Connections between adults’ attitude towards religion and relations with parents during childhood, experiences with their peers and selected personality factors

The paper presents the results of seven empirical studies on connections between attitudes towards religion in adults and variables representing important socialization experiences from childhood to adolescence, and current traits of personality. The attitude towards religion was defined as a bipolar psychological dimension: skepticism-religiousness, briefly called religiosity. Childhood experiences were characterized by the mutual feelings of the child and the parents and the level of parental control. The adolescence experiences were based on experiences from individual roles in peer groups. The current personality traits were described according to the three factor-models: Eysenck’s, Big Five, and HEXACO. Personality measurement was provided by EPQ-Rs, NEOI-FFI and HEXACO-60 questionnaires, and the remaining variables by own questionnaires (Opi for religiosity, PDwR for experiences with parents and AB for experiences from peer groups). The researches were exploratory by cross-sectional design. Seven samples of different sizes (from 140 to 390 persons) and in different age ranges were examined: a part from ages 17 to 26, and the others from 18 to 65. Results showed that connections between religiosity and experiences from family or peer-groups were poor and unsystematic. Adult religiosity in some samples has tendency to have a positive connections with the level of feelings between the child his/her and parents, and a negative connections with active roles in peer groups. Relationships between religiosity and personality traits are rather weak, but coincide with the ones signaled by other researchers, i.e. religiosity has positive connections with such factors as Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Honesty. According to the empirical data and on the basis of his own model of psychological organization, the author suggests that skepticism-religiousness as one of the characteristics of the world-view is shaped autonomously, and is not dependent on socialization experiences and basic personality traits. Conditions of religiosity should be searched rather in individual identity, lifestyle, other traits of worldview, and in specific subjective experiences.