Socio-demographic and Socio-cultural Predictors of Religiousity in Turkey

Using quantitative techniques, this article explores the unique effects of the socio-demographic factors of gender, age, employment status, income level, and marital status, as well as the socio-cultural factors of education, rural-urban background, and religious denomination on levels of religiosity in Turkey. The data set comes from the Survey of Religious Life in Turkey (Turkiye'de Dini Hayat Araptirmasi) which was conducted by the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet ipleri Bapkanligi) in Turkey. This study measures religiosity in three ways. The first includes self-reported religiosity levels. The second is the frequency of performing the five daily prayers. The third measure explores the degree to which participants agree with the Islamic religious practice of inheritance where male descendants inherit twice the amount that females do. Therefore, this article investigates how individuals' socio-demographic profiles and socio-cultural backgrounds predict these three aspects of religiosity in the ordinal logistic regression models. All the variables except income have significant effects on religiosity in all three measures. The findings indicate differences to be present in the ways this study's independent variables predict the first two measures of religiosity (self-reported religiosity levels and frequency of daily prayers) compared to how they predict the last (perception of gender differences in inheritance).