A Study On Developing Features And Influential Factors Of Chinese Catholics’ Religiosity

Catholicism is one of China’s five religions, and Catholics is a group which can’t be ignored. But the researches on Chinese Catholics are quite rare. So, based on the former studies, taken Chinese Catholics as participants, Chinese Catholics’Religiosity Scale (CCRS) was developed. Using the scale and also interviewing6participants, this study discussed the developing situations and influential factors of Chinese Catholics’ religiosity.Following the concept and structure established by Shen Yang (Shen,2007), the concept and structure of religiosity in this study is:Catholics’ religiosity is a comprehensive expression of Catholics’unique personality attributions, which includes four dimensions:God belief, transcend experience, morality pursuit and institutional participation.According to the four dimensions, the scale developed contains28items, in which God belief subscale contains6; transcend experience subscale contains7; morality pursuit subscale contains7; institutional participation subscale contains8. The internal consistency coefficient of the scale is.726, and that of the four subscales is.550,.504,.437, and.593; the split-half coefficient of the whole scale is0.631; the reliability of test-retest after two-week is.723. The correlation coefficient between the four subscales ranges from.145to.593; that between the whole scale and the four subscales ranges from.538to.769. So, the scale has an acceptable reliability and validity.The scale was administrated to264Catholics in Hangzhou and Jiaxing in Zhejiang province, and the developing situation and influential factors was discussed. The result showed:(1) From a development perspective, taken the period of41-50years as a bounded point, the level of Catholics’religiosity showed a increasing trend with age. The shape of the curve is just like a hook.(2) Significant difference of the level of Catholics’ religiosity exists on gender, age, marriage, education and conversion years.(3) Multiple regression analysis showed that only the variable of age entered the regression equation.The interviews further testified the increasing trend of religiosity with age. Meanwhile, the role of model and self experiences also had very important affects to the development of religiosity.