**4.2.1 The cross tab analysis of religious and educational variables**

In this research, two research questions are addressed. The first research question is: "Whether a person's education is related with his or her religious activities." The analysis of the first question could be expressed in the following table:


Table 2. The Structure Tree of Analysis

Table 2 demonstrate the logic of our analysis: we analyse the correlation between one's highest degree and his or her religious activities. The religious activities are divided into two categories: the first category is the fact concerning one's religious belief such as how often one prays, takes part in religious activities, and in which religion is one raised. The second category is one's opinions considering how religious one person is. The questions include how fundamental one considers him or her to be, the strength of affiliation, etc. The corresponding results of the analysis will be shown in the result part.

Religious Participation and Educational Attainment: An Empirical Investigation 327

Followed by the empirical estimation, the results are described as two parts: the first part concerns about the association between one's highest degree achieved and his or her religious practices and beliefs. The second part of the results is about the association between other factors (age, education, family background, etc.) and one's religious practices.

**5.1 The association between one's highest degree achieved and his or her religious** 

There is no significant association between a person's highest degree earned and "how often the person attends religious services". However, there is significant association between one's highest degree and their feelings about the bible. Besides, there is significant association between a person's highest degree and "allow anti-religionist to teach". There is also a significant association between one's highest degree earned and "how fundamentalist was one at age 16. Similarly, a significant relationship exists between one's highest degree earned and "how fundamentalist was one currently". Other variables that are significantly associated with "a person's highest degree earned" include the following variables: "feelings about the bible", "confidence in the existence of God", "Pope is infallible on matters of faith or morals", "how often does one pray", "whether one should agree that there can by Bible prayer in public schools or not", "whether one agrees that sinners must be punished or not", "whether one has ever had a 'born again' experience", "how often does one take part in religious activities", "whether religious experience changed one's life", "whether there is a turning point in life for religion", "one's religious preference", "religion in which one is raised", "strength of affiliation", "try to carry one's beliefs into other dealings", "whether there is any turning point when less committed to religion", "whether one considers himself or herself a religious person", "whether one tried to convince others to accept Jesus", "whether one thinks that he or she believes too much in science, not enough about faith", "how fundamentalist is spouse currently", "whether one considers herself or himself a spiritual person". Tables 3 to Table 11 describe some of the most important associations between one's highest degree achieved and his or her religious practice in detail. We classify the tables 3 to 11 as one's belief such as in which denomination is he or she raised and people's opinion of religious activities such as how fundamental the

Table 3-6 describes some of the facts concerning the association between one's highest

Table 3 shows the relationship between a person's highest degree and how often he or she prays. From the table, we can see that for people with less than high school education, most of them pray once a day (31.2%); for people with high school and junior college education, the majority pray several times a day; for people with bachelor and graduate degrees, the majority of them pray once a day. The largest percentage of people who never pray comes out of graduate degree holders (21.2%). The Pearson Chi-Square is 35.128 and the significance lever is 0.019, this means that a person's highest degree is significantly

**5. Results** 

**practices and beliefs** 

person considers himself to be.

degree and his religious practices.

associated with how often a person prays.

**5.1.1 Facts concerning one's religious belief** 

Aanalyse this issue, crosstab analysis is applied. Crosstab method is usually applied to when the independent variables are categorical variables. The data is divided into several cells and the significance of association among different cells is estimated. To use the crosstab method, it is very crucial that there are no empty cells. Technically, there will be empty cells only if the variables are continuous. Since we don't have continuous variables in our model, we are not worried about this problem. We did the crosstabs with the response variable by each of the categorical predictor variables, and those tables looked good with cell size, as a result, the analysis is valid. The results of this part of the analysis are shown in Table 3 to Table 11. The meanings of the crosstab results and regression results are explained in detail to satisfy the needs of those who are less methodologically inclined (sociologists included) and those who are generally less familiar with the jargons of sociology (non-sociology readers)

#### **4.2.2 Regression analysis of religious, educational, occupational, and other variables**

The second part of the analysis applies regression analysis to analyze the relationship between religion and other social economics variables. First, I estimate the effect of education and other variables on the number of church attendances of individual i in year t: R is a variable indicating the number of days of attending religious activities. The constant term is denoted by α1. E is a categorical variable indicating the level of one's education. M is a variable indication the marital status of the person: whether he or she is married or not. N is a variable indicating number of children in the family; X is a vector of independent variables including age, family income, religion denomination, whether the person is divorced or not, ethnicity, whether the person feels happy or not, whether the person feels life is exciting or not, race, the type of household, whether the person is Hispanic or not, the marital status of the person, and the gender of the person. Since the independent variable of religious activity attendance is a continuous variable, the paper applies ordinary least square regression to estimate the model.

$$R\_{it} = \alpha\_1 + \delta\_1 E\_{it} + \delta\_2 M\_{it} + \delta\_3 N\_{it} + \sum\_{1}^{11} \delta\_m X\_{im} + \varepsilon\_{it}^1 \tag{1}$$

Second, I estimate the effect of occupation and other variables on people's religion activities. The estimation equation is as the following:

$$R\_{it} = \alpha\_2 + \lambda\_1 O\_{it} + \lambda\_2 M\_{it} + \lambda\_3 N\_{it} + \sum\_{1}^{11} \lambda\_m X\_{im} + \varepsilon\_{it}^2 \tag{2}$$

R is again the variable indicating religious attendances. The constant term is denoted as α2. O is a categorical variable representing a person's occupation. M is a variable indication whether the person is married or not. N is a variable representing the number of children in the family, X is a vector of control variables that include age, the family income, religious denomination, whether the person is divorced or not, ethnicity, whether the person is happy or not, whether the person feels life or not, race, the type of the household, whether the person is Hispanic or not, the marital status of the children, and gender. The independent variables from equation one and equation two are similar.
