Moral Belief Survey

Growing up, I lived in a home with 3 other women, my grandmother, my mother, my sister, and myself. The 4 of us are all pretty different with it comes to any sort of beliefs, my grandmother comes from the 1940s, was married at 17 and was a devout Catholic for most of her childhood and young adult life. She raised my mother to be Catholic as well, yet as of now, neither one of them would consider themselves religious. That being said, their moral beliefs were developed differently. My Grandmother’s morals heavily align with that of the Church, and my mothers do not. My mother raised my sister and I to choose our own religious/spiritual path, and instilled us with the “norms” of societal ethics, and then also to develop our own morals. My sister and I turned out very different in all aspects of our own personal beliefs even with the same upbringing. So how does being brought up with two different sets of moral & religious beliefs effect the way you believe, also, how does that effect how you teach and raise your own children?

The method that I used to find out was a short 10 questioned survey with 2 demographic questions and 8 religious, spiritual, moral, and ethical question. I then took this survey and shared it on a handful of Facebook pages. I was looking to cast as wide of a net as possible, and wanted to include as many strangers, or acquaintances as I possibly could. I am a part of a few different Facebook pages with people from all over the place geographically, and age wise, so I felt as if I would get a pretty well rounded sort of answers. I was right, as over 150 people answered my survey. Sadly, surveymonkey.com only allows you to view the first 100 responses if you do not have a membership with them, therefore, I will be discussing the results of the first 100 people. 

Throughout my findings, I quickly learned that a VAST majority of my respondents were women, with 94%, and 5% being men and 1% skipping the question altogether.  I expected a majority of the people to be women, but not quite that many. Next I asked for age, where 72% were under the age of 34, and 27% were over the age of 34. So quickly I was able to assess that a large chunk of my data was going to be based off of young women. Which was great, as I am a part of that demographic, and feel like I can easily asses this due to my own thoughts and beliefs. My 3rd question was if you believed in a "Higher power” and the response to this question actually surprised me a bit with double the amount of people believing in a higher power than either not or not know. In conjunction with that question, the next one proved to be even more surprising as only a quarter of the respondents said that they do not consider themselves to be religious or spiritual even though half do not believe in a “higher power”. I really expected this question to be slightly similar to the last, because in my beliefs, one must be remotely religious or spiritual to believe in a greater being. Question 5 and Question 8 were two question that I wanted to be tied together, because it is something that relates so closely to me. Question 5 was “How similar are your beliefs to that of your parents” and Question 8 was “Are you raising your children to believe the same as you do?” I was actually shocked by how closely related the two results ended up being with almost exactly half of the people saying that their beliefs were similar to that of their parents and half saying that they were different. Then, what the most shocking was that the exact same amount of people who said they were raising their children as they were, said they would not be raising their children as they did. This is my theory, but I didn't think at all that it would be that accurate. I was assuming that if one was raised to believe what their parents believed, then they in turn would raise their children to believe just as they were taught, and if someone was raised to believe on their own, they would most likely do the same for their children. I also found that more often than not, one tends to find a relationship with someone who believes the same which can easily play into how the two were raised vs how they’re raising their children.

The second half of the survey was based around morals and ethics. Question 6 was asking if these two things are the same things. When I was asked this question, my knee-jerk answer was “Yes, they are the same” but then almost instantly I realized that this was wrong, and I don’t actually believe that. About double the amount of people I asked felt the same, that they are not the same things. That being said, in my life, I really don’t get my personal morals and beliefs from my religious background as I didn’t have much of one growing up, that being said, I developed lots of my framework before believing in what I believe in. In my survey however, more than half said that they do get their framework from their religious beliefs. 

By the end of this survey I was actually surprised by how closely the results ended up being to what I was originally expecting. When it comes to your religious and spiritual beliefs, you tend to follow that of your parents in raising your children, if you agree with them, and then to do the opposite if you done agree. You also tend to attract people who have the same general beliefs as yourself. It was also extremely interesting to see how people classify themselves as religious vs spiritual and then following with if they believe in a greater being. You never really can guess peoples thoughts and beliefs.