Hammond, P. E. and J. D. Hunter. 1984. “On Maintaining Plausibility: The Worldview of Evangelical College Students.” Journal for the Social Scientific Study of Religion 23: 221-238.
Hammond and Hunter analyze how the social setting of colleges (public, private, sectarian, non-sectarian) impacts the evangelical worldviews of their students, with the aim of addressing the larger issue of how evangelicalism can be maintained in a society that is becoming increasingly secular. Using responses to a questionnaire administered at nine evangelical institutions, the authors create an “Index of evangelical Beliefs,” a tool for measuring the strength of evangelicalism of students. The authors also categorize the colleges by degree of insularity – the degree to which the schools guard against secular influences. They find that a higher percentage of students who score high on the index (i.e. are strong evangelicals) are found at the highly insulated institutions, suggesting that evangelical students are attracted to traditionally evangelical institutions (and ones with a large population of evangelical students). The authors find only modest support for the attrition hypothesis (that the strength of students’ evangelicalism declines during the college years).
