Family Formation and Religious Service Attendance

Abstract

The positive relationship between family formation and regular weekly religious service attendance is well established, but cross-sectional data make it difficult to be confident that this relationship is causal. Moreover, if the relationship is causal, cross-sectional data make it difficult to disentangle the effects of three distinct family-formation events: marrying, having a child, and having a child who reaches school age. We use three waves of the new General Social Survey panel data to disentangle these separate potential effects. Using random-, fixed-, and hybrid-effect models, we show that, although in cross-section marriage and children predict attendance across individuals, neither leads to increased attendance when looking at individuals who change over time. Having a child who becomes school aged is the only family-formation event that remains associated with increased attendance among individuals who change over time. This suggests that the relationships between marriage and attending and between having a first child (or, for that matter, having several children) and attending are spurious, causal in the other direction, or indirect (since marrying and having a first child make it more likely that one will eventually have a school-age child). Adding a school-age child in the household is the only family-formation event that directly leads to increased attendance.

Are the Sanctified Becoming the Pornified? Religious Conservatism, Commitment, and Pornography Use, 1984–2016*

“…We also control for a number of factors that may influence pornography viewership, following previous research (Patterson and Price, ; Perry, ; Wright, ; Wright, Bae, and Funk, ). We control for age and age 2 (in years) and we include a continuous measure of equivalized household income (Schleifer and Chaves, ). Dummy variables are also included for gender (female = 1), education (less than bachelors = 0, bachelors = 1, advanced degree = 1), race (white = 0, black = 1, other = 1), region (South = 1), and urban residence (city = 1).…”

“…Thus we have chosen listwise deletion in order to make replication easier. 2 The modification involves decomposing the black Protestants category into the mainline and evangelical categories (Schleifer and Chaves, 2017). This transformation alleviates concerns over collinearity with our racial control variables and we believe better captures the group of evangelical Protestants.…”

Family Formation and Close Social Ties Within Religious Congregations

“…Nonetheless, our knowledge regarding family formation and congregational social ties remains limited by measures, methods, and theoretical development. First, most studies on family formation on religious outcomes examine either religious attendance or affiliation (see Chaves, ; Schleifer & Chaves, ; Stolzenberg et al, ; Thornton, Axinn, & Hill, ), but not social ties within congregations. Although attendance and affiliation are important outcomes tied to improved well‐being (Fenelon & Danielsen, ; Stroope, ), they do not always operate congruently with religious social ties (e.g., Jewish adherents; see Lenski, ), nor do they reap the same social benefits as close congregational ties (see Lim & Putnam, ; Putnam & Campbell, ).…”

“…Second, concerns persist with regard to selection effects into marriage, given how religious adults already have a predisposition toward traditional family formation (Eggebeen & Dew, ; Ellison, Burdette, & Glenn ). Although most studies find that family formation positively predicts religious outcomes, such as attendance (Chaves, ; Stolzenberg et al,; Thornton et al, ), a recent study using advanced methods finds that the marriage effect on religious attendance disappears when accounting for selection (Schleifer & Chaves, ). If this is true with regard to religious attendance, then selection issues may also confound inferences regarding close congregational ties.…”

Still under the ancestors' shadow? Ancestor worship and family formation in contemporary China

“…The process of family formation can be defined as the progression through marriage and parenthood (e.g., Blossfeld and Huinink 1991;Schleifer and Chaves 2014). Previous studies of ancestor worship mostly cover one particular aspect of parenthood as an indicator of son preference: the sex composition of the children (e.g., Almond, Edlund, and Milligan 2013;Guilmoto 2012;Jin, Li, and Feldman 2007;Lee and Wang 1999;Li and Lavely 2003).…”