Age and Faith: A Changing Outlook or an Old Process?

The Role of Private Prayer in Psychological Recovery Among Midlife and Aged Patients Following Cardiac Surgery

“…Examples are seen in Allport's (1950) distinction between intrinsically and extrinsically motivated religiosity, Hood's (1973) operationial definition of religious experience, and Batson and Schoenrade's (1991) measure of religion as a quest. Stark's (1968) work on age and faith contributed to the development of the religiosity concept with respect to aging. An apparently increasing piety among elderly adults was seen to be associated with frequency of praying.…”

Age Differences on Five Dimensions of Religious Involvement

“…Most research has examined bivariate relationships on single dimensions of commitment. An exception is Stark's (1968) paper in which he finds that older cohorts scored higher on agreement with orthodox belief items. In addition, private devotionalism and belief in life after death showed consistent increases with age.…”

Sociology of Religion and the Aged: The Empirical Lacunae

“…time, sociologists of religion were discovering the multidimensionality of the religious variable (Glock and Stark, 1965;Faulkner and DeJong, 1966;Faulkner and Dejong, 1969;Weigert and Thomas, 1969). For example, when Stark (1968) examines the relation between age and five dimensions of religious commitment, he concludes that the relationships between older age and piety are confined to private devotionalism, denominational differences, and belief in immortality. In contradistinction, most researchers who have focused on church attendance have considered neither the physical disabilities nor the private devotions of the aged.…”

“…Of these areas, aging and church attendance is the largest. It contains 21 articles or books (Bultena, 1949;Waterman, 1949;Catholic Digest, 1953;O'Reilly, 1957;Lazerwitz, 1961;Orbach, 1961;Wilensky, 1961;Lazerwitz, 1962;Moberg, 1965a;Moberg and Taves, 1965;Catholic Digest, 1966;McGreevey, 1966;Stere, 1966;Glock, Ringer and Babbie, 1967;Riley and Foner, 1968;Stark, 1968;Beard, 1969;Hammond, 1969;Pihlblad and Rosencranz, 1969;Bahr, 1970;Wingrove and Alston, 1971). However, 14 of the 21 studies appeared after the White House Conference in 1961.…”

“…In his study the oldest age cohort includes individuals as young as 50. Stark also gathered data for purposes other than studying the elderly, but Stark's data are more recent (1963), he does have a sufficient number of cases over 65 years of age, and he does include more dimensions of religiosity than did previous research (Stark, 1968). …”