Social diffusion of religious values within families : conceptual and methodological considerations

Family members create for each other the social context in which family behavior and personality development take place. The importance of social influence in families is evidenced empirically by family members' great similarity on a wide variety of characteristics. Focusing on intrafamily convergence on religiosity, the study discuses empirical methods of dyadic analysis and illustrates their use with an analysis of horizontal intracouple alignment and vertical intergenerational transmission. In addition to the finding that experiences during religious socialization in the parental home have a stronger impact than partner influences in adulthood, the analyses show that social context effects are stronger when the interaction dyad is more cohesive, as measured by, for example, relationship quality.