Religion among Teens: A Data-Driven Learning Guide

Application

For this exercise, you will examine some of the factors that relate to the importance of religion in the lives of American teenagers. You will use crosstabulations and graphs for your analyses.

Importance of Religion among American Teens

For this analysis, you will use two different measures of the importance of religion in adolescents' lives. The first is v169, which we have renamed "ATTEND." ATTEND measures respondents' self-reported attendance of religious services. The response options are: "Never" (1); "Rarely" (2); "1-2 times per month" (3); "once per week or more" (4). You will also use v170, which we have renamed "RELIMPORT." This variable asks "how important is religion in your life?" with response options: "not important" (1); "a little important" (2); "pretty important" (3); "very important" (4).

Demographic Characteristics and Religiosity

Look at the crosstab of "ATTEND by v150 (sex)" . Do males or females seem to report more frequent attendance of religious services? What percentage of males reports never attending religious services?

Next use the second measure of religious importance. In the crosstab of RELIMPORT by v150 (sex) does religion appear to be more important to male or female teens? What percentage of females reports that religion is not important to them?

MTF's measure of race (V151) contains three possible response categories: "Black"; "White"; "Hispanic." Find out if religious service attendance varies by race . Compared to whites, are Hispanics more or less likely to report never attending religious services?

Next, run a crosstab of. RELIMPORT by V151 . Which of the three racial groups is most likely to say religion is not important to them? What percentage of whites reports that religion is either pretty important or very important to them?

Parents and Religiosity

Parent's education may be related to the importance of religion in one's life. Although it is possible to look at mother's education and father's education separately, if parent education is related to importance of religion, it is likely that it is a combined effect of the education of both parents rather than the education of just the mother or just the father. Creating a useful combined parent education variable requires a few steps. First, we recoded the existing father's education variable (v163) into a three category variable called "PEDU3" which groups those with less than high school education (1), those who have completed high school, but not a college degree (2), and finally those fathers with a college degree (3). We created a new variable for mother's education (MEDU3) using the same categories.

Using these new variables, we created a combined parent education variable called "PAREDUCOMBO5" by simply adding PEDU3 to MEDU3. The values of this variable range from "2" to "6" with a "2" meaning that both parents have less than a high school education, "3" meaning that one parent has less than a high school education, "4" could be that both parents have completed high school or that one parent has a college degree and the other less than high school, "5" meaning that both parents have completed high school and one parent has a college degree, and "6" meaning that both parents have college degrees.

Look at the crosstab of ATTEND by PAREDUCOMBO5 . Looking at the table as a whole, do those whose parents have higher levels of education seem to be more or less likely to attend religious services frequently?

Next, look at the crosstab of RELIMPORT by PAREDUCOMBO5 . Looking at the table as a whole again, do you see any pattern of either steady increase or steady decrease in religious importance as parents' education level increases?

It is also possible that parent's presence in the household may be related to teenagers' religiosity. We recoded variables V155 and V156, which ask whether the father (or male guardian) and mother (or female guardian) live in the same household as the respondent, into the new variables DADPRES and MOMPRES. Both are coded as binary variables where "0" means that parent is not present in the household and "1" means that the parent is present in the household.

For ease of analysis, we also created two new religiosity variables (recoded from ATTEND and RELIMPORT). The new attendance variable is coded as "0" for all respondents who do not attend religious services weekly and "1" if they do. The new importance variable is coded as "0" if they do not say that religion is a very important part of their life and "1" if they do. The new variables are called "RELATTEND2" and "RELIMP2," respectively.

Look at the comparison of means test with RELATTEND2 as the dependent variable and MOMPRES and DADPRES as the independent variables. What percentage of respondents attends religious service weekly in households where a mother is present, but a father is not? How about when both parents are present?

Now look at the comparison of means of RELIMP2 by MOMPRES and DADPRES. How do you interpret the .20 value in the cell at the intersection of the "no mother present" row and the "father present" column?

Note: The online data analysis system (DAS) used on this site uses a system called Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA), developed and maintained by the Computer-assisted Survey Methods Program (CSM) at the University of California, Berkeley. Documentation for DAS/SDA can be found on their Web site.

Goal & Concept - Dataset - Application - Interpretation & Summary - Bibliography