Looking beyond Church Attendance: The Relationship between Parents’ Religious Identity and School Choice

ABSTRACT

Parents have specific and peculiar reasons for choosing the schools that they do for their children. Numerous attempts have been made to bring clarity to the matter, but the decision-making processes for school choice – especially as it pertains to faith-based schools – remain somewhat murky. I posit that the religious and cultural identity of a parent may have a significant relationship with the school they choose for their child. By first quantifying the culture of a Protestant denomination in America through the cultural consensus model, I was then able to operationalize that measure as a variable alongside others such as income, educational context and social network. The results indicate that there is a strong association between cultural consonance and choosing – or not choosing – a Seventh-day Adventist school.

KEYWORDS:

• School choice
• consumption norms
• cultural consensus
• Seventh-day Adventist
• faith-based communities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Throughout this study, the terms “SDA” or “Adventist” is used interchangeably with “Seventh-day Adventist”.