ABSTRACT
This chapter presents European Social Survey data to test the aforementioned relations within a complete explanatory model in more than 20 European countries. It focuses on both the methodological and the substantive, and provides an illustration of how a structural equation modeling approach can be useful in cross-national research. The chapter also focuses on the interplay between religious involvement, value orientations, social attitudes, and social structural variables. It presents three parts of the theoretical model: the effect of sociodemographic variables on religious involvement; the correlation between religious involvement and value priorities; and the net effect of religious involvement on social attitudes. The chapter provides an extensive equivalence test of the indicators for the central concept of religious involvement, and summarizes the results of similar tests for several human values and social attitudes. The predictive power of social background variables that traditionally explain the variance was shown to be related to the average level of religious involvement in a country.
