Transmission of Religious and Social Values from Parents to Teenage Children

Author(s): Dean R. Hoge, Gregory H. Petrillo, Ella I. Smith

Source: Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Aug., 1982), pp. 569-580
Published by: National Council on Family Relations
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/351580
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 Transmission of Religious and Social
Values from Parents to Teenage Children

DEAN R. HOGE
GREGORY H. PETRILLO
ELLA I. SMITH
Boys Town Centerfor the Study of Youth Development,
Catholic University

Using 254 mother-father-youthtriads gathered from Catholic, Baptist, and Metho-

dist churches, the authors looked at patterns of parent-child value transmission.
Mean age ofyouth was 16. 0. Parent-child correlations were mixed but often weak.
Thirty-threefamily factors were tested for effect on value transmission; most had no
effect, but several enhanced religious value transmission-younger age of parents,
parental agreement about religion, and good parent-child relationships. Member-
ship in one denomination or anotherpredicted children's values more than did their
parents' values, indicating that value socialization takes place in cultural subgroups
more than in nuclear families. Implications are discussed for future research.

INTRODUCTION pending greatly on the concreteness and

If cultural continuity is to be maintained,
values must be transmitted from one genera-
tion to the next. Socialization theory usually
stresses the family as the most important
mechanism in value transmission; but the in-
fluence of age-peers, school, and sociohistori-
cal events had also been recognized (Mann-
heim, 1952; Coleman, 1961; Kandel and
Lesser, 1972).
A number of studies have looked at the im-
pact of parents on children's values; for re-
views see Bengtson (1975), Kalish and John-
son (1972), and Schwartz and Schwartz
(1975). The prevailing finding is that value
transmission from parents to children is
sometimes strong and sometimes weak, de-
Financial support was provided by the Boys Town
Center. We would like to thank Raymond Potvin for
helpful comments. Data for the study were gathered in
1976 and analyzed in 1980-1981.
Dr. Hoge is a Member of the Boys Town Center and of
the Department of Sociology, Catholic University. Mr.
Petrillo and Ms. Smith are graduate students. For all
three the address is Boys Town Center, Catholic Uni-
versity, Washington, D. C. 20064.
saliency of the particular topic under study.
The field of political socialization has made
rather great progress in specifying factors in
value transmission (Dennis, 1973; Jennings
and Niemi, 1974).
The present paper reports on research re-
garding transmission of religious values and
social values. Both kinds of values are central
to cultural stability. Our research uses a
sample of high school youth and their
parents, borrowing the conceptualization and
method largely from political socialization re-
search. We are especially interested in re-
ligious values and would expect them to
transmit more fully than political values,
since they are so important to personal and
family identity. To clarify the focus of this re-
search, we look first at the best studies of
value transmission in any value area, then at
the few scattered studies of religious value
transmission.
Past Research on Parent-child
Value Transmission
The most convincing test of value transmis-
sion from parents to children would use data

August 1982 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY 569

from parents and data from children, but not
all studies have done this. Some have
gathered information from only one genera-
tion and have asked for ratings of the other.
Such studies have estimated a relatively
greater impact of parents on children,
probably due to inaccurate perceptions of the
other (for demonstrations of this see
Furstenberg, 1971; also see Bell, 1963; Elder,
1963; Rosen, 1964). Since perceived agree-
ment as reported by one generation is not a
reliable measure of real agreement, we limit
our attention only to studies with direct data
from two generations.
Even with this limitation, there still are im-
portant methodological issues, of which three
should be noted. First, overall mean scores on
value scales by children may resemble overall
mean scores by parents, yet correlations of in-
dividual children with the scores of their
parents may be low. This, in fact,
characterizes most of the research findings
(Connell, 1972; Jennings and Niemi, 1974;
Niemi et al., 1978), causing theorists to
speculate about the impact of extrafamilial
institutions and conditions which encourage
overall social conformity in spite of low
parent-child correlations. We believe that
theoretical conclusions must be based on
both kinds of test.
Second, assessment of parent-child simi-
larity could use measures of absolute agree-
ment or covariation (Bengtson, 1975). The
first has the more stringent condition of exact
agreement, while the second predicts the
scores of children from the scores of parents,
usually using correlation or regression
techniques allowing the intercept to be = 0.
The question of which assessment is more
useful would seem to depend on the historical
situation. In a time of rapid social change,
children may hold values which are different,
by a certain distance, from the values of their
parents; yet parental values would still pre-
dict children's values in spite of an overall
shift. In such a situation, covariation would
be an important test, since absolute
agreement would be statistically uncommon.
In more stable times, or on specific values
changing little, absolute agreement would
seem to be more important.
Third, even if parent-child covariance or
agreement is high, we cannot safely infer
transmission from parents to children. Pos-
sibly children have some impact on parents as
570 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY
well as vice versa. More importantly, ex-
periences or conditions common to both
parents and children may account for
covariation. In an early study, Newcomb and
Svehla (1937) found that common factors
acting upon members of the same family in-
dependently led them to agree on various
topics. Newcomb and Svehla looked at
parent-child correlations on attitudes toward
the church and found them quite high in a
broad sample. When they looked at Pro-
testant, Catholic, Jewish, and nonreligious
families separately, they found that the
parent-child correlations considerably weak-
ened (also see Troll et al., 1969). Parent-child
correlation studies can thus be expected to
have different findings depending on the
amount of heterogeneity in the sample.
These clarifications may help us interpret
the contradictory conclusions drawn by past
researchers. Some studies have emphasized
the similarities between parents and children,
and others have emphasized the dissimi-
larities. The most thorough studies have
found weak agreement between parents and
children (Troll et al., 1969; Furstenberg,
1971; Kandel and Lesser, 1972; Clausen,
1974; Jennings and Niemi, 1974; Bengtson,
1975; Niemi et al., 1978). The amount of
agreement, however, varies from topic to
topic.
The topics on which parent-child agree-
ment has been found to be strongest are those
which are visible, concrete, and of lasting
concern to the parents. Abstract conceptions
of values, transient issues, and issues of little
concern to the family have been found to have
little or no parent-child transmission. In the
best study of this question, Jennings and
Niemi (1968, 1974) calculated parent-child
correlations on 17 different value and attitude
measures, mostly in the realm of politics. The
strongest agreements were on religious pre-
ference and political party identification. A
moderate amount of agreement occurred on
concrete issues related to school and church
concerns-questions about government in-
volvement in school integration, about prayer
in public schools, and about whether the
Bible is literally true; tau-b on these ranged
from .29 to .34. Only slight agreement was
found on more abstract issues or issues of
limited relevance to family life-questions
about whether a Communist should be al-
lowed to take political office; whether a
August 1982
speaker opposed to religion should be allowed
to lecture locally; positive or negative feelings
about various social groups such as Negroes,
Jews, and Big Business; a measure of political
trust versus cynicism; and a measure of cos-
mopolitanism versus localism. These tau-b
correlations were in the .05 to .20 range.
(Also see McClosky and Dahlgren, 1959;
Nelson and Tallmann, 1969; Thomas, 1971.)
The family conditions encouraging parent-
child transmission have been investigated
most closely by three research studies. First,
Troll et al. (1969) investigated eight family
characteristics possibly affecting parent-child
value transmission. The results were mostly
negative, with only three variables having an
identifiable impact-greater social-class sta-
bility over the generations, less intrafamily
conflict, and greater family integration
(1969:332).
Second, Kandel and Lesser (1972) studied
high school students and their mothers and
looked at a series of variables describing the
mothers and family life. Remarkably, only
one of all these variables strongly affected
mother-child value agreement, and that was
only in one value area-mother's encourage-
ment of the child predicted mother-child
agreement on educational plans.
Third, the best study was done by Jennings
and Niemi (1968, 1974), who had a nation-
wide sample of 1800 high school seniors and
their parents. They studied a wide range of
factors possibly influencing parent-child
political value transmission. These included
affectivity, control of children by parents,
feelings of closeness, punishments, and so on.
To their dismay none of these measures
turned out to be important in predicting
parent-child agreement in political values
(1968:181). The only pattern which emerged
was that the amount of agreement between
the two parents predicted the amount of
agreement between each parent and the
child. That is, parents homogeneous on the
value under study had greater impact on the
child's viewpoint. Jennings and Niemi con-
cluded that, in a complex society with
multiple socialization agents, children may
well wind up looking like no particular
model. "This may be a major clue to the irony
of high aggregate similarities in the face of
modest pairwise similarities" (1974:325).
August 1982 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY
Transmission of Religious Values
Religious value transmission from parents
to children has seldom been studied. Besides
the few items on religion in the Kalish-John-
son, Furstenberg, and Jennings-Niemi stud-
ies, the only studies on religious values with a
two-generation design known to us are New-
comb and Svehla (1937), Wieting (1975), and
Keeley (1976).
Newcomb and Svehla studied 558 students
and parents in the early 1930s using the
Thurstone Attitude Toward the Church scale.
They found parent-child agreement, on the
average, when the children were 17 or
younger, but less favorable attitudes by child-
ren than by parents when they were 18 or
older. The individual parent-child corre-
lations were quite high: .58 for mothers-
sons, .64 for fathers-sons, .69 for mothers-
daughers, and .65 for fathers-daughters. The
older the children and the higher the family's
socioeconomic status, the weaker were the
parent-child correlations. When they com-
puted the correlations within religious pre-
ference groups, the relationships weakened.
The correlations of each child with each
parent averaged .30 for the Protestants, .35
for the Catholics, .51 for the Jews, and .65 for
those without religious affiliation.
Wieting studied 66 family units consisting
of father, mother, and senior high adoles-
cent. He found that adolescents attend
church less than their parents and see the
church as less important than do their
parents, but they attach similar meanings to
classical religious symbols. He did not pre-
sent parent-child correlations.
Keeley studied religious attitudes of 220
college freshmen and their parents. He found
that the students were more individualistic
and less traditionally religious than their
parents. He presented no parent-child corre-
lations. (See Strommen, 1963; Zuck and
Getz, 1968; McCready, 1972; Johnson, 1973;
and Thomas et al., 1974 on family factors in
religious socialization.)
THE DATA
The data come from a larger study of youth
and the church. In 1976 we attempted to
study the total population of tenth graders in
a representative sample of suburban Roman
571
Catholic, Southern Baptist, and United
Methodist churches in the Maryland suburbs
outside Washington, D. C. We enrolled
enough churches so that the tenth graders
would total at least 220 in each denomination
(a total of 5 Catholic, 20 Baptist, and 10
Methodist churches). Complete question-
naires were obtained from 451 youth-152
Catholics, 151 Baptists, and 148 Metho-
dists-for completion rates of 65%, 68%,
70% respectively. Then we asked both par-
ents to fill out and return questionnaires; and
315 mothers and 284 fathers did so, pro-
ducing 254 complete triads of youth, mother,
and father. These 254 families were analyzed.
Some bias occurred during data collection in
that youth most alienated from the church re-
fused disproportionately to participate. The
nature of bias in the parent data is unknown.
The sample is middle class. Mean family
income (as reported by fathers) was about
$32,900 for the Catholics, $26,200 for the
Baptists, and $31,600 for the Methodists.
The percentage of fathers with at least some
college education was 83 for the Catholics, 65
for the Baptists, and 77 for the Methodists.
Mean age of the youth was 16.0 years; 97%
were white, and 54% were female. Mean age
of parents was 45.3 years.
MEASURES
Our primary interest is in religious values,
but the questionnaire also included five items
on social and political values. Religious
values were measured by four Likert-type
indices. The statements had five responses
ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Dis-
agree, scored from 5 to 1. Index scores were
the mean of the items answered.
1. CreedalAssent Index. This 7-item index
from King and Hunt (1975) measures general
adherence to traditional Christian creeds.
One item states, "I believe in eternal life,"
and the percentage agreeing was 80 for the
girls, 69 for the boys, 92 for the mothers, and
79 for the fathers. Cronbach's alpha is .85 for
the youth, .87 for the mothers, and .94 for the
fathers.
2. Religious Relativism Index. This 5-item
index measures the belief that all religions are
equally true versus the belief that only fol-
lowers of Jesus Christ and members of His
church can be saved. One item states, "All
the different religions are equally good ways
of helping a person find ultimate truth." (For
572 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY
the items see Hoge and Petrillo, 1978: 378).
The percentage agreeing was 49 for the girls,
47 for the boys, 43 for the mothers, and 37 for
the fathers. Cronbach's alpha is .73 for the
youth, .73 for the mothers, and .76 for the
fathers.
3. Religious Individualism Index. This
5-item index measures the belief that in-
dividual knowledge and experience is the
final authority for religious truth, versus the
belief that the church has final authority and
defines truth for all people. One item states,
"Today people should think for themselves
about religion and not accept the teachings of
any one church." The percentage agreeing
was 30 for the girls, 25 for the boys, 30 for the
mothers, and 32 for the fathers. Cronbach's
alpha is .62 for the youth, .68 for the
mothers, and .74 for the fathers,
4. Devotionalism Index. This 5-item index
from King and Hunt (1975) measures fre-
quency of prayer, frequency of feeling close to
God, and importance of prayer and
devotions. One item states, "Private prayer is
one of the most important and satisfying
aspects of my religious experience." The per-
centage agreeing was 74 for the girls, 67 for
the boys, 85 for the mothers, and 83 for the
fathers. Cronbach's alpha is .85 for the
youth, .84 for the mothers, and .90 for the
fathers.
Five items measured social values. Two
were on sexual ethics and three were on
political topics in the areas of civil dis-
obedience, the rights of Communists, and the
role of government in school integration. The
items on sex ethics were included because in
past research this topic has been found to be
closely associated with religious beliefs and
commitment (Hoge, 1979). All research
shows that values in the area of sex and
family are more closely associated with re-
ligious beliefs than values in any other nonre-
ligion area. The items on political topics were
included both to investigate topics not found
to be associated with religious beliefs in past
research and also to provide more continuity
to the Jennings and Niemi study.
The five items were: (a) tolerance of porno-
graphy which states, "Publications that dwell
on and illustrate sex acts should be banned
from newsstands"; (b) tolerance of pre-
marital sex which states, "It is morally right
for a couple committed to each other to have
premarital sexual intercourse"; (c) support
August 1982
for civil disobedience which states, "Civil
disobedience is sometimes justifiable and
necessary to combat injustice"; (d) rights of
Communists, an item borrowed from Jen-
nings and Niemi, which states, "If a Com-
munist were legally elected to some public
office around here, the people should allow
him to take office"; and (e) integration of
schools, an item also borrowed from Jennings
and Niemi, which states that some people say
that the government in Washington should
see to it that schools are integrated, while
other people say it is none of the govern-
ment's business. The responses were "The
government should act," "The government
should not act, since it is none of its
business," and "I am not interested enough
to have an opinion on this."
All items except the last had a Likert for-
mat, with five responses ranging from Stron-
gly Agree to Strongly Disagree. They were
scored from 5 to 1, except on the item on
tolerance of pornography, where they were
scored from 1 to 5. On the last item con-
cerning integration of schools, the response
"The government should act" was scored 3;
"The government should not act, because it is
none of its business" was scored 1; and "I am
not interested enough to have an opinion on
this" was scored 2. The result of this method
of scoring is that on each item a high score in-
dicates a liberal or tolerant attitude.
FINDINGS
Table 1 shows aggregate differences in
values among daughters, sons, mothers, and
fathers. In religious values the mothers are
clearly the most traditional-highest on
creedal assent and devotionalism, lowest on
relativism and individualism. Also the
daughters are more traditional than the sons
on creedal assent and devotionalism. On all
four measures the youth are significantly less
traditional then their mothers, and on two
measures they are significantly less tradition-
al than their fathers.
In sexual ethics the youth are more tolerant
of sexual freedoms than are their parents. On
the question of the rights of an elected Com-
munist to hold political office, the youth are
less supportive of civil rights than their
parents. Lastly, on the other two political
issues-the validity of civil disobedience and
government involvement in school integra-
tion-they resemble their parents.
There is, in short, a generation gap on
some values but not on others. The greatest
gap is in the area of sexual ethics; and pro-
bably its source is in the youth culture of the
1970s, which approves of much sexual
freedom.
Parent-child agreement in the aggregate
does not mean that correlations of parents'
values with children's values within each
family will be strong. The top section of Table
2 presents the zero-order correlations be-
tween fathers and mothers and between each
parent and youth. Looking at the father-
mother correlations, we see that they are
highest on religious values and sexual ethics;
on political topics they are somewhat lower.
On the parent-child correlations, again the

TABLE 1. SCORES ON NINE RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL VALUES

Daughters Sons Mothers Fathers

Values (N = 138) (N = 116) (N = 254) (N = 254)
Religious Value Indices
Creedal Assent Indexa (mean) 4.07 3.88 4.31 4.05
Religious Relativism Indexab (mean) 2.93 2.86 2.56 2.58
Religious Individualism Indexab (mean) 3.08 3.06 2.80 2.83
Devotionalism Indexa (mean) 3.78 3.44 4.15 3.71
Social Value ItemsC
Tolerance of pornographyab 33 43 9 26
Tolerance of premarital sexab 41 45 10 16
Support for civil disobedience 38 52 39 45
Rights of Communistsab 26 33 41 63
Integration of schools 59 51 58 55
ayouth (combined sons and daughters) are significantly different from mothers at .05.
byouth (combined sons and daughters) are significantly different from fathers at .05.
cSee text for wording of single items. The first four items are in Likert format; the percentage who strongly agree
or agree is given except on the item on pornography, which is stated in the opposite direction; there the percentage
who strongly disagree or disagree is given. The item on integration has three responses, and the percentage who say
the government should act is given.

August 1982 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY 573

TABLE 2. CORRELATIONS BETWEEN MEMBERS OF FAMILY DYADS BEFORE AND AFTER FAMILY
CHARACTERISTICS ARE PARTIALED OUT
Father- Mother- Father- Mother- Father-
Mother Daughter Daughter Son Son
Values (N = 245)a (N = 134)a (N = 136)a (N = 114)a (N = 114)a
Zero-order Correlations
Creedal Assent Index .32* .27* .00 .34* .12
Religious Relativism Index .51* .45* .35* .54* .44*
Religious Individualism Index .39* .15* .09 .17* .22*
Devotionalism Index .38* .05 -.03 .13 .03
Tolerance of pornography .38* .11 .13 .10 .12
Tolerance of premarital sex .44* .21* .16* .17* .23*
Support for civil disobedience .27* .04 .10 -.01 .16*
Rights of Communists .28* .17* .13 .05 .31*
Integration of schools .31* .05 .11 .10 .14
Partial Correlationsb
Creedal Assent Index .29* .22* -.05 .28* .06
Religious Relativism Index .37* .23* .18* .34* .28*
Religious Individualism Index .35* .14 .08 .17* .22*
Devotionalism Index .34* .02 -.05 .12 .01
Tolerance of pornography .38* .11 .08 .08 .11
Tolerance of premarital sex .41* .15 .13 .13 .19*
Support for civil disobedience .28* .02 .09 -.01 .18*
Rights of Communists .24* .14 .12 .04 .26*
Integration of schools .31* .04 .11 .09 .15
Partial Correlations, Using Single
Items on Religious Values
Creedal assent item .17* .18* -.05 .17* .00
Religious relativism item .23* .28* .24* .24* .20*
Religious individualism item .17* .22* .04 .11 18*
Devotionalism item .23* .01 -.05 .03 -.08
aAverage N for nine correlations; most of the missing data occurs on the integration of schools item.
bDenomination (2 dummy variables), family income, and father's occupation (professional versus other) are par-
tialed out.
*Significant at .05.

strongest patterns are found on the religious
values and sexual ethics. Of the four
parent-child correlations, the weakest is the
father-daughter relationship and the stron-
gest is the father-son relationship; but the
pattern varies by topic-on religion the
mother-son transmission is strongest, and on
politics the father-son transmission is stron-
gest.
The correlations at the top of Table 2 are
especially strong on the Religious Relativism
Index. This is due to the denominational dif-
ferences in our sample. The Baptists had
much different attitudes on the items making
up this index than did the Catholics and
Methodists. For example, on the item "All
the different religions are equally good ways
of helping a person find ultimate truth," 24%
of the Baptist parents strongly agreed or
agreed, compared with 44% of the Catholic
parents and 53% of the Methodist parents.
Similary, 21% of the Baptist youth strongly
agreed or agreed, compared with 62% of the
Catholic and 57% of the Methodist youth.
This point illustrates the conclusion of
some past researchers that extrafamilial
factors strongly affect parent-child corre-
lations and that, to understand the strength
of parent-child correlations more clearly,
contextual background variables should first
be partialed out. We did this in the middle
part of Table 2, where partial correlations are
presented, with denomination (in the form of
two dummy variables), family income, and
father's occupation (scored professional
versus other) partialed out. The correlations
are somewhat weakened on most measures;
but they are very much weakened on the Re-
ligious Relativism Index, so that now they
more closely resemble the parent-child corre-
lations on the other religious measures.
Two of our political measures were bor-
rowed directly from Jennings and Niemi. On
the item about whether an elected Com-
munist should be allowed to take office, they
found a correlation (tau-b) of .13 between
high school seniors and their parents. This is
similar to our finding. On the item about

574 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY August 1982

whether the federal government should take a
role in school integration, they found a tau-b
of .34, which is much stronger than our
finding. Why this Jennings-Niemi relation-
ship was so much stronger than ours is un-
clear. Perhaps the historical situation influ-
enced it, or perhaps tenth graders are not old
enough to have stable attitudes on this
question.
Stronger correlations occur on the religious
values rather than on the sexual or political
issues possibly because the religious values
are measured by multi-item indices, the re-
liability of which is much higher. To test this
possibility we recomputed the partial corre-
lations in Table 2, using not the four religious
indices but a single item from each index. We
used the item in each which had the highest
item-to-index correlation.1 The results are
shown at the bottom of Table 2. The father-
mother correlations are somewhat weaker,
and the parent-child correlations are on
average a bit weaker. We conclude that the
use of multi-item indices strengthened the
parent-child correlations at the top and mid-
dle of Table 2, but not enough to change the
overall patterns of relationships greatly.
Comparison of Denominational Influence
and Parental Influence
Already we have seen that membership in a
particular denomination has an influence on
the youth apart from the specific influence of
parents' attitudes. Table 3 compares the in-
fluence of denominational membership and
parents' attitudes. It regresses the youth's at-
titudes on two denominational variables and
also on two parent variables. (The two de-
nominational variables are the two dummy
variables found to have the strongest associa-
tion with youth attitudes.)
Table 3 shows that the effect of denomi-
national membership is slightly stronger,
overall, than the effect of parental attitudes.
This finding is theoretically important, for it
alerts us to the impact of subgroup or sub-
cultural influences in addition to direct
parental influences as measured by parent-
child correlations. That is, within specific
subgroups the parent-child correlations may
be weak; but across subgroups the corre-
lations may be stronger, since group differ-
ences cause more variance in the data. Pos-
sibly the reduction in variance in the data ac-
counts in a purely mathematical way for the
weak parent-child correlations. To test this
notion we computed the data in Table 4. In it
are shown the parent-child correlations with-
in each denomination, compared with the
parent-child correlations for the total
sample. (The measure for parents is the mean
of the measure for the father and the measure
for the mother.) Also the table gives the
standard deviations of the parents' measures.
The pattern in the table is mixed. Only on
the Religious Relativism Index is the re-
duction-in-variance pattern clearly visible.
Apparently denominational membership has
a strong impact on views about religious re-
lativism, and the views are transmitted in
distinct patterns which are stronger than the
parent-child correlations alone would in-
dicate. Otherwise Table 4 has inconsistent
patterns, suggesting that the impact of de-
nominational membership is generally not in-

TABLE 3. COMPARISON OF INFLUENCE OF DENOMINATIONAL MEMBERSHIP AND PARENTS'

ATTITUDES: STANDARDIZED REGRESSION COEFFICIENTS (N = 254)
Effect of Effect of
Denomination Parents' Attitudes
Catholic Baptist Mother's Father's
vs. Other vs. Other Attitude Attitude
Values (Beta) (Beta) (Beta) (Beta)
Creedal Assent Index -.06 .23* .25* -.07
Religious Relativism Index .11 -.34* .21* .12*
Religious Individualism Index -.12 -.22* .12 .10
Devotionalism Index -.07 .07 .07 -.05
Tolerance of pornography -.01 -.19* .05 .09
Tolerance of premarital sex .03 --.29* .07 .13
Support for civil disobedience -.10 -.08 -.03 .14*
Rights of Communists -.04 -.21* .05 .17*
Integration of schools -.01 -.15 .00 .12
*Significant at .05 by F-test.

August 1982 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY 575

TABLE 4. PARENTS' STANDARD DEVIATIONS AND PARENT-CHILD CORRELATIONS FOR TOTAL
SAMPLE
Total Sample Catholics Baptists Methodists
(N= 254) (N= 101) (N= 81) (N= 72)
Parents' S.D. r Parents' S.D. r Parents' S.D. r Parents' S.D. r
Creedal Assent Index .551 .18* .532 .19* .477 -.09 .586 .18
Religious Relativism Index .725 .50* .584 .34* .642 .34* .567 .18
Religious Individualism Index .617 .18* .587 .31* .612 .06 .535 .11
Devotionalism Index .682 .03 .592 .16 .617 -.15 .762 -.01
Tolerance of pornography .929 .14* .946 .16 .875 -.16 .954 .39*
Tolerance of premarital sex .867 .23* .795 .27* .768 .18 .951 .07
Support for civil disobedience .956 .09 .970 .17* .916 -.02 .966 .09
Rights of Communists .984 .21* .941 .10 1.014 .23* .995 .25*
Integration of schools .792 .14* .712 .21* .809 .10 .869 .10
*Significant at .05.

terpretable in simple reduction-in-variance eliminated because of strong correlations

terms. The different denominations stress
different things. For example, the Catholic
parents seem to stress religious attitudes and
sex morality more than the others, and the
Methodist parents stress civil liberties more
(at least for Communists and publishers of
sex materials).
Family Characteristics Enhancing
Value Transmission
Which family characteristics strengthen
value transmission from parents to children?
Past researchers have not been able to
identify many such characteristics. We com-
puted the absolute difference between each
child's score and the parents' score (mean of
mother and father) on each of the nine
measures. Then we tested a series of family
characteristics, using correlations and regres-
sions, to try to predict low absolute differ-
ences between parents and children.2
A total of 33 measures of family charac-
teristics were tested in preliminary analysis,
divided into five sets: parental characteristics
(denomination, age, education, income),
parents' religion, parents' agreement on re-
ligion, religious socialization in the family,
and relationship of youth with parents.
Measures of mother's attitudes and father's
attitudes were kept separate unless they
correlated at .5 or stronger, when they were
combined into a "parents' " variable to eli-
minate multicollinearity in the regression
analysis.
An initial zero-order correlation matrix
showed that ten variables had no correlation
as strong as - .15 with any of the nine dif-
ference scores, and they were eliminated from
further study. Also, several variables were
with other independent variables. The rest
were tested in regressions, which regressed
the nine difference scores on each set.
Table 5 presents the results for one of the
nine difference scores-creedal assent. On
the other eight difference scores, the pattern
of significant regression coefficients was so
scattered that it approximated random ex-
pectation; hence, the relationships are not
theoretically important. Only on creedal as-
sent do family factors seem to have definite
influence on value transmission. The ten pre-
dictor variables in Table 5 were the strongest
we found. They are examined below, set by
set.
1. Parental characteristics. In our study
these parental characteristics are background
variables forming the context for processes of
value transmission. We looked at parents'
age, parents' education, denomination (two
dummy variables), and family income. Only
three variables-parents' age, parents' edu-
cation, and one denominational variable-
had any significant relationship to any of the
nine difference scores; hence, they were in-
cluded in the final regression. Only one is
significantly associated with value trans-
mission on creedal assent-the younger the
parents, the better value transmission occurs
from them to their sons.
2. Parents' religion. In preliminary analysis
we looked at father's creedal assent, mother's
creedal assent, father's and mother's church
attendance and participation in church
groups and committees, and the ratings of
fathers and mothers regarding how much
they carry their religion over into all of life.
Only three variables were retained for the
final regression, and only two of them have

576 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY August 1982

TABLE 5. DETERMINANTS OF PARENT-CHILD AGREEMENT ON CREEDAL ASSENT: STANDARD-
IZED REGRESSION COEFFICIENTS (BETAS) AND VARIANCE EXPLAINED
Determinants of Agreement Totala Girlsa Boysa
Parental Characteristics
Parents' age -.22* -.14 -.30*
Catholic vs. other (Catholic = 2, other = 1) .02 .09 -.06
Parents' education .09 .05 .16
Adjusted R2 .04 .00 .09
Parents' Religion
Mother's creedal assent .15* .22* .07
Father's creedal assent .16* .27* .01
Parents carry religion over into all life .13 .07 .20
Adjusted R2 .10 .17 .03
Parents' Agreement on Religion
Agreement on creedal assent .24* .35* .10
R2 .06 .13 .01
Religious Socialization
Parents' religious supervision .11 .20* .01
Parents talk about religion .21* .28* .12
Adjusted R2 .06 .12 .00
Relationship with Parents
General disagreement with parents -.13* -.02 -.29*
R2 .02 .01 .08
aFor the total sample, N varies from 230 to 253; for girls N varies from 128 to 137; for boys N varies from 108
to 116.
*Significant at .05.

significant associations with value trans-
mission on creedal assent. Among the girls,
value transmission is most successful when
their mothers and fathers are both high in
creedal assent.
3. Parents' agreement on religion. Jennings
and Niemi had found mother-father agree-
ment to be very important in political sociali-
zation, so we looked at mother-father re-
ligious agreement in the present study. We
included measures on whether the parental
marriage was religiously mixed or not;
whether the children perceived their parents
as arguing about religion; and whether the
parents agreed on creedal assent, relativism,
individualism, and devotionalism. Only one
measure was found to relate to value trans-
mission-whether the parents agree on
creedal assent.
4. Religious socialization. We looked at
two variables measuring the way the parents
attempted to socialize their children into the
faith. First was a combined parents' score on
the Family Religious Supervision Index. This
index, found only in the parents' question-
naire, measures whether parents pressure the
children to attend church and religious edu-
cation or whether they consider religion to be
the children's own business. One item states,
"In our family, we feel that for as long as the
children are living here they must attend
church regularly." (For the index items see
Hoge and Petrillo, 1978:379.) The other
variable was a combined rating of mothers
and fathers by the youth on how much their
mothers and fathers talk to them about re-
ligion and the church. Both measures proved
to relate significantly to value transmission of
creedal assent for daughters. For sons they
were nonpredictive.
5. Relationship with parents. We tested
eight variables-mother's and father's con-
trol and support (see Thomas et al., 1974: 12;
for the items see Hoge and Petrillo, 1978:
379), how much the youth care what their
mothers and fathers think of them, and how
much disagreement the youth report between
themselves and their parents on a number of
different topics. Only one parents' variable-
the measure of disagreement with parents on
a number of topics-is associated (negatively)
with value transmission.
Table 5 shows the regression coefficients
for each sex as well as for the total sample,
due to the obvious interactions with sex.
Family characteristics generally predict value

August 1982 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY 577

transmission better for daughters than for
sons.
Most of the relationships we found were
weak, in agreement with past research. They
were clearly strongest in predicting value
transmission in creedal assent; and the most
important family characteristics were those
clearly associated with religion-parents' re-
ligion, parents' agreement on religious be-
liefs, and family religious socialization
practices. Other family characteristics, less
obviously related to religion, did not predict
successful value transmission.
One pattern visible in the regressions using
nine difference scores was that parents' age
was often a significant factor. The older the
parents, the weaker was value transmission
on creedal assent, devotionalism, tolerance of
premarital sex, and attitudes about rights of
Communists (significant at .05).
CONCLUSIONS
We looked at parent-child value trans-
mission on four religious values and five
social-political values, and we found rather
weak relationships. Past researchers have
found the same. We compared the effect of
parental values on children's values with the
effect of denominational membership and
found that the latter was slightly stronger;
children evidently get their values from
extrafamilial culture as much as from their
parents. Something in the larger social struc-
ture strongly influences them.
Our study had abundant good information
on the families, but the information proved
mostly useless for explaining value-trans-
mission patterns. On only one out of the nine
values did we find consistent impact of family
characteristics on transmission-creedal as-
sent. On this value transmission was stron-
gest in families where parent-child overall
disagreements were small and where the par-
ents were younger, had definite religious be-
liefs and agreed on them, and carried out
conscious religious socialization in the home.
The findings of this study are theoretically
important more for the hypotheses that were
unsupported than for the hypotheses that
were sustained. Most important of all, the
parent-child correlations were weak. Where
do the children get their values? Any simple
model of parent-to-child value transmission is
almost useless, at least for the kind of values
578 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY
studied here. Other influences are very im-
portant. Jennings and Niemi were faced with
disappointingly weak parent-to-child corre-
lations in their study just as we are now, and
they discussed a number of possible explana-
tions. They said that possibly other sociali-
zation agents have such a strong influence
that the influence of parents is weak as a re-
sult. Possibly the values under study are not
concrete and salient enough for children to
receive repeated cues from their parents in
everydayfamily life about the parents' values.
Possibly the attitudes under study are not
very stable over time.
Earlier we suggested that perhaps the at-
titudes of tenth graders are not yet stable
enough so that strong parent-to-child corre-
lations could result; but this idea is uncon-
vincing, considering that other studies using
twelfth graders found similar weak patterns.
Also, it is possible that reduction in variance
in the data due to our method of enrolling the
subjects into the study was a source of low
correlations. It is true that both parents co-
operated in only 56% of the families of the
youth we initially enrolled; and probably the
more educated and more church-involved
parents cooperated disproportionately, thus
cutting down the variance in parental values.
Several implications for future research
may be noted. The fact that denominational
membership predicted the children's values
points to the importance of extrafamilial
groups for value socialization. Future studies
should be designed to assess the impact of
such groups, including peer groups. The
children might be asked, for example, to
name friends who subsequently would be in-
cluded in the study. Future studies should
obtain measures of the concreteness and
salience of values measured, and children
should be asked what they think their par-
ents' attitudes are on the various topics. Also,
future studies should strive for a greater
variety of subgroups. If this study had in-
cluded six or eight denominations instead of
three and if they had been very diverse (in-
cluding, for example, Islamic groups or
world-renouncing sects), the subgroup effects
would have been much stronger. Whether the
parent-to-child correlations within each sub-
group would still be weak is unknown.
The fact that age of parents seemed to be
important for value transmission, with
August 1982
younger parents having a greater impact,
calls attention to the question of birth-order
effects and possible sibling influences.
Birth-order research generally has found
greater value conformity among firstborn
than among later-born children (see Mac-
Donald, 1969). Future research should ex-
plore this.
In summary, future researchers must pay
more attention to other factors than those in-
vestigated in the present study. A more
elaborate paradigm is needed.
FOOTNOTES
1. The measure of creedal assent stated, "I believe in
salvation as release from sin and freedom for new life
with God." The measure of relativism stated, "All the
different religions are equally good ways of helping a
person find ultimate truth." The measure of in-
dividualism stated, "The individual can find religious
truth without any help from a church." The measure
of devotionalism asked, "How often do you ask God
to forgive your sin?" The first three items had 5 res-
ponses ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Dis-
agree; the last had 5 responses ranging from Very
Frequently to Never.
2. In preliminary analysis we looked at family character-
istics predicting both raw parent-child differences
and absolute parent-child differences. The regression
coefficients for the former were stronger, showing
that family characteristics predict parent-child value
covariation better than parent-child value agreement
in absolute terms. However, the resulting regression
coefficients were very difficult to interpret theoret-
ically. Therefore, we carried out the final analysis
using absolute difference scores, so that divergence of
children's values from parents' values in either direc-
tion were scored in the same absolute measurement.
The strength of this method is that the regression
coefficients are more interpretable. The weakness is
that any theoretical difference between children
higher than their parents and children lower than
their parents on a particular measure is lost.
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