Bryant, A. N. 2004. “Campus Religious Communities and the College Student Experience.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles.
Participation in religious communities is central to the lives of many college students across the United States. Few studies, however, provide detailed information about the content of student beliefs, or on the impacts—academic, personal, and religious—of these groups on their members over time. Using data generated from first-year student responses to two datasets—the Fall 2000 Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey and the Spring 2001 Your First College Year (YFCY) Survey—Alyssa N. Bryant provides a more robust picture of participation in religious campus subcultures in students’ first year of college. Some of Bryant’s findings challenge preconceived notions of religious college students: for example, that involvement in a religious organization prevents cultural awareness. The author complements her quantitative findings with an in-depth case study of an evangelical student group on the campus of a large university. She finds that “many students sought a self-authored faith distinct from their parents’” and, despite conservative theological views and a conservative belief in gender roles (a prevailing belief in essential gender roles and an evangelical community defined by masculine norms), evangelical students display a diverse range of political attitudes.
