Do church-based social relationships influence social relationships in the secular world?

Abstract

This study has three specific aims. The first is to see if social relationships in the church influence social relationships in the secular world. Data from a longitudinal nationwide survey provide support for this view. The second goal is to see if church-based social relationships are more likely to arise from church teachings at worship services or through informal reinforcement by fellow church members (as assessed by spiritual support). The findings suggest that informal spiritual support is more likely than attendance at worship services to bolster social relationships in the church. The third goal is to explore the influence of race. The results reveal that African Americans and Caucasian Americans get the same amount of support from secular social network members. However, the data further reveal that secular social ties among African Americans can be attributed to the social relationships they maintain in the church, but the same is not true for Caucasian Americans.

Keywords:

• church-based relationships
• secular relationships
• older adults

Notes

Notes

1. Researchers who are not familiar with the procedure reported by DeShon (1998) may prefer to have Cronbach's alpha estimates for the scales in this study. These estimates are as follows: spiritual support (0.848), church-based emotional support (0.821), secular support (Wave 2; 0.773), secular support (Wave 3; 0.788).

2. The test to determine whether these coefficients differ significantly was performed in the following manner. The model was estimated a second time after the relationship between spiritual support and emotional support from fellow church members was constrained to be equal to the relationship between the frequency of attendance at worship services and emotional support from fellow church members. Estimating this model provided a second chi-square goodness of fit value. The difference between this chi-square value and the chi-square value from the original model provides a test of the equivalency of these relationships. The difference between the two chi-square values (37.857) was significant at the 0.001 level, indicating that the effect of spiritual support is larger than the effect of church attendance.