An Empirical Study of the Formation Trends of Religiosity

The present paper is an attempt to empirically study of a typology of religiosity formation trends. Since the objective of the study was to investigate the conceptual capabilities and possibility of measurement of the subject as well as evaluate the identification tools, and there was no intention of generalization of the results to a specific statistical population, quota sampling method was used. Out of eleven paths introduced in the reference article (Shojaeezand, 2012), only measurement of five paths was possible through surrvey and questionnaire and hence this study was limited to those five paths. The five paths were studied from four perspectives among the selected sample: “first encounter with religion”, “development of religiosity”, “becoming religious after a halt”, and “preferences”. The results indicate that in the first encounter with religion and development of religiosity, the “practical religiosity” and “logical-rational” patterns have the highest frequencies. On the level of becoming religious after a halt, however, the “logical-rational” and “glorious happening” patterns have the highest frequencies. On the level of preferences, the selective and practical patterns of religiosity have the highest frequencies. After studying the correlation between background variables and the path of becoming religious, thirteen significant relations were extracted, showing that the religious condition of the family has the strongest relationship with the way of becoming religious.