A study that began as a survey project more than two decades ago has evolved into a highly funded research project led by a Syracuse University professor.

Merril Silverstein, a Marjorie Cantor Professor of Aging Studies in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, and his team members at SU, California State University at Los Angeles and University of Southern California are working on research dealing with the transmission of religion over four generations.

After submitting proposals, Silverstein and his team were awarded $1.49 million from the John Templeton Foundation and $401,072 from the National Institutes of Health for continued research on the subject.

Silverstein said he was interested in how instrumental grandparents were to their grandchildren in terms of passing down religion. That earlier study, which took place in California, eventually evolved into this major project that studies religion post-retirement and the health benefits — if there are any — of religious life.

“Over the years, about 3,000 people altogether were asked questions about their religious denominations, practices, beliefs, identities and so on,” Silverstein said.

Silverstein’s team has “rare longitudinal data spanning now 40-some years,” which enables them to examine how religious life changes over time. The data helps his team to analyze the impact of religion on health and how religion has transmitted across generations within families.

The research project was originally funded by various government agencies, particularly the National Institute on Aging. For that reason, there has been a fair amount of analyses of this data, but Silverstein and his team are now focusing on the aspects of religion and spirituality.

Silverstein said spirituality “resonates more with younger generations, and is now understood either as an alternative or complement to religious life.”

As an individual, Silverstein said he is “interested in broader areas having to do with how beliefs influence one’s practices in life,” such as ethical and health behaviors, like smoking.

“Damaging behaviors minimize when people have a more coherent view of the world, which is (part of) what religion gives,” Silverstein said. He added that religion can also lend a “basic philosophy on life to make sense of the world.”

Silverstein said one of the principle themes of the research has been the relationship between generations. The youngest generation of people involved in the project was in its late teens and early 20s at the beginning of this study in 1970. Silverstein said those people are now in their 60s and experiencing retirement and other life transitions.

Maria Brown, a professor of practice in Falk College who is overseeing the quantitative aspect of the project at SU, also said the studies “focus on the transmission of religion through generations (and) on the passing down of values from parents and grandparents.”

To explain the study in a simpler manner, Woosang Hwang, a graduate student at SU and Silverstein’s research assistant, used an example of a parent and a child.

“If the parent and child have the same religion, they show a high level of parent-child relation which means they have a good relationship,” Hwang said. “If they have different religions then [we assume] there is a sort of conflict or a low level of parent-child relationship. It is logical, it makes sense … we just want to verify this issue using the data.”

Hwang said the tendencies or trajectory of the relationship between generations is examined using statistical analysis. Hwang added that another component of the research at the University of Southern California involves in-depth interviewing of the people from the study.

Published on September 15, 2015 at 10:53 pm

Contact Arva: ahassonj@syr.edu