Empirical Study of Relationship between Religiosity and Meaningfulness of Life in a Student Community

The study of the function of religion in creating meaning in man’s individual life and its social effects is one of the significant subjects in sociology of religion. The significance of meaning in life stems from the fact that with the advent of the modern world, the traditional value systems encounter a challenge and the volatility of the modern world life, its multiple of meanings and its various narrations, have landed man in bewilderment and caused him anxiety. Sociologist of religion, with different intellectual orientations, have agreed that religion has the power to justify happiness or unhappiness of man and plays its role and function mainly by formulating human experiences in a regular and interpretable framework and finally works as a firmament for creating meaning. The present paper is an attempt to measure the relationship between religiosity and meaningfulness of life through an empirical study. The sample of this study included 372 students of the Kharazmi University. The data were collected by questionnaire for this survey. The findings of the study indicate that religiosity has a positive direct relationship with meaningfulness of life, while among different aspects of religiosity, the creedal dimension has the highest level of positive relations, while its ritualistic aspect has the weakest relation. The connotations of these data have been analyzed as well.