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Religious Identity, Religious Attendance, and Parental Control

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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

Using a national sample of adolescents aged 10–18 years and their parents (N = 5,117), this article examines whether parental religious identity and religious participation are associated with the ways in which parents control their children. We hypothesize that both religious orthodoxy and weekly religious attendance are related to heightened levels of three elements of parental control: monitoring activities, normative regulations, and network closure. Results indicate that an orthodox religious identity for Catholic and Protestant parents and higher levels of religious attendance for parents as a whole are associated with increases in monitoring activities and normative regulations of American adolescents.

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Notes

  1. Religious identification variables were restricted; we were able to access them through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).

  2. Preliminary analyses show that most decisions were made relatively equally either by adolescents or parents. Thus, we decided to use the ordered model rather than to dichotomize these items.

  3. In ancillary analyses, we reran regressions using “other Protestant” as a reference category. Results indicated that this residual category is somewhat more liberal than other Protestant groups regarding sex. Adolescents having parents of evangelical, mainline, and black Protestant groups reported that their parents would be more likely than parents with “other Protestant” to be very upset if they had sex. However, we do not see consistent patterns for other parental control items. Results are available upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University, One Bear Place #97236, Waco, TX, 76798-7236, USA

    Young-Il Kim

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400766, Charlottesville, VA, 22904-4766, USA

    W. Bradford Wilcox

Authors
  1. Young-Il Kim
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  2. W. Bradford Wilcox
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Correspondence to Young-Il Kim.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 5.

Table 5 Odds ratios from generalized ordered and binary logit models of parental control (full model)
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Kim, YI., Wilcox, W.B. Religious Identity, Religious Attendance, and Parental Control. Rev Relig Res 56, 555–580 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-014-0167-0

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