Selected Variables Related to Alienation from Religion as Perceived by Students Attending Seventh-day Adventist Academies In the United States
type: CreativeWork
description: Problem. Some young people who are reared in religious homes reject the religion of their parents upon reaching adolescence. This is a matter of crucial concern to church youth leaders as well as to parents. It was the purpose of the present study to discover relationships that may exist between alienation from religion and other selected variables. It was hypothesized that religious alienation is related to the quality of the relationships— especially as those relationships concern religious values— chat the young people have with parents and other authority figures. Independent variables were chosen in accordance with that hypothesis which was subdivided into sixteen research hypotheses. Method. Four hundred students were chosen by a stratified random method from among all students enrolled in Seventh-day Adventist secondary schools in the United States. Each young person was asked to respond to the Youth Perceptual Inventory, an instrument especially designed for this study. The Inventory consists of 154 statements divided into sixteen Likert-type attitude scales and six demographic items. One scale measured alienation from religion. The other fifteen measured the independent variables. The data were collected in a manner which guaranteed complete anonymity to the responding students by a staff liaison person at each school. A response of 100 percent was secured. The major statistical method used in analyzing the data was multiple regression analysis. Results. Approximately 16 percent of the adolescents might be considered alienated from religion in general, while 52 percent are alienated from some aspect of their religion. Items which elicited the most alienation concern Sabbath sermons, church membership, experiences with the church, Bible classes, and church restrictions on the life-style. Correlations between the alienation-from-religion scale and the other scales are all significant at the .01 level except one. The strength of these correlations ranges from …
abstract: Problem. Some young people who are reared in religious homes reject the religion of their parents upon reaching adolescence. This is a matter of crucial concern to church youth leaders as well as to parents. It was the purpose of the present study to discover relationships that may exist between alienation from religion and other selected variables. It was hypothesized that religious alienation is related to the quality of the relationships— especially as those relationships concern religious values— chat the young people have with parents and other authority figures. Independent variables were chosen in accordance with that hypothesis which was subdivided into sixteen research hypotheses. Method. Four hundred students were chosen by a stratified random method from among all students enrolled in Seventh-day Adventist secondary schools in the United States. Each young person was asked to respond to the Youth Perceptual Inventory, an instrument especially designed for this study. The Inventory consists of 154 statements divided into sixteen Likert-type attitude scales and six demographic items. One scale measured alienation from religion. The other fifteen measured the independent variables. The data were collected in a manner which guaranteed complete anonymity to the responding students by a staff liaison person at each school. A response of 100 percent was secured. The major statistical method used in analyzing the data was multiple regression analysis. Results. Approximately 16 percent of the adolescents might be considered alienated from religion in general, while 52 percent are alienated from some aspect of their religion. Items which elicited the most alienation concern Sabbath sermons, church membership, experiences with the church, Bible classes, and church restrictions on the life-style. Correlations between the alienation-from-religion scale and the other scales are all significant at the .01 level except one. The strength of these correlations ranges from …
author: Dudley, Roger L.
keywords: Other Religion, Sociology
date published: 1977-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T00:52:58Z
provider: Andrews University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Andrews University