Explaining religious change across generations: an international study of religious transmission in families
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Empirical findings show that institutional religiosity and religious practice have been steadily declining in most European countries (and more recently in the US and Canada, too) since the 1960s. While there is a large body of evidence to suggest that the decline in church religiosity is due mainly to intergenerational change (with one generation being less religious than the previous), there is also a general lack of detailed knowledge about how this change actually happens. In addition, the conditions in which religious and non-religious worldviews are passed on through generations have rarely been the object of international comparative study. The research project intends to concentrate on the transmission of religion in family socialization and examines both the familial and societal conditions that impinge on the continuity or discontinuity of religious change across generations. The main research questions result from the original project (see: https://osf.io/g98rx/), but have also been expanded and concretized in the course of the analysis: 1) How are religion and non-religion transmitted from generation to generation? How has the transmission of religion changed across generations and within families? How does the transmission, transformation or abandonment of religiosity and pro-social values take place in processes of socialization over generations? 2) How have the meaning and practice of religion and non-religion changed across generations and within families, and in which way is this linked to the changing societal context? 3) Which factors and mechanisms in a family promote the transmission or discontinuation of religiosity (e.g. family relationships, nurturing styles, trust, equality, attentiveness, tolerance, religious profile, and conservatism or liberalism)? Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, we will use a mixed-methods approach that combines the strengths of both methodological paradigms – the former’s representativeness and generalizability, and the latter’s precise reconstruction of mechanisms and capacity for building typologies. The project will be carried out in five countries, which are sufficiently different to each other with regard both to religious landscape, and some other contextual characteristics (e.g. societal factors such as cultural changes or migration): Canada, Finland, Germany, Hungary, and Italy. Our research project aims to understand the transmission of religiosity and non-religiosity across generations in Europe and Canada. In short, we anticipate being able to provide a better explanation of religious change itself, and a more precise theory of religious change across generations. The research is financed by means of the John Templeton Foundation from July 2022 to June 2024 and will be carried out in cooperation between researchers from - the University of Münster (Germany), https://www.uni-muenster.de/Religion-und-Moderne/aktuelles/forschung/projekte/projekt_templeton.html, - the University of Eastern Finland, https://uefconnect.uef.fi/en/group/the-transmission-of-religion-across-generations-a-comparative-international-study-of-continuities-and-discontinuities-in-family-socialization/ - the Pázmány Péter Catholic University Budapest (Hungary), - the University of Turino (Italy), https://www.dcps.unito.it/do/docenti.pl/Show?_id=rricucci#tab-profilo and - the University of Ottawa (Canada). SEE Wiki for more information on our theoretical and analytical framework.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".