Relationship between Values and Religious Identity in Buddhist Adolescents

Abstract

The paper describes results of a social psychological study on religious identity in Buddhist schoolchil- dren. The study involved 184 students of 9—10 classes of a school in the Aginskoye settlement (Aginsky Buryatsky Okrug, Zabaykalsky Krai). According to G. Allport’s concept and R. Gorsuch & S. McPherson measurements, religious identity is considered not only as practicing Buddhism, but as a complex social psychological formation with a four-factor structure base on the following scales: personal/social and in- trinsic/extrinsic. Different components of religious identity are explored in the context of their relation- ship with value orientations (as described by S. Schwartz and G. Hofstede). The following techniques were employed: the adapted version of D. Van Camp’s Individual/Social Religious Identity Measure, Schwartz’s Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ-R2), and Hofstede’s Values Survey Module. As it was revealed, al- most all values related to various components of religious identity of the Buddhist adolescents refer to the social focus. The paper concludes that religious identity in modern Buddhist young people has a distinctive social character.

Keywords

• religious identity
• value orientations
• Buddhism
• Buddhist youth
• Buddhist schoolchildren
• religious identity components