National Study of Youth and Religion

Click here to view Research Note: Religious Participation and Parental Moral Expectations and Supervision of American Youth [PDF]

Sociologists with the National Study of Youth and Religion, based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, announce the publication of Research Note: Religious Participation and Parental Moral Expectations and Supervision of American Youth in the June 2003 issue of the Review of Religious Research journal. The research note finds support for the hypothesis that parental religious participation increases parental moral expectations and the frequency with which parents supervise their adolescent children.

Christian Smith authored the article. Smith is the principal investigator of the National Study of Youth and Religion as well as professor and associate chair of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Religious Research Association publishes the Review of Religious Research four times per year. A goal of the Review is to publish work that illuminates the social role and influence of religious institutions, beliefs and practices.

Data from the national Survey of Parents and Youth, conducted in 1998-99, serve as the basis for testing Smiths hypothesis. SPY was designed by Princeton University's Center for Research on Child Wellbeing in conjunction with the National Evaluation Team for the Urban Health Initiative at the Center for Health and Public Service Research at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded SPY, which was designed to monitor trends in youths access to parental and community resources.

The National Study of Youth and Religion, funded by Lilly Endowment Inc., is based at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This four-year research project began in August 2001 and will continue until August 2005. The purposes of the project are to research the shape and influence of religion and spirituality in the lives of U.S. adolescents; to identify effective practices in the religious, moral and social formation of the lives of youth; to describe the extent to which youth participate in and benefit from the programs and opportunities religious communities are offering to their youth; and to foster an informed national discussion about the influence of religion in the lives of youth in order to encourage sustained reflection about and rethinking of our cultural and institutional practices with regard to youth and religion.