Religious education and intercultural understanding: examining the role of religiosity for upper secondary students’ attitudes towards RE

Abstract

Recent studies show that religious education (RE) may play an important role for teaching intercultural understanding in many Western societies facing increased cultural and religious pluralism. Quantitative and qualitative research have however failed to examine what role the religiosity of the students plays in their attitudes towards RE. A nationally representative Swedish sample of 1850 students answered a classroom questionnaire. The main result was that, when controlling for background variables such as gender, foreign background, parents’ education level and study programme, the students’ religiosity had a significant effect on their attitudes towards (a) existential issues, (b) preferences on what to study in RE as well as (c) incentives for studying RE. Regression analyses demonstrated that by entering individuals’ religiosity into the model the effect of foreign background was suspended in 11 out of 14 cases. In order to understand the attitude towards RE, it is useful to include the students’ religiosity. As a consequence, this article argues that in order to reach the citizenship goals of educating for intercultural understanding in RE, the subject should be developed to reach male students, students with parents with lower levels of education, students in vocational study programmes and students who are not religious.

Keywords:

• religious education
• secondary
• students
• attitudes
• religiosity

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by a grant from the Swedish Research Council (VR) number 2007/8139. Additional funding for the data collection was provided by Church of Sweden and the Kempe-Carlgrenska Trust. The entire empirical part of the study was approved by the Regional Ethics Review Board in Uppsala.

Notes

1. Since it was possible to combine alternative identities, there is some overlap in the sense that 174 respondents agreed quite a lot (4) or completely (5) with both of these self-identifications, and another 79 respondents agreed moderately (3) with one of these labels and quite a lot or completely with the other. Due to this outcome, a new category was created from the self-definitions of ‘religious’ and/or ‘believers’ (steps 4 and 5) and named as the new category of ‘religious’ consisting of 377 pupils. Thus, henceforth ‘religious’ refers to this said new category.

2. The concept of existential issues became central to the Swedish discussion on RE in the 1960s. It can be seen as a way of creating motivation for keeping RE as a subject in a secularised society undergoing rapid social change. Hartman’s notion and his empirical studies of childrens’ existential issues also linked closely to central pedagogical discourses of the time (Hartman 1986).

3. A list of 13 existential issues was included in the questionnaire and these issues were reduced by means of principal component analysis, to make further comparison easier. Two items, ‘Religions other than Christianity’ and ‘Environment issues’ were omitted since they occurred in more than one dimension. In other words, 11 items were retained. Further, the limit of four was set to select the coefficients to retain in the principle component analysis. Varimax rotation was used. The four dimensions identified explained 68% of the variance.

4. Principal component analysis with Varimax rotation and Kaiser normalisation. The four dimensions identified explained 63% of the variance.

5. The following tables present the results from 14 regression analyses. Also, it needs to be mentioned that three regression analyses are left out for reasons of space, since the analyses showed R² of less than .05, meaning that the models tested explained less than 5% of the variance in the dependent variable in question. The dependent variables that were left out for this reason are: (1) ‘RE is not about everyday problems’, (2) ‘RE has little to do with reality’ and (3) ‘RE is not very engaging’. The independent variables were examined for multicollinearity using variance inflation factor (VIF) and tolerance statistic (Field 2010).