Original scientific paper
The perception of religious symbols in Croatian society: the cross, crescent moon and star of David
Tijana Trako Poljak
orcid.org/0000-0002-0846-2889
; Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
The empirical research was conducted on the representative sample of Croatian citizens (2010; N=1008). The main aim was to determine: 1) the general perception of “universal” symbols of three religions in Croatia: the cross (Christianity), crescent moon (Islam) and star of David (Judaism); 2) whether these results correspond to those obtained by the additional instrument of questionnaire which examined more directly the opinions about the members of these three religions; 3) the presupposed factorial structure of the perception of religious symbols: evaluation and activity; and 4) the correlation between the perception and the religious characteristics of the respondents. The instrument was a semantic differential scale consisting of 10 bipolar adjectival pairs. The methods of univariate, bivariate and multivariate statistics were used in the analysis of data.
The results have confi rmed the initial hypotheses. The general conclusion is that the Croatian society most positively perceives the symbol of the cross (the symbol of “self ”, as the majority of the respondents declared themselves as Catholics, i.e. Christians), followed by the star of David and then the crescent moon. The factor analysis revealed the expected factorial structure and the results show a high positive correlation with those from the questionnaire.
Keywords
collective representations; significant symbol; social symbolism; symbolic interactionism; “universal” symbol; “particular” symbol; perception; religious symbols; Christianity; Islam; Judaism; relational identities
Hrčak ID:
70814
URI
Publication date:
20.7.2011.
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