{"id":84,"date":"2012-09-17T16:56:16","date_gmt":"2012-09-17T16:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=84"},"modified":"2012-09-17T21:25:17","modified_gmt":"2012-09-17T21:25:17","slug":"the-religious-lives-of-american-adolescents-comparing-the-impact-of-public-private-and-homeschools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=84","title":{"rendered":"THE RELIGIOUS LIVES OF AMERICAN ADOLESCENTS: Comparing The Impact of Public, Private, and Homeschools"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record<\/strong>: \u00a0Jeremy E. Uecker, \u201cAlternative Schooling Strategies and the Religious Lives of American Adolescents\u201d in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion<\/em> 47, no. 4 (December 2008): 563-584 [Abstract available here<\/a>].<\/p>\n

Summary<\/strong>:\u00a0 Uecker<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Baylor University and author of many interesting articles on young adult religion and sexuality, here examines data from the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) to determine whether Catholic schooling, Protestant schooling, or homeschooling have any impact on the religious lives of American teens.<\/p>\n

The National Survey of Youth and Religion<\/a> (NSYR)\u00a0is a massive effort headed by Christian Smith<\/a>\u00a0seeking, through nationally representative phone interviews and select longer, face-to-face interviews, to track the religious lives of American teens.\u00a0 The first wave of interviews was conducted in 2002-2003 with a total sample of 3,370 respondents.\u00a0 Two follow-up surveys conducted on the same sample have been performed since then, with the third wave finishing up in 2008.\u00a0 This powerful data set has formed the basis for several important publications, perhaps the most notable being the excellent book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers<\/em><\/a>\"\"\u00a0<\/em>by Smith and his colleague Melinda Lundquist Denton<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Uecker takes this same data set and asks of it the following questions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Everyone knows that parent religious commitment is the most important predictor of a child\u2019s own religious life.\u00a0 Is this influence direct or indirect?\u00a0 Does the child learn directly from the parent or\u00a0does\u00a0the parent merely choose the environment to which children are exposed\u2013schools, churches, friends, mentors, etc.?<\/li>\n
  2. If we remove (control for) parental religiosity, does where a child goes to school affect\u00a0his or her\u00a0religious commitments?\u00a0 Uecker looks especially at Catholic schools, Protestant day schools, and homeschooling, though he also makes some comments about non-religious private schools and public schools.\u00a0 He wants to know both about communal religious\u00a0behaviors like church attendance, religious education attendance, and youth group participation, and about private religious behaviors like prayer and devotional scripture reading.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    To answer his questions Uecker submits his data to vigorous and sophisticated statistical manipulations.\u00a0 Because the NSYR data set is so complete, he is able to control for many variables and conduct a range of multiple regression analyses that yield the following results:<\/p>\n

    He finds, contrary to the theorizing of some sociologists, that parental influence is direct, and powerfully so.\u00a0 Parents don\u2019t just \u201cchannel\u201d their kids into religious or irreligious environments.\u00a0 They \u201cdirectly influence their adolescents,\u201d though his study can\u2019t say exactly how this happens (p.582).\u00a0 Uecker guesses that it is probably some combination of example-setting, exhortation, and context-building.\u00a0 Families provide a \u201csacred umbrella\u201d (an allusion to Peter Berger\u2019s famous Sacred Canopy<\/a>\"\"<\/em>) that students carry with them into the broader world.<\/p>\n

    But if we screen out the parental influence, is there any special role that different sorts of educational configurations play?\u00a0 From the NSYR data, it seems that the type of schooling a child receives has very little impact on his or her religious commitments.\u00a0 Here are Uecker\u2019s specific findings:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Attendance at Catholic schools makes students a little bit more likely to attend religious services and to think of religion as important in their lives.\u00a0 It makes students less<\/em> likely to attend religious education classes, probably because parents think the Catholic school covers that well enough.\u00a0 But the overall impact of Catholic education apart from parental religiosity is very minimal.\u00a0 This is made especially clear in data from adolescents who had had some Catholic schooling in the past but then shifted into the public school system.\u00a0 These students were indistinguishable from fully publicly educated students in their religious practices when parent religiosity was controlled for.<\/li>\n
    2. Protestant day schools have a bit more impact, partly because parents tend not to think of day schooling as a substitute for Church religious instruction or youth group activities.\u00a0 Thus Protestant children attending Protestant schools get a double dose of religious instruction.\u00a0 Furthermore, Protestant schools tend to place a higher stress than do Catholic schools on the religious formation of their students such that \u201cincreased exposure to a Protestant schooling strategy may result in heightened private religiosity\u201d like prayer and bible-reading.\u00a0 But the differences here are very minimal compared to the differences based on parental religiosity, and as with Catholic schools, the effect doesn\u2019t seem to last:\u00a0 students who \u201cformerly<\/em> attended Protestant schools are no different than public schoolers.\u201d (p.581)<\/li>\n
    3. For homeschooling the results are very interesting.\u00a0 Homeschoolers with irreligious parents are less likely to have a public or private religious life than are adolescents with similarly inclined parents in the public schools or in private religious schools.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Perhaps because they are not exposed to the religious elements (peers, teachers, etc.) of these schools.\u00a0 But what of homeschoolers with very religious parents?\u00a0 \u201cHomeschoolers with extremely religious parents are not statistically different\u201d in communal or private religiosity \u201cthan public schoolers with extremely religious parents.\u201d (p. 579)\u00a0 Homeschooling parents of course have a huge impact on their children, but the act of homeschooling itself seems to have \u201cvery little effect on any aspect of adolescents\u2019 religious lives.\u201d<\/li>\n
    4. Though it wasn\u2019t the original focus of his research, Uecker found that secular private schooling actually has a documentable negative effect on religiosity.\u00a0 Religious parents who send their kids to secular private schools end up with slightly less religious kids, perhaps because kids in these environments \u201cencounter intellectual cultures, expectations, or ideas that undermine religious commitment.\u201d (p.581)<\/li>\n
    5. Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, public schooling \u201cis neither detrimental to nor beneficial for adolescent religiosity.\u201d (p. 581)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      The take home messages of this article\u00a0are obvious.\u00a0 Parents play by far the greatest role in fostering (or not fostering) the religious\u00a0habits of their children, even into adolescence.\u00a0 No other factors, from the school students attend, to their friends and mentors, to the degree to which they are closed off from other influences, seem \u201cto attenuate the role of parents at all.\u201d\u00a0 (p.581)<\/p>\n

      More provocatively, Uecker\u2019s findings suggest that parents who pull their children out of public schools for fear that the schools will lead them religiously astray are worried unnecessarily.\u00a0 Parents who do so and place their children in Christian schools are making a move that will likely have a modest spiritual impact on their children, at least as long as they continue to go to school there.\u00a0 Similarly, parents who choose homeschooling are making a decision that may have all sorts of other benefits or costs.\u00a0 But speaking just of the religious behaviors and commitments of their children,\u00a0such parents\u00a0might just as well have left their kids in public schools.<\/p>\n

      Appraisal<\/strong>:\u00a0 No doubt there are individual families whose stories do not mesh with this data.\u00a0 But speaking in generalities, Uecker\u2019s case is rock solid.\u00a0 His data set is the best ever created to assess such issues.\u00a0 His statistical models and execution are flawless.\u00a0 His conclusions are therefore hard to resist.<\/p>\n

      Milton Gaither, Messiah College<\/p>\n

      Disclaimer:\u00a0<\/strong> The views expressed in reviews are not the official views of ICHER or of its members.\u00a0 For more information about ICHER\u2019s Reviews, please see the \u00ab\u00a0About these Reviews \u00bb Section.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Record: \u00a0Jeremy E. Uecker, \u201cAlternative Schooling Strategies and the Religious Lives of American Adolescents\u201d in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, no. 4 (December 2008): 563-584 [Abstract available here]. Summary:\u00a0 Uecker, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Baylor University … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[13,15,16],"tags":[68,51,52,69,67,74,71,72,73,70],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public-schools","category-religion","category-socialization","tag-christian-smith","tag-jeremy-uecker","tag-journal-for-the-scientific-study-of-religion","tag-melinda-lundquist-denton","tag-national-survey-of-youth-and-religion","tag-nsyr","tag-peter-berger","tag-sacred-canopy","tag-sacred-umbrella","tag-soul-searching-teh-religious-and-spiritual-lives-of-american-teenagers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":158,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}