Dissertation

At Vanderbilt University's Institute for Public Policy Studies, I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the topic of verbal prayer in public schools, in an attempt to add some evidence to the public debate taking place around that issue at the time (mid-1990s). One of the research questions I had was, "To what extent did children who wanted to participate in school prayer make negative judgments about children who did not want to participate in school prayer, and why?"

CHILDREN'S JUDGMENTS OF NONPARTICIPANTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOL PRAYER - ABSTRACT

Copyright by Julie Tapp, 1996

Despite its legal and political significance, there have been no empirical studies of the potential effects of public school prayer on children's attitudes in the classroom. The dissertation research investigated the extent to which children make negative judgments about nonparticipant peers.

Subjects were 103 ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-old children, recruited through seven summer camps in the Atlanta area. A two-by-two factorial design was used. Type of voluntary activity or Event (fundraiser versus prayer) was a within-subject factor, designed to assess whether prayer differed from other voluntary school activities with respect to children's views on nonparticipation. Explicitness of rule or Rule (teacher's vague versus explicit statement about nonparticipation being acceptable) was a between-subjects factor, designed to test whether an explicit rule regarding the acceptability of nonparticipation influenced subjects' judgments about nonparticipant peers. Sites were randomly assigned to the between-subjects factor, Rule.

The results were: (a) subjects who wanted to participate in classroom prayer were likely to have negative opinions about nonparticipant peers which were significantly more negative than their judgments about nonparticipants in fundraising; (b) Rule had no detectible effect, i.e., a statement by teachers regarding the voluntary nature of participation did not lessen negative peer attitudes toward nonparticipants in either prayer or fundraising activities; and (c) most subjects viewed nonparticipants in prayer as violating a religious norm, whereas opting out of fundraising was seen as a violation of a social norm.

The primary policy implications of this study are: (a) negative judgments and social rejection of nonparticipant peers may occur if verbal school prayer is implemented as characterized in this study; (b) a simple statement of the voluntary nature of prayer is insufficient to mitigate the effects of nonparticipation.