Religious Behavior, Personality, and Dimensions of Self-Esteem Among 13- to 15-year-old Adolescents

Abstract

Self-esteem (SE) is widely regarded as an indicator of positive psychological functioning. The empirical evidence for an association between SE and religiosity, although extensive, is ambiguous; some studies have reported a positive association, yet others have failed to detect any significant relationship. The aim of the present paper was to clarify any relationships between the components of SE and several religious behavioral variables among a large sample (N = 3,056) of U.K. adolescents. It was demonstrated that SE derived from the regard of peers correlated with none of the religious variables, whereas personal SE and SE derived from parents were significantly associated with most of the religious variables, although the correlations were weak and negative. In order to examine if these weak correlations could be artefacts of individual differences in personality, the predictive effects of the religious variables were reexamined after allowing for extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism. Only personal bible reading and paternal church attendance remained significant (but small) negative predictors of personal SE. It was concluded, at least among U.K. adolescents, that religious observance is associated with neither increased nor decreased SE. It has no effect in either direction.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.