Kontakt 2013, 15(2):173-182 | DOI: 10.32725/kont.2013.021

Religious belief as preferred quality of children from the view of generation hand downHealth and Social Sciences - Original article

Olga Dvořáčková^1,*, Alena Kajanová², Tomáš Mrhálek³

¹ Jihočeská univerzita v Českých Budějovicích, Zdravotně sociální fakulta, katedra laboratorních metod a informačních systémů

² Jihočeská univerzita v Českých Budějovicích, Zdravotně sociální fakulta, katedra sociální práce

³ Masarykova univerzita v Brně, Filozofická fakulta a Fakulta sociálních studií

The article is dedicated to the topic of religious belief as preferred characteristic in children in the present Czech Republic. National census shows that the number of worshippers in traditional church decreases progressively and on the other hand more and more people declare themselves as individuals without religious belief.
The aim of the article is to identify the impact of parents' religiosity on preferences of personality in their children and to find which factors influence this relationship. We apply the principle that religious belief is strongly transgenerationally transferred personal property/characteristic. We focus partly on socio-demographic factors, and further on different forms of religiosity, i.e. personal, institutional, traditional and engaged religiosity.
We conducted secondary data analysis, with the dataset being the results from individual investigations (in years 1991, 1999, 2008) of the research European Values Study (EVS) in representative set from the Czech Republic. EVS data are a great tool enabling us to study the above-mentioned topic regarding important factor influencing all the studied problems, which is time.
The results show different rates of intergenerational transfer of religious belief in observed religious groups and churches, its relative stability in time and positive influence of engaged form of religiosity.
On the other hand, contrary to our former assumptions, there is no influence of sociodemographic factors or any other forms of religiosity. Of all studied churches Greek catholics are the most demanding concerning religious belief in their children. Parents preferring religious belief in their children pay less attention to transition ceremonies which are connected to their religious belief.

Keywords: religiosity; transgenerational transfer; EVS; church

Received: May 30, 2012; Accepted: February 5, 2013; Published: June 18, 2013  Show citation