Study of Stout Students Religion and Beliefs

University of Wisconsin Stout

Jordyn Horvath

APSS 301

Professor David Seim

 December 20th, 2017

Final Research Paper

While studying in the Applied Social Sciences program, I find myself

conducting or examining research, this Is something as APSS students we

grow to be very skilled at. I wanted to be able to conduct research that

could cover a large portion of people and be able to compare and compile

information others could learn from. The question I wanted to ask and

understand was; How does a student’s background or cultural up-bringing

intertwine with the religion they practice if they practice one? Which lead me

to wonder what students believed religion was and whether they were

religious, spiritual or believed in science more than faith, I wanted answers.

Religion is a hard topic to cover, there are many things that could

potentially be sensitive or difficult for someone to talk about. There is also

the fact that there is just so much information out there to uncover, so

many “dead” religions and so many religions we don’t hear about everyday if

one isn’t apart of said religion. I also wanted to make sure my research

came off as being un-biased and safe for anyone to take part in, I wanted to

know truly how people practiced religion and why this was the religion they

practiced. I also wanted to hear from people who believed in evolution and

science, how they came to believe that, if it was parental influence or self-

realization.
 To begin my research, I had to first form a hypothesis, which was that

yes, a student’s background and cultural up-bringing does indeed impact

their religion and what their beliefs were. I then needed to find a way to test

this hypothesis, I thought about conducting many, many interviews but

realized this was going to need to be a much bigger project then I could

cover on feet, I looked into creating surveys and sending it out to stout

students, I had a few different options. The first option would be using

Qualtrics and have them give me an email list to submit my survey to, and

the second option was to use Survey Monkey and post my survey on Stout

Student pages on Facebook and get hopefully enough responses. I did end

up using a survey monkey to gather that section of my data.

One other way we were expected to try and gather data was with our

literature review. I chose to study the literature titled “U.S. College

Students' Perception of Religion and Science: Conflict, Collaboration, or

Independence?” By Christopher P. Scheitle. I liked this article because of the

new perspective it was going to give me, a chance to see what students

were believing in if it wasn’t religion. The article also reviews how

undergraduate students perceive the relationship between religion and

science and how that relationship is built and managed. To start the

experiment, the researcher had to gather willing participants that wanted to

be studied and act in the research about religion and science. The research

similar to mine, was not only asking about religion but also asking about
what the students major was and their year in school. This would add a

variable to the research that would help show some of the comparable

trends in students and their beliefs.

Some of the questions being asked were if students sided with science

or with religion, and this isn’t something I thought to ask when taking my

survey with the stout students. They also asked questions like how many

courses of science the student took in high school and in college, they asked

what their religious affiliation was and how committed or not committed that

student is to their religious beliefs or science beliefs. The next set of

questions were about the students, they were asked their race, and then

their gender, and then their age. The next questions I thought seemed out

of place but was interesting to add into the study was how those students

scored on their ACT’s or SAT’s, I felt like it wouldn’t have shown much

difference to the study and it made me question why it was added into the

research. I was interested in this because I got to see what other students

from a completely different background and area of the country. I chose this

because this is important and I wanted to learn more about the different

types of religious affiliations from around the country and how many

students actually don’t have religious beliefs and believe in a scientific

system instead.

The second article I chose is called “How College Affects Students'

Religious Faith and Practice: A Review of Research” by Harold V. Hartley III.

I liked this article for a few reasons, within my topic I needed to try and

expand the knowledge base of what I have found so far and be able to tie in

different aspects to my research. Some of the things I found in this article

were evidence of how attending college students experience has negative

impacts on their religious beliefs and practices. Some of the common themes

with this article were studying the students over time, from the beginning of

their college education and watching how over time, this can have a

negative effect on his or her religious studies and practices.

The third choice I picked for articles is The Relationship Between

Religious Beliefs, Moral Development, Self-Control, Peer Pressure, Self-

Esteem, and Premarital Sex” By Jacynth A. Fennell. This article was very

interesting, once again helping me expand on other ideas of research and

new topics I can look into to fulfill some new areas of exploration.

Something cool about this article was that it explored different areas other

than religion, the theme never changes though, it studies college students

and young adults which is something it had in common with the other

article.

Another way I found data was with the content analysis, both this and

the literature review were ways for me to get background information on the

topic and be able to implicate that into my research. This is what I had

discovered for my content analysis, for this content analysis, I found an

article called “Research Campus Politics to Find the Right College” by US

News, it covered all types of topics from college influence to race and

influence of religion on students. It was very interesting to read about how

when doing research for choosing colleges people were looking into the

diversity of Race, Religion, Ages, Gender and other variables. The news

station called it being invested in the college, they called it looking into the

college politics. This was an interesting article to look over as it isn’t directly

related to my research but it could be in my future research as I continue on

with the topic of religion and students.

The second piece of content I chose is called, “College students divided

on God, spirituality” by USA Today. This one was similar to my first piece but

talked all about religion instead of all of the varied topics talked about

above. This study said that across the country on all campuses, students are

completely divided into three categories, the first one is being completely

religious and the second is being spiritual but not religious, and the last

category was that they didn’t believe in anything and considered themselves

atheist. The article was talking about why each student stood behind each of

the three categories and that is kind of a big part of my research with trying

to decipher why each student believes what they believe and why they

believe it and if there were identifying factors to why they continue to

believe it.

The next step in my research was to find a way to possibly tie a theory

into my topic and see what kinds of information I could gather from this. I
really found the theory of Psychology of Religion to be so interesting.

Basically, it states there is five reasons for the belief in god, they go as

follows 1. The need to be in control, 2. The need to cope with death or grief,

3. To deal with suffering, 4. The need for justice, and lastly 5. Creative or

experiential thinking. I really enjoyed this theory and how it told the story of

why people do what they do or why they believe what they believe. This was

a huge part of what I wanted to know, I wanted to study why people believe

and if they believe something how did they get to that place of belief.

The next step was for me to define my methods, figure out what

worked best for me and how I was going to use these methods to better my

experiment. One of the first methods I worked with was conducting small

interviews with my peers and other campus students, this didn’t seem to

work the best for me as it was on such a small scale. I then decided I was

going to conduct a series of survey questions and use that to collect my

largest portion of data. I as earlier stated, was going to be using Survey

Monkey and Facebook to get my survey to Stout students, this seemed to

cover a larger majority of people in a more efficient way.

One of the other methods was the literature review and content

analysis above, these were great tools for me to discover some other studies

similar to mine and see what other researchers were finding and at all

different sizing scales. I liked using the literature review to start off with a

base knowledge of what I was going to find at a school in the mid-west, I

identified in my research when looking for literature I wanted them to be

from schools or towns in the Midwest area and be demographically similar to

Menomonie, Wisconsin.

When collecting my data one of the biggest tools I used was the online

Stout Library website, this is such a helpful tool available to me as a student

here. I used this to search for my research on other studies, and found all

five of my content and literature reviews from this website. Another tool I

used was google, this is something typically I would stray away from due to

some of the resources sounding somewhat unreliable.

While I shared some of my results within my literature review, I also

had such a large amount of survey responses, which is something I wasn’t

expecting, this was another task I had to do, analyze that data. To begin, I

had a respondent number of 58 students, and the following is their

demographics, five of these responders are in their Freshman year, thirty-

five of them are in their Sophomore year, eleven are in their Junior year,

and seven of them are in their Senior year. I also asked the students what

they identify as ethnically, here is what I received for responses, fifty-five

students identify as white or Caucasian, three students identify as Asian or

Pacific Islander, one student also identifies as African American or black, and

one student identifies as Hispanic or Latino.

With the next section of questions, I wanted to find out where these

students fell on the political scale, not surprised with the responses I found
that forty one percent of students identified as Democratic, and thirty nine

percent identified as Republican. This left thirteen percent with identify as

independent and seven percent to identify as other. This question was

important to me because of the fact that sometimes political affiliations lie

closely within in religious affiliations. For religious affiliations, I had a larger

variety then I was expecting, thirty students identified as just being

Christian, ten students are Catholic, two students are protestant, one

student is Native American, four are non-domination, ten had other not

listen religions, and fourteen didn’t have a religion. I next wanted to see

what students believed was the difference between spiritual and being

religious, some of the responses were very similar here are a few examples;

“Spiritual is an inner peace and calm and religion is following a certain set of

rules or beliefs set by a greater group of people” and “I believe being

spiritual is more about peace and reflection of mind, whereas religious is

specifically devoted to a religion and requires action, such as attending a

service.”

The next question was How would you define a "religion"? What

properties must a belief system have in order for it to be a "religion"? I was

expecting answers to be of more variety but there were very few that stood

out, here are some examples of what I found, “Religion is something that a

group of people believe in which influences their way of life. It also contains

some form of belief in something immeasurable or unable to be recorded.”

And “A set of practices and beliefs as means to guide you and your actions

throughout your life, involving the idea of a higher power than yourself”

while these didn’t particularly stand out to me, they did simplify and

summarize most of the responses. When asking about whether atheism is a

religion I was slightly nervous if this was going to create a bit of chaos or

anger for those who are strong believers in religion, I got two very good

answers, “I would say yes, because you still believe in something. That

something is just not a God.” And the next one is a bit longer but I didn’t

want to leave it out of my results, “I don’t necessarily believe that atheism

itself is a religion. More so a personal choice to live life independently and

spiritually. Atheists often choose to believe science rather than something

that cannot be seen right in front of you. I think that atheists just want to

figure out life on their own and don’t want to depend on something that

won’t always pull through.”

The next question had the widest variety of answers, the question

was, do you think that religion in general has had a positive or negative

effect on the world? Can you think of any examples? Here are my top three

answers, the first is for positive “Positive. It gives people purpose. People

will cite religion as a reason they help others.” The next one is for the

negative “Negative. I think that religion is used to help people get what they

want. People also use it to help their hate biases.” The last is for people who

were unsure or believe a little of both “In general it has had both effects. It
can lead to mission groups helping out around the world or it can start

wars.” The large majority believed that it had a positive effect on the world,

the majority was twenty-seven of the students, negative had 17 students

and fourteen students. I added a question because it had peaked my

interest if people weren’t religious could they or did they still believe in an

afterlife? I found that seventy-four percent of my responders believed yes,

nineteen percent believed no there isn’t and seven percent were still unsure

if they thought so or not.

In conclusion, I found that while many students do believe in

something, whether it is a religion, a higher power, or science and evolution,

this can all stem from many factors. Where they grew up, how they were

raised, their political affiliation, there age, gender and ethnicity. I proved my

hypothesis correct in the sense that there are so many factors that go into

place, especially when we are discussing the beliefs of many individual

people and how they arrived at said beliefs.