

Search for more papers by this author
Sam A. Hardy

Sam A. Hardy

Brigham Young University

Search for more papers by this author
First published: 08 January 2022
Citations: 3

Acknowledgments: The authors thank the Editor of JSSR and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts.

Abstract

A large body of research shows that religiosity in general is associated with values. Yet, we know little about the specific aspects of religiosity that drive this association. Using nationally representative data from a sample of young adults in the United States, we examined how various aspects of religiosity—religious tradition, service attendance, frequency of prayer, religious salience, belief in God, closeness to God, and number of religious friends—are associated with the 10 values comprising Schwartz's circle of values. Bivariate results indicate that most measures of religiosity are correlated with Schwartz's circle of values. Multivariate regression results, however, show that the relationship between religiosity and values is largely due to the positive associations between closeness to God and social focus values, the positive associations between number of religious friends and social focus values, and the negative associations between religious service attendance and personal focus values. We conclude by discussing why these aspects of religiosity appear to be most relevant to Schwartz's circle of values and by suggesting directions for future research on religiosity and values.

STATEMENT ON DATA REPLICATION

The data are available without charge at the Association of Religion Data Archives website (www.TheARDA.com). Contact the lead author for questions about the Stata code used in the analyses.

The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties.