The study sought to assess the extent to which selected practices [Sabbath Observance (SabO), Vegetarianism (Veg), Teachers` behavior (TeachB), Citizenship Grade (CitzG), Week of Spiritual Emphasis (WoSE), and Dress Code (DresC)] interact with student...
The study sought to assess the extent to which selected practices [Sabbath Observance (SabO), Vegetarianism (Veg), Teachers` behavior (TeachB), Citizenship Grade (CitzG), Week of Spiritual Emphasis (WoSE), and Dress Code (DresC)] interact with students` religiosity in general, and their interest in the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) faith, in particular at Valley View University. One hundred and forty-seven out of 600 resident students participated in this study. Nonprobability sampling was employed to select participants. Missing data were handled listwise. Outliers were deleted after testing all cases for Mahalanobis χ2. Multicollinearity was not a problem since all tolerance values exceeded .1 and all VIF values were low (<2.5). Since the study is exploratory in nature, a forward-stepping-method logistic regression was conducted to determine which practices (SabO, Veg, TeachB, CitzG, WoSE, DresC) predicted student`s interest in the SDA faith. Regression resulted in a fairly good overall model fit of two predictors (SabO and WoSE); -2 Log Likelihood = 91.991, Goodness of Fit (Nagelkerke R2) =.530, and statistically significant in distinguishing between students` interest in the SDA faith; χ2 (1) =48.987, p<.0001. The model correctly classified 81.40% of the cases. Wald statistics (20.576, 6.912 respectively) indicated that SabO and WoSE significantly predicted students` interest in the SDA faith. The odds ratios (8.168, 2.317 respectively) for the two variables indicated fair change in the likelihood of interest in the SDA faith.