Original scientific paper
Religiosity as a Predictor of Value Orientations
Duško Sekulić
Željka Šporer
Abstract
The paper is based on analogy with Rodney Stark’s findings that religiosity is a god predictor of other moral values when general religiosity level is high but not when it is low. The research question i; what is happening to the predictive capability of religiosity in the post socialist period in Croatia where the general level religiosity increased. The hypothesis derived from Stark would be that the predictive capability of religiosity will increase. Counter hypothesis will say the opposite, namely that the predictive capability of religiosity will go down because the religiosity in post socialism is based on new conformity and consequently „less onesst. The results are more in accordance with the first hypothesis and religiosity is a good predictor of values system, it better predicts gender conservatism and authoritarism but not nationalism. The reason for that is that the level of nationalism went up, in the same direction as religiosity did, and levels of other value orientations went down or stayed the same. As the consequence the gap between the religiosity and other value orientations (except nationalism) has increased. The longitudinal nature of our analysis is offering us another interesting conclusion. The fact that the positive correlation among value orientations exists in one point in time does not mean that they will move in the same direction in the future. For example our data are showing a positive correlation between religiosity and gender conservatism in every particular time point. On the long term these two value orientations are moving in opposite directions: the religiosity is going up and gender conservatism down.
Keywords
RELIGIOSITY; PREDICTIVE CAPABILITY; NATIONALISM; VALUE ORIENTATIONS; GENDER CONSERVATISM; AUTHORITARISM
Hrčak ID:
13263
URI
Publication date:
30.6.2006.
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