Motives of Visiting Temples: A Demographic Study

Abstract

Visiting temples is considered as sacred and a must do activity in India. As there are a plethora of devotees for temples, there is a need to study and explores the motives behind visiting temples and the impact of different rituals and offerings on the devotees and visitors. The main objective of this study is to examine the motives behind visiting the temples and the effect of the rituals and offerings on the visitors. The study was exploratory in nature and survey was used to complete it. As there was no such kind of study in past self-developed questionnaire is used for data collection. All the persons who were visiting temples were the population of this study. There were 500 questionnaires distributed, 450 were suitable, and hence the sampling size is 450. Non-purposive quota sampling technique was used. To analyze the collected data various inferential tools were applied like, Exploratory Factor analysis, and MANOVA. The findings of this study include three new factors as, Offerings of Prashad and Holy Water, Mental peace and Temptation to see the Aarti. It has also been found that the effect of the entire demographic’s variable is insignificant on Motive of change in life, problems can be dissolved, offerings of Prashad and Holy water, mental peace and temptation to see the Aarti, only two demographic variables age and visitors of temples have a significant effect on the motives of visiting temples.