Social location and predictors of adopting an atheistic worldview in the United States
Principal Investigators
Dr. Katie E. Corcoran
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
West Virginia University
Dr. Christopher P. Scheitle
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
West Virginia University
Start and end dates: 1 August 2022 – 30 June 2024
Award: £62,310
This project aims to identify general, proximate, social causes of adopting an atheistic worldview that is, shifting from believing in God to not believing in God. Past research on this issue has suffered from one or more shortcomings. Some research, for instance, has grouped all religiously unaffiliated individuals together in operationalizing an atheistic worldview. Other research has lacked longitudinal panel data that would provide greater leverage to identify causal factors in adopting an atheistic worldview.
We theorize four social predictors — (non)religious upbringing, exposure to worldview pluralism, higher education, and US regional cultures — that should affect whether someone adopts an atheistic worldview. We will use a longitudinal panel survey representative of US teenagers, the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), to test our hypotheses. The panel nature of the data allows us to use temporally prior predictors to examine their effect on whether someone adopts an atheistic worldview (i.e., not believing in God). We will write and submit articles for publication, submit papers to present at conferences, write an op-ed of the findings, and archive our statistical code, which represent the concrete deliverables of this project. In doing so, this project will address the following questions: What are the main social causes of atheism and what theories contribute to explaining why someone adopts an atheistic worldview? The findings from the project will provide new insights into the role of social factors and location in predicting adoption of an atheistic worldview.
