The Impact of Religiosity on Membership in Charitable Social Networks

Abstract

Today, people are on the one hand under the impact of their respectivesocieties' religious culture, and on the other exposed to the modernworld's structural components. A survey of transformations occurred insociety and their impact on religiosity can illustrate both theachievements and failures of the existing programs in the field ofreligious issues. This study was done with the aim of assessing therelationship between religiosity and the degree of people's participationin charitable social networks. The method adopted was a survey of thestatistical population of 18-year-old and above inhabitants of Tehran'smunicipal Division 14. These were selected according to one-stagecluster design in random. Due to extensive theories in the sociology ofreligion, a compilation of the views of Weber, Inglehart, Berger andLukman was used for explaining the issue and a standard questionnairewas also adopted for collecting the data. Data analysis was doneaccording to statistical tests. The religiosity variable was examined infour different ritual, experimental, consequential and ideologicaldimensions; and the groundwork variables were considered from thepoint of view of age, education, and marital status. The research resultsindicate a correlation with a high percentage of probability betweenindependent variables and the degree of people's membership incharitable social networks.

Keywords

• sociology of religion
• religiosity
• charitable social networks
• social participation