A Religious Experience? Personal, Parental, and Peer Religiosity and the Academic Success of Sexual-Minority Youth Using Nationally Representative Samples

Abstract

Using nationally representative transcript data, this study is the first to include a discussion of religiosity in the context of sexual-minority students’ academic achievement. This study examines the issue in three capacities: first, by comparing school success of sexual-minority youth to a non-sexual-minority reference group; second, by examining multiple facets of religiosity—including personal, parental, and peer factors—and their associations with the schooling success of sexual-minority youth and their heterosexual counterparts; and third, by exploring these issues across the three definitions of sexual-minority youth for both genders. The results indicate that whereas non-sexual-minority females with higher personal, parental, and peer religiosity tend to have higher grade-point averages (GPAs), sexual-minority males’ school success is unrelated to the religiosity of their environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic success
• family
• heterosexual youth
• high school students
• peers
• parents
• religiosity
• sexual-minority youth

Acknowledgments

The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305C050041-05 to the University of Pennsylvania. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the U.S. Department of Education. This research uses data from Add Health, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris, and funded by a grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 17 other agencies. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Persons interested in obtaining data files from Add Health should contact Add Health, Carolina Population Center, 123 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2524 ([email protected]). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.