Does the share of religious ingroup members affect how important religion is to adolescents? Applying Optimal Distinctiveness Theory to four European countries

Autor: Andreas Flache, Lars Leszczensky, Lisa Sauter
Přispěvatelé: Sociology/ICS
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of ethnic and migration studies, 46(17), 3703-3721. ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
ISSN: 1369-183X
Popis: European youth attend classrooms that are religiously diverse, with the importance of religion differing between ethno-religious groups. While religion no longer matters much to many native-origin Christian youth, it is important to many of their immigrant-origin Christian and, especially, Muslim peers. Considering religion as a source of adolescents' social identity, we examine how religious classroom composition relates to the importance adolescents attach to religion. Optimal Distinctiveness Theory suggests a curvilinear relation, because a group has to be large enough to satisfy the need of belonging but small enough to satisfy the need for differentiation. Using large-scale survey data for 15-year old adolescents from four European countries, we find that this inverted U-shaped relation holds for immigrant-origin Muslim but not for native- and immigrant-origin Christian youth. Instead, for Christian youth religion was more important in classrooms with higher shares of Muslim classmates, thus lending credence to arguments derived from threat theory.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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