Religion and self-efficacy: a multilevel approach

ABSTRACT

Can the religious values of an entire geographic area affect the self-efficacy of emerging adults living in that area? Although prior research has demonstrated that individual religious characteristics are associated with self-efficacy, less is known about how the overall religious context influences self-efficacy. Using multilevel analyses on two waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) merged with county-level variables, this study finds that a county’s higher conservative Protestant population share is associated with lower self-efficacy even after controlling for various variables. Surprisingly, this conservative Protestant contextual effect also applies to residents who are not conservative Protestants but live in a conservative Protestant county. In contrast, county-level Catholic population share is linked with higher self-efficacy. However, this Catholic contextual effect is explained when controlling for county-level variables.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious context
• self-efficacy
• youth

Acknowledgements

This research uses data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, a research project designed by Christian Smith, of the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, and generously funded by the Lilly Endowment Inc. of Indianapolis, IN.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. $IC{C}_1=({\tau }_{11}/{\tau }_{11}+{\tau }_{22}+ϵ),$ where ${\tau }_{11}$ means variances at level 2, ${\tau }_{22}$ means variances at level 3, and $ϵ$ means residuals.