An Empirical Study of Differences between Religiosity in Urban and Rural Structures

The objective of this research is to study the dominant perception in sociology that city and village as environmental domains of modernism and traditionalism leave different impacts on religiosity of their inhabitants. On the basis of the issues related to sociological characteristics and distinctions of city and village, and relying on argumentations about secularization in sociology of religion, two hypotheses have been formulated: First, the average religiosity in village is higher than that in the city; and second, the religiosity variance in village is less than that in city. The hypotheses were empirically tested through a survey conducted among 200 rural and 200 urban families in Ardabil Province of Iran. The findings of the research showed that there are no significant differences between religiosity of urban and rural dwellers, but with regard to ritualistic dimensions, religiosity of urbanites is more than that of the rural dwellers. Overall, the findings did not substantiate the hypotheses.