Factors Influencing Catholic Faith in Mexican American Religious Identity - Prof. Robert D, Papers of Introduction to Sociology

Download Factors Influencing Catholic Faith in Mexican American Religious Identity - Prof. Robert D and more Papers Introduction to Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Melanie Bradley 034:011 11/17/06 “Staying Catholic among Mexican Americans” - 1 - Introduction Many literature articles have reported over the religious denominations that people choose within their mainstream society. However, little research has been done to see whether this holds true for Mexican Americans that staying within their Catholic roots or switching out of Catholicism when living in the American culture. Approximately 80% of Mexican Americans are of Catholic faith and I am interested in knowing whether they maintain that faith or switch to another belief system. It is important to know whether Mexican Americans are adapting to mainstream American culture by switching religious identity since many Mexican Americans are moving into America and becoming a predominant part of American culture. By using age, gender, dependents, income, and social stability as my independent variables, I try to explain what factors influence the Mexican American population as surveyed by the Latino National Political Survey (LNPS) on my dependent variable of whether they are Catholic or not. Literature Review The article by Smith and Sikkink (2003) attributes that social disruption such as marriage, divorce, geographical location, etc. to significantly increase a person’s chance of religious switching or dropping out. The article uses data collected in the Religious Identity and Influence survey, conducted in 1996, to draw their hypotheses and conclusions on. Religiosity among Protestants was over-sampled during the initial survey so the correct weighting procedures were used to accommodate for that. The dependent variable that the paper is interested in is whether the respondent has switched faith or dropped their religious beliefs. There were a number of independent variables that the researchers drew upon for their testing. Among them, the ones that influenced this - 2 - this. Although not directly related to my research, I find a similar association to this through social stability. The article uses childhood religiosity, relatives, denominational differences in which they were raised, parental influence, and other social factors. From these, I derived yet again that social stability will have a positive influence on whether or not the respondent remains Catholic. The article does support their hypotheses that the more stable of a community they are in and grew up in, the more they will assimilate themselves to those with which they socialize with. The fourth article that was reviewed was a micro-level analysis of how people of the Swedish population choose a religious practice. The dependent variables that Brodin covers are the religiosity of the Swedish respondent. Although not associated with the Mexican American population, I found that the micro-level of analysis of religiosity chosen by individuals was important in deciding what factors to use for my research. By conducting interviews with respondents, the qualitative research that Brodin provides helped me to select social stability as a factor. Through the interview process, Brodin discovered that it was difficult for the respondents to reject the religiosity of those that they associated themselves with. Therefore, the respondent assimilated to those closest to them. Yet again, the social events and friends that the Mexican American population surrounds themselves with should then influence whether they are of the same Catholic religiosity. Finally, the last article that was reviewed by Ababou was about the impact of age, generation, and sex on religious practices by respondents in Morocco. Yet again although not closely associated with Mexican Americans, this article was beneficial in showing the significance that gender and age has on a respondent’s religiosity. The dependent variable that Ababou uses is the religious beliefs of the respondents. He uses an inductive approach to age - 5 - which I replicate in my variable. Ababou finds that the older the respondent is, the more likely they are to be religious. Also, when using gender as an independent variable, he also finds that women are more likely than men to be religious. Hypotheses Drawing upon literature, the five following hypotheses will test whether the Mexican American population remains within the Catholic faith or are switching to another belief system. H1: Mexican American women are more likely than men to be of Catholic faith. H2: Older Mexican Americans are more likely to be Catholic than younger. H3: The more socialized a Mexican American is into the American culture by social stability, the more likely it is that they will remain Catholic. H4: Among Mexican Americans, the higher the income of the respondent, the less likely they will be of Catholic religiosity. H5: Mexican Americans that have dependents will have a positive affect on being of Catholic faith. Data and Methods The units of analysis among this research are the individuals that make up the Mexican American population according to the LNPS. The sample size of Mexican Americans that reported having a religious identity was 1545. Dependent Variable: Since I want to know whether Mexican Americans are remaining Catholic, the dependent variable is whether the Mexican American is of Catholic faith or not. Respondents that are not - 6 - of Catholic faith include all other religious denominations as well as those who are not religious at all since it is possible for a Catholic to leave the faith and to become non-religious. Missing data from the variable were deleted due to the ambiguousness of predicting a person’s faith. Currently, 78.4% of respondents are Catholic. I want to know what characteristics make up those that are not of Catholic faith by finding what characteristics make up the people who are likely to be Catholic or not. Independent Variables: Research has shown that women are more likely than men to be religious. The first of the variables that I tested was the effect that gender has on Catholicism. I ran a Cross-tabulation and Chi-Square procedure to test what effect gender has on the religiosity of a Mexican American. There was no missing data on the gender of respondents. The second of the independent variables that I tested was whether age has an effect on the Mexican American remaining of Catholic faith. Previous research states that the older the respondent is, the more likely they are to be Catholic and it’s a curvilinear relationship. The relationship between age and religiosity stabilizes once a respondent has reached around age 60. I used an inductive approach to categorize individuals in age according to decade. Teenagers and those in their twenties were included in the decade up to the 30, after that according to decade the individuals were grouped, and as the final group was once they have reached an age of 61 and up. Since age is an ordinal variable, I ran an Independent Samples T-Test to evaluate the effect that age has on a respondent being Catholic. There were a very small number of respondents who did not provide an age on the original survey so they were deleted from the sample. - 7 - being in the “31 through 40” age group and the mean age of the non-Catholic group being in the “18 through 30” category. The difference in the mean scores between Catholics and non- Catholics was .3049. This indicates that it is a weak relationship between age of respondent and religiosity. This means that it is true that the older the Mexican American is, the more likely it is that they are of Catholic faith. My third independent variable is indexed for social stability. Previous research predicts that the more socially assimilated the Mexican American is with people unlike themselves, the less likely it is that they will be of Catholic faith. The Independent Samples T-Test supports my hypothesis that there is a difference between the social groups the respondent has and whether or not they are Catholic. It is a statistically significant relationship with “Sig. (2-tailed)” number being .000. The differences in the means for the religiosity of the respondent are .8268 with a standard deviation of social stability being 1.85. This indicates that I have a moderate strength between the variables. This would also mean that the more socially assimilated the respondent becomes with their community, the more likely it is that they will loose their religious Catholic identity. I am able to accept the hypothesis for the higher the income of the respondent, the less likely they will be Catholic. The significance of this test however is not important. The “Sig. (2- tailed” value was larger than .05 which would lead me to say that is not significant. The strength of the relationship however is also very weak with the difference in the means being .4191. This could be for a number of different reasons. The levels of education could be a better indicator for socioeconomic status as well as income. Finally, I tested my last variable of the respondent having dependents predicting their Catholic faith or not by running a Cross-tabulation Chi-Square test. In doing this, I rejected my - 10 - hypothesis. The final variable is also not statistically significant. The value of the “Cramer’s V” statistic is also very close to 0 which would lead us to say that it is a weak relationship. In this variable, I do not account for how many dependents the respondent has, but whether they are the legal guardian of any. It could be possible that the number of dependents the respondent has could effect whether or not they remain religious in the Catholic faith. I was curious to see whether the religiosity of the respondent still held true for gender controlling for if they had dependents or not. My results showed that more men with dependents were Catholic that those without. The also held true for women but there were actually more men with dependents who were Catholic than women. The relationship is statistically significant for men who do or do not have dependents but the same does not hold true for women. Conclusion The findings of this paper were not similar to predictions of people of other ethnic and religious backgrounds according to my literature review. Although, some of the findings were congruent, I rejected 2 of my 5 hypotheses and the ones that were accepted were either not statistically significant or had a very weak strength. This could mean several things for the Mexican American population. According to the research performed here, they are not as similar to the rest of society with losing their religiosity according to several influences. It is also possible that the attitudes of the Mexican American respondents may have changed now due to a time issue of the time of data collection. It is also possible that we had such poor results as predicted since the LNPS was conducted in 1990 and the literature review articles were predominately written after 2003. The data may not reflect the hypotheses here due to a change in the Mexican American population to date. - 11 - References Ababou, Mohamed. 2005 “The Impact of Age, Generation and Sex Variables on Religious Beliefs and Practices in Morocco.” Social Compass. 52:31-44. Brodin, Jenny-Ann. 2003. “A Matter of Choice: A Micro-Level Study on how Swedish New Agers Choose Their Religious Beliefs and Practices.” Rationality and Society. 15:381- 405. Loveland, Matthew T. 2003. “Religious Switching: Preference Development, Maintenance, and Change.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 42:147-157. Smith, Christian, and David Sikkink. 2003. “Social Predictors of Retention in and Switching from the Religious Faith of Family of Origin: Another Look Using Religious Tradition Self-Identification.” Review of Religious Research. 45:188-206. Wortham, Robert A. 2006. “The 2000 North Carolina Religious Adherence Rate: A Demographic Explanation.” Sociological Spectrum. 26:453-469 Appendix (see attached documents) - 12 -