The authors analyse the relationship between primary religious socialisation and the preservation of religious orthodoxy expressed by attitudes and practices in adulthood. They aim to test the effect of socialisation and the effect of religious practices in adulthood on the orthodoxy of people’s beliefs in three countries (Austria, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic), which are similar in terms of their cultural context, but have different religious environments. The authors see the different religious environment of each of the studied countries as the main explanatory factor. They also try to demonstrate that in an era of pluralism, orthodox religious attitudes (corresponding to offi cial teachings and practices) are more likely to be preserved in environments that are prevailingly secular in character. The authors work with data from the ISSP—Religion 2008 survey, tracking the following variables: primary religious socialisation, religious practice in adulthood, and orthodoxy of faith.
This article outlines several techniques for analyzing panel data with a dichotomous dependent variable. This presentation is inspired by the classic work of Paul Allison [1999]. An example analysis is presented where public attitudes toward restitution of church property in the Czech Republic is explored using panel data. Here the focus is on exploring changes in the intra-personal agenda of respondents on this specific issue. There are three main conclusions from this research: (1) media exposure and (2) the education level of the respondent increase the odds of the church restitution issue being mentioned by a respondent as being important, and (3) mention of the church restitution issue in a particular wave of the panel survey is negatively associated with mention of this issue in later waves of the panel study examined. These findings are discussed in terms of their methodological and substantive implications.
In this article the authors interconnect the framing and agenda-setting theories of mass-communication effects. They postulate that the framing process creates conditions for the agenda-setting process and argue that differently framed news have different effects in the agenda-setting process. They hypothesise that issue-specific frames, episodic frames, and value frames have a stronger agenda-setting effect than generic frames, thematic frames, and strategy frames and suggest explaining the role of frames in the agenda-setting process through the theory of cognitive dissonance. The hypotheses are tested using matched panel survey data on respondents’ personal agendas and using a content analysis of the media in relation to one particular issue. The selected issue – the restitution of property to the Catholic Church – was chosen because it contains a rich combination of frames. Moreover, this is an issue on which it is possible to study the effect of a ‘focusing event’, which may have an additional and distinct effect in addition to the ‘regular’ frames. The authors show that differently framed news do indeed have distinctive effects on personal agenda-setting. Some frames have a strong positive effect, while others have no effect. They even identify one frame that appears to have a slightly negative net effect on personal agenda-setting. This is a somewhat revolutionary finding, since it demonstrates that, unlike the predictions made by the agenda-setting theory, people may (under certain conditions) react to the heightened media exposure of an issue by denying its importance.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.