FIRST MARRIAGE AND FIRST BIRTH: Comparing Religious, Home, and Public Schools

Record: Jeremy E. Uecker and Jonathan P. Hill, “Religious Schools, Home Schools, and the Timing of First Marriage and First Birth” in Review of Religious Research 56, no. 2 (June 2014): 189-218. [Abstract Here]

Summary: Uecker, a sociology professor at Baylor University, and Hill, a sociology professor at Calvin College, are both familiar names to readers of these reviews.  In a 2008 article Uecker found (among other things) that there was no difference in levels of adult religious commitment between graduates of public or home schools.  Parent religiosity, not school type, made all the difference.  In a 2013 article Hill found that homeschooled young adults were less likely to engage in volunteer activities than demographically equivalent graduates of public schools.  Both of these articles had drawn from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a remarkably ambitious project that has borne great fruit in understanding the religious and political lives of young adults in the United States.

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Uecker on Homeschooling and Religious Commitment

This post reviews Jeremy E. Uecker, “Alternative Schooling Strategies and the Religious Lives of American Adolescents” in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, no. 4 (December 2008): 563-584 [Abstract available here].

Uecker, a Ph.D. candidate at the U of Texas at Austin and author of many interesting articles on young adult religion and sexuality, here examines data from the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) to determine whether Catholic schooling, Protestant schooling, or homeschooling have any impact on the religious lives of American teens. 

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