Religious Service Attendance Paper

Words: 754
Pages: 4

The article I examined was titled “Patterns of Change in Religious Service Attendance across the Life Course: Evidence from a 34-Year Longitudinal Study” and was written by R. David Hayward and Neal Krause. It was a study on how religious service attendance changes throughout an individual’s life course in predictable ways and at common transition points. More specifically, the study tracked the change in religious service attendance using data collected longitudinally over the course of 34 years, between 1971 and 2005, with over 3,000 individual participants, and in ages ranging from 15 to 102. The results of the study found that religious service attendance showed a pattern of decline in adolescence, stability in middle adulthood, and a pattern …show more content…
This goes along with the idea from the current course reading that “all lives are the same.” Almost all participants experienced a sharp decline in religious service attendance when they entered young adulthood, had stable religious attendance during middle adulthood, and a rapid increase in religious attendance after retirement as they transitioned to older adulthood. This pattern was found even when studying college-aged individuals in the late 19th century, in the early 1930s, and immediately after World War II. All reported very similar levels of religious non-attendance to those found among members of the same age group in 2012, and as these earlier cohorts were followed into middle and late adulthood, they all, on average, showed stable religious attendance in middle adulthood followed by increases in later adulthood. This bolstered the author’s point that religious attendance is more affected by developmental changes throughout the life course rather than by generational differences, meaning that differences between the older group and younger group didn’t happen simply because the older group came from a time where organized religious attendance was more socially expected. It also supports the idea that the life course contains predictable patterns that can be found in most individuals throughout a