Background Research

The topic we are doing our comprehensive course project for AP Statistics on is the effect of a child’s parents’ political and religious beliefs on their own beliefs. Our group is composed of Jonah Free, Brandon Schmitt, and Matt Brady.

              While researching the topic we have come across quite a few articles and studies with information and past studies on it. The actual passing on of religious beliefs is called religious socialization, and the passing on of political beliefs is called political socialization. We are looking into political and religious socialization coming from the subject’s parents.
                A study by Melissa Jones and Professor Kent Portney has shown that political socialization by parents has a positive link with a parent’s political activity has a positive link with their children. They found that among young people whose parents were politically active and took them to vote, 69.1% of the young people considered voting very important or somewhat important. Among young people whose parents didn’t take them to vote only 39% view voting as very or somewhat important. This study illustrates that depending on how politically active a parent is there is a correlation. To quote the article, “the data show that young people are far more likely to be vote and to view voting as important if their parents encouraged political participation by voting themselves and taking their children to the polls”
                Another study by Ralph W. Hood, Jr., Peter C. Hill, and Bernard Spilka was found in a book called “The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach.” This particular study was on religious socialization. The main part of this book we used was found in the section titled “Parent-Child Agreement Studies. This article stated that there have been many studies on the parent-child relationship in religious, and there have been various results. Some results have made the conclusion that because of “a kind of organized rebellion against parents by teenagers, one component which supposedly involves considerable discrepancy between teenager’s attitudes and those of their parents” (Hunsberger, 1985a, p.314) which would create a difference in religious socialization by children just not following in their parents footsteps because they want to rebel. Other studies have showed that relationships in religious between child parent relationships had a weak to moderate relationship, with the mother-to-child relationship being higher than the father-to-child relationship.
                In conclusion to our research, we have found mostly what we expected, with the results from religious socialization being slightly different. In the case of political socialization, we have found that in past studies it has showed a positive relationship between parent and child. In religious socialization, the relationship for parent-to-child is positive, though slightly weaker than political.