Lane Joslin
Live Poster Session: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/95494382184
Lane Joslin
Lane Joslin is a sophomore majoring in Government and minoring in East Asian Studies. She took this class with a desire to become more proficient with coding and more deeply understand how to analyze data. She enjoys the company of her friends, good food, and journaling.
Abstract: The relationship between religion and racist attitudes has been studied, showing that religion creates conditions conducive to the development of racist ideology (McConnell & Todd, 2015; Hall et al., 2009; Duriez & Hutsebaut, 2000). The relationship between spirituality and racism, though, has been understudied. Using the 2024 GSS Codebook, I into questions measuring the strength of one’s spirituality and measuring racist attitudes through the question how much would you want to live in a neighborhood with 50% Black people. I ran a chi-squared analysis investigating the relationship between these two variables (spirituality and racist attitudes), and found the relationship to be statistically significant and positive (as one’s strength of spirituality increases, so does their comfortability in living with Black people). To confirm that the variable of religious affiliation and race didn’t confound these results, I ran a logistic regression including the religion variable. The results showed that even with this potential confounding variable, the relationship between strength of spirituality and enthusiasm for living in a 50% Black neighborhood was significant and positive. Additionally, the results of the regression showed that race moderates the relationship between the positive relationship strength of spirituality and comfortability with living with Black people, wherein Black people are much more likely to want to live in a neighborhood with 50% Black people. This shows that those who are weaker in spirituality and white as a race represent a demographic that could be focused on for prejudice intervention programs.
QAC-POSTER-Spirituality-Racism-Moderated-by-Race