Religious life in schooled society? A global study of the relationship between schooling and religiosity in 76 countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The thesis that schooling inevitably leads to secularization continues to be debated. Indeed, while education has become a central and authoritative institution across the world, religiosity seems to persist. An alternative hypothesis proposes that recognizing the cultural aspects of the growth of “schooled societies” may reveal unexpected compatibilities between education and religiosity. However, research that both empirically integrates these aspects and examines their relationship with religiosity from a global perspective remains scarce. Against this background, this article first constructs a macro-level indicator that taps into cross-national variation in the different dimensions of “schooled societies.” Subsequently, we examine its relationship with the subjective importance of religion in people’s lives and individual-level educational differences in religiosity. Results based on data from 94,011 respondents across 76 countries show that in societies that are more “schooled,” people generally tend to be less religious. Moreover, the development of a schooled society moderates the relationship between educational attainment and religiosity. In societies that show more characteristics of a schooled society, especially less educated people are likely to remain religious. Finally, we found that our new indicator for the schooled society explained more variance than other, less fine-grained indicators of this concept. This illustrates the added value of a more comprehensive indicator for the role of schooling as an institution. In the conclusion, we use our findings to outline a research agenda.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".