Religiosity and Premarital Sexual Permissiveness: A Response to the Reiss-Heltsley and Broderick Debate

Abstract

Proposition one in Reiss's theory of premarital sexual permissiveness was reexamined with data obtained from a random sample of college students at a midwestern university. When religiosity was measured by Faulkner and Dejong's '5-D Scale of Religiosity' and the Reiss scale was used to measure permissiveness, the expected stronger relationship between religiosity and permissiveness in Agroups with traditions of low sexual permissiveness than in groups with traditions of high sexual permissiveness was not observed in four groups which were so dichotomized. These findings are basically consistent with those reported by Heltsley and Broderick. Intercorrelations between the sub-scales which measured the five dimensions of religiosity and sexual permissiveness revealed that the ritual dimension was not as important a determinant of sexual permissiveness as the intellectual, ideological, and the experiential dimensions. It is suggested that Reiss's measure of religiosity (frequency of church attendance) taps only the ritual dimension of this multi-dimensional concept and thus provides an incomplete and, possibly, inaccurate measure of this variable. This may account for the lack of support for this aspect of proposition one in the retests which have utilized more sophisticated measures of the independent variable.