Adolescent religious development and commitment: A structural equation model of the role of family, peer group, and educational influences

This investigation explores the social psychological study of adolescent religion and why it has lagged behind other areas of social psychology. It also looks at the significant advances made during the past 20 years, especially in the areas of scale and index construction and structural equation model testing. Later, I propose and test a conceptual model of adolescent religious belief and commitment which is informed by these recent advances. This model looks at the linear structural relations from the covariance matrix of relations in a large survey of adolescent religious attitudes and behavior conducted in late 1988 and early 1989. This proposed model is specified, modified and re-specified. The final fit of the proposed conceptual model to the data is quite good, especially when one takes into account the survey used for this study was originally written for another purpose. Finally, the implications of this new model and additional research strategies and questions are suggested.