Identifying the Antecedents of Noncognitive Outcomes Among College Seniors

• In Event: Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Spirituality and Education: Selective Papers

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine college students’ spiritual and religious development and estimate the statistical associations among students’ pre-matriculation characteristics, program affiliation, and self-reported activities. Faith development is measured on Leak, Loucks, and Bowlin’s (1999) Faith Development Scale (FDS). We employed ordinal logistic regression to examine relationships between pre-matriculation characteristics and program affiliation with four intermediate outcomes: Frequency of attending religious services, conversations with university professionals, conversations with people, and prayer/meditation. Secondly, this study seeks to understand to what extent these factors predict students’ FDS score. The intermediate results revealed that students’ gender, high school type, signature college program affiliation, and college affiliation at college matriculation showed statistically significant association in predicting these intermediate outcomes.

Authors

• Henry I. Braun, Boston College

• Minsong Kim, Boston College