Doctoral dissertation · University of Miami · Defended 11 May 2022 · 125 pages
My doctoral research for the Ed.D. in Higher Education Leadership, supervised by Professors Soyeon Ahn and Carol-Anne Phekoo, with Willis Jones and Nam Ju Kim on the committee.
Abstract
Higher education research on the effects of religious affiliation on student engagement and satisfaction has overwhelmingly focused on religious students. Demographic changes have led to students without a religious affiliation now representing about half of the incoming cohorts. The current study addresses that large and growing gap in the literature.
How college students’ engagement, satisfaction and performance differ between religiously affiliated and unaffiliated students was analysed using a HERI-UCLA dataset of 16,148 students from 141 institutions. The study found that religiously unaffiliated students were significantly worse off in almost all aspects of their college experience: they were less engaged and less satisfied, albeit with small to medium effect sizes. No difference was found in the two groups’ GPAs. When testing the differences between the constructs in the structural equation model, little evidence was found that students’ religious affiliation moderated the relationship between student engagement and student satisfaction, or the relationship between student engagement and performance.