Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, United States.
Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, United States.
Soc Sci Res. 2020 May-Jul;88-89:102426. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2020.102426. Epub 2020 Apr 12.
Religiosity has been positively linked with multiple measures of academic success, but it is unclear whether the "effect" of religiosity on academic outcomes is causal or spurious. One source of heterogeneity that may contribute to a child's level of religiosity and his/her academic success is family background. This paper is the first to use sibling differences to estimate the associations between religiosity on short and long-term academic success. Our analysis yields two main results. First, more religious adolescents earned higher GPAs in high school, even after including family fixed effects. Second, because they earned higher GPAs in high school, more religious adolescents completed more years of education 14 years after their religiosity was measured. Our findings suggest that adolescents' religious commitments influence their schooling in both the short and long term and should be more actively included and theorized as important drivers of educational and economic stratification.
宗教信仰与多种学术成功的衡量标准呈正相关，但宗教信仰对学业成果的“影响”是因果关系还是虚假关系尚不清楚。可能导致孩子的宗教信仰程度及其学业成功水平存在差异的一个因素是家庭背景。本文首次利用兄弟姐妹差异来估计宗教信仰与短期和长期学业成功之间的关联。我们的分析得出了两个主要结果。第一，即使包括家庭固定效应，宗教信仰更强的青少年在高中时的绩点也更高。第二，由于他们在高中时的绩点更高，因此在测量他们的宗教信仰 14 年后，宗教信仰更强的青少年接受了更多年的教育。我们的研究结果表明，青少年的宗教信仰会在短期和长期内影响他们的学业，应该更加积极地将其视为教育和经济分层的重要驱动因素，并将其纳入和理论化。
