Multilevel relations between adolescents' religiosity, socio-economic status and autonomy/relatedness values in 10 cultures

This study analyzes multilevel relations between adolescents’ religious orientation and socio-economic status (SES) with their autonomy/relatedness values across 10 cultures. The data have been collected as part of the international “Value of Children and Intergenerational Relations”-project (P.I.: Gisela Trommsdorff and Bernhard Nauck). The theoretical background is Kagitcibasi’s model of family change and self-development (Kagitcibasi, C., Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2005, 36, pp. 403-422). While the relation between economic status and autonomy/relatedness in the family (family models) is an integral part of Kagitcibasi’s theory, religiosity has been hardly studied as a relevant factor for family model formation. In a prior study using the same dataset, family model value profiles of independence, autonomy/relatedness, and interdependence were identified. The current study aims to predict adolescents’ preference of these value profiles by individual-level and culture-level measures of religiosity and socio-economic status using multilevel modeling. Overall, n = 2566 adolescents (57% female, age 13-20 years) from China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, South Africa, Switzerland, and Turkey participated in the study. Results showed that religiosity was significantly related to family models across cultures at the individual as well as the cultural level. At both levels, the more important religion was evaluated, the more likely was the preference of the interdependent as compared to the independent family model. With regard to SES, results showed that while individual-level SES was unrelated to family models, the culture-level Human Development Index strongly predicted affiliation to the independent and autonomous-related as opposed to the interdependent family model. In conclusion, both the average religiosity and the socio-economic status of a culture have a strong impact on adolescents’ autonomy/relatedness values. At the individual level, importance of religion, but not SES, is related to these values. The results suggest that religiosity is an important factor for adolescents’ autonomy/relatedness orientation