Family Determinants of Religiosity of People in Emerging Adulthood in Poland

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

Thank you for the opportunity to review a revised version of your manuscript. And thank you for the clear explanations of how my previous comments/suggestions were addressed in your revision. The revised paper was clearer for me as pertains to the areas I mentioned and I thought they were addressed well. My only final suggestion would be to do a final editing for minor language issue in English, such as changing the tense of the analysis plan. These are such minor areas that I am certain the Editor could address these in the final proof.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

As mentioned above, my only final suggestion would be to do a final editing for minor language issue in English, such as changing the tense of the analysis plan. These are such minor areas that I am certain the Editor could address these in the final proof.

Author Response

Dear Rewiever,

               We would like to thank you once again for your thorough investigation of our paper and all the helpful remarks. We have adjusted grammatic form of the analysis plan.

Yours faithfully.

Authors

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a well-written paper on an important topic, that of the socialization of religion. I’m just coming in as a reviewer of the revision. Here are my recommendations. 

 

1.     If the editor cares about tightening the paper, I feel like many of the paragraphs in the introduction and discussion are longer than they need to be. So, paragraph structure could be tightened without losing much in terms of coverage while probably improving clarity.  

2.     One thing I found odd about the introduction is that a lot of the prior literature that should have been mentioned before the Research Questions and Hypotheses section did not come until that section. It seems if there are studies that looked at this previously, they should be mentioned in the body of the introduction, and then the Research Questions and Hypotheses section should just point back to the body of the introduction.

3.     I also found the Research Questions and Hypotheses section awkward to follow. Usually, people just list the hypotheses, not the questions and then hypotheses. The way you have it now seems to have more levels of organization than are needed and it just gets confusing. I also may be missing something, but I don’t see an H3.

4.     Most of the prior studies cited seem to be about a decade old. Has nothing been done in this specific area in the last decade?

5.     It seems some of the references cited in the paper are not included in the references section.

6.     It’s probably too late now to mention this, but in my mind 215 people is a pretty modest sample size for survey research, particularly involving college students, who tend to be pretty easy to recruit and college data from.

7.     In the Statistical Analysis section, I would just refer to it as a t-test, not t-Student’s test, and I would specify which type of t-test. I assume in this case it is (or at least should be) a dependent or paired t-test, since the data are linked within families. I would provide more detail on which type of t-test, which variables, etc.

8.     In the Statistical Analysis section I also think you need to justify your choice/use of the particular analyses.

9.     Table 1 could easily be reported in a sentence in the method section. It doesn’t need to be a table. I think in section 3.1.2, when you state Table 2, you mean Table 3. Then later when you say Tables 3-4, you mean 4-5. I suspect an earlier reviewer maybe asked by Table 1 to be added and you didn’t adjust. If you added Table 1 because of an earlier reviewer feel free to keep it, even though I disagree it is necessary.

10.  On line 407, you state the two parents are “at a similar level.” I assume this is based on eye-balling, but you could actually run the same t-test to compare parents.

11.  Something seems incorrect with the Cohen’s d scores. Your values are massive. A medium Cohen’s d is .5, and yours are all 3-4. I just pulled out my calculator and for Intellect took the difference between students and fathers (8.74-7.58), and then divided by 3.2 (the average of your two standard deviations), and I got .36. You report it at 3. So, your reported Cohen’s ds seem about 10X the actual values. I suggest making sure you are calculating them correctly, and then once you have the correct values, you should comment on the size of them in the results section (small, medium, or large). Most of yours I suspect will be small/medium.

12.  I really don’t know what is being reported in Tables 4-5. There is a single sentence that says t-tests, but I don’t know what kind of t-tests using which variables for what purpose. It seems like you did a large number of paired t-tests, comparing each pair of parenting variables. Part of the problem is I have not idea why you are doing that, as it doesn’t tie into the hypotheses as far as I can tell, and I’m not sure what we learn from it.

13.  I’m looking at a draft of the paper as a PDF sent to me by the journal, so, I’m not exactly sure what the end result will look like. But to me, the table formatting is clunky. The headings run over multiple lines, some row headings do as well, etc.

14.  Rather than the word Beta I would use the symbol β.

15.  In section 3.4 where you report the regressions, why did you only add material over-protectiveness as far as all the parenting dimensions? That’s not clear. If it is just based on which ones correlated the most, that’s not a good justification to me. This is because a variable can be a moderator of links between X and Y without being that correlated with either.

16.  I’m not sure what it means for a model to be a poor fit to the data but still significant, just based on an F-test.

17.  I can’t read the Figure 1 legend. Also, I would relabel the axes more clearly and get rid of the regression formula boxes in the middle, or at least move them to I can read the other one.

18.  I would make sure the discussion aligns with the hypotheses. The paper is about links between parent religiosity, parenting, and emerging adult religiosity. Keep it to that. I wouldn’t spend as much time just talking about emerging adult perceptions of parenting.

19.  I would call them emerging adults, not “students,” other than in the method section.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

               First and foremost we would like to thank you for your thoughtful remarks concerning our manuscript. Those remarks have significantly contributed to the improvement of our paper. In the following part of our letter we would like to describe how we have addressed and implemented your suggestions quoting your remark and providing an answer.

1. If the editor cares about tightening the paper, I feel like many of the paragraphs in the introduction and discussion are longer than they need to be. So, paragraph structure could be tightened without losing much in terms of coverage while probably improving clarity.  

The current structure of our paper is a result of our response to previous suggestions from both the reviewers and editors. They had no suggestions considering the length of the paper. 

2. One thing I found odd about the introduction is that a lot of the prior literature that should have been mentioned before the Research Questions and Hypotheses section did not come until that section. It seems if there are studies that looked at this previously, they should be mentioned in the body of the introduction, and then the Research Questions and Hypotheses section should just point back to the body of the introduction.

Answering the previous reviewer’s remarks considering poor structure of the introduction section as it used to confuse readers due to our focus of development of particular aspects of religiosity, we have reorganized the introduction section basing it upon the chronology of stages of development. Abovementioned changes resulted in reformulating the introduction section. We did not sufficiently revised the hypothesis section to adjust for the changes. We have fixed that, following your suggestion  

3. I also found the Research Questions and Hypotheses section awkward to follow. Usually, people just list the hypotheses, not the questions and then hypotheses. The way you have it now seems to have more levels of organization than are needed and it just gets confusing. I also may be missing something, but I don’t see an H3.

We did it that way to clearly list our hypothesis and questions due to the considerable length of the introduction section. In previous reviews it was underlined that not all variables considered in our analyses are sufficiently described in the Introduction section, so we have broadened that section and outlined findings we had considered crucial for formulation of the hypothesis in the Research Questions and Hypotheses section, for the readers not to have to go back to the introduction section to assess whether our hypothesis have enough support.   

4. Most of the prior studies cited seem to be about a decade old. Has nothing been done in this specific area in the last decade?

We conducted our literature search using Google Scholar and EBSCO search engines. The terms used were “Emerging adults and religiosity”, “Parental attitudes or Parental styles or Parental practices and religiosity and emerging adults”. The search was conducted from Aprli 2020 to January 2021 and was concluded prior to data analysis. The search was done by all authors. We are reporting all articles we considered relevant for our study.

5. It seems some of the references cited in the paper are not included in the references section.

Thank you for your remark. That issue has been addressed. Now all cited sources should be listed in the references section.

6. It’s probably too late now to mention this, but in my mind 215 people is a pretty modest sample size for survey research, particularly involving college students, who tend to be pretty easy to recruit and college data from.

. We agree that 215 can seem to be a suboptimal sample size. It is however worth noting that the study was conducted during the covid pandemics. We thought of it as an asset to our study as all college students in Poland studied remotely at that time and they will be easy to access. We expected a small effect sizes, around 0,23 in terms of Pearsons r. Our power calculation indicated that about 239 subject will be enough to achieve power of 0,95. We estimated out dropout rate at 10% of the sample as in our testing data collection performed of 3 subjects unaware of contents of our study the longest filling time was 25 minutes. Our survey proved to take longer to complete as the mean completion time was 37 minutes. Our dropout rate turned out to be larger than expected. Our method of contacting the students rendered it ill-advised to resend the invitation link so we concluded data collection at 295 participants.   

7. In the Statistical Analysis section, I would just refer to it as a t-test, not t-Student’s test, and I would specify which type of t-test. I assume in this case it is (or at least should be) a dependent or paired t-test, since the data are linked within families. I would provide more detail on which type of t-test, which variables, etc.

It was indeed paired t-test. We have described it more clearly now, owing to your suggestion.

8. In the Statistical Analysis section I also think you need to justify your choice/use of the particular analyses.

Thank you for your remark. A brief justification has been added to statistical analyses plan with references to relevant literature.

9. Table 1 could easily be reported in a sentence in the method section. It doesn’t need to be a table. I think in section 3.1.2, when you state Table 2, you mean Table 3. Then later when you say Tables 3-4, you mean 4-5. I suspect an earlier reviewer maybe asked by Table 1 to be added and you didn’t adjust. If you added Table 1 because of an earlier reviewer feel free to keep it, even though I disagree it is necessary.

As you have guessed, we inserted Table 1 owing to one of previous reviewer suggestion to show the data more clearly. We have adjusted numbers of the tables. Thank you for pointing it out to us.  

10. On line 407, you state the two parents are “at a similar level.” I assume this is based on eye-balling, but you could actually run the same t-test to compare parents.

The basis for this statement was the result of relevant t-test. It has been stated in the text to avoid confusion.

11. Something seems incorrect with the Cohen’s d scores. Your values are massive. A medium Cohen’s d is .5, and yours are all 3-4. I just pulled out my calculator and for Intellect took the difference between students and fathers (8.74-7.58), and then divided by 3.2 (the average of your two standard deviations), and I got .36. You report it at 3. So, your reported Cohen’s ds seem about 10X the actual values. I suggest making sure you are calculating them correctly, and then once you have the correct values, you should comment on the size of them in the results section (small, medium, or large). Most of yours I suspect will be small/medium.

We owe you many thanks for bringing up this issue. While working on table 2 we looked at the wrong table in our statistical analysis report, so all data were reported incorrectly. It has been fixed so that the data presented, show the results of paired t-tests we performed.  

12. I really don’t know what is being reported in Tables 4-5. There is a single sentence that says t-tests, but I don’t know what kind of t-tests using which variables for what purpose. It seems like you did a large number of paired t-tests, comparing each pair of parenting variables. Part of the problem is I have not idea why you are doing that, as it doesn’t tie into the hypotheses as far as I can tell, and I’m not sure what we learn from it.

Those tables are not meant to display numeric variables. Instead, they are designed to inform the reader about directions of differences in magnitude of parental attitude, which are displayed to facilitate the reader interpretation of our results. The idea is that reader should be provided with a profile of parental attitudes detected in our sample in some concise way.

13. I’m looking at a draft of the paper as a PDF sent to me by the journal, so, I’m not exactly sure what the end result will look like. But to me, the table formatting is clunky. The headings run over multiple lines, some row headings do as well, etc.

Headings and footnotes of the tables had been lengthen owing to the suggestion of previous relievers as in their view the article lacked information necessary to understand contents of the tables.

14. Rather than the word Beta I would use the symbol β.

We agree that it will add clarity to the results section. It has been done.   

15. In section 3.4 where you report the regressions, why did you only add material over-protectiveness as far as all the parenting dimensions? That’s not clear. If it is just based on which ones correlated the most, that’s not a good justification to me. This is because a variable can be a moderator of links between X and Y without being that correlated with either.

Maternal overprotectiveness was entered to the regression based on the technique of regression analysis by forward selection. Our regression analysis was an exploratory one. We accounted for possible moderation effect conducting moderation analysis as described in lines: 536-549.

16. I’m not sure what it means for a model to be a poor fit to the data but still significant, just based on an F-test.

We just wanted to outline that f value was smaller. We agree that describing it that way brought more confusion that clarity. We changed our wording of that line.

17. I can’t read the Figure 1 legend. Also, I would relabel the axes more clearly and get rid of the regression formula boxes in the middle, or at least move them to I can read the other one.

We have followed your advice to edit the Figure 1. We got rid of the regression formula boxes. We also redesigned the legend of the figure so that all information are now presented in English. We hope that the graph is now more pleasant to read.

18. I would make sure the discussion aligns with the hypotheses. The paper is about links between parent religiosity, parenting, and emerging adult religiosity. Keep it to that. I wouldn’t spend as much time just talking about emerging adult perceptions of parenting.

The current outline of the discussion section has been created in response to previous reviewer. As far as we understood, we reconned it would be prudent to preset some general profile of parents religiosity and attitudes prior to analyzing relations between variables, for the reader to be able to envision the parents we discuss.     

19. I would call them emerging adults, not “students,” other than in the method section.

As it was stated in the method section, the subjects were university students so we use term emerging adults and students interchangeably when referring to our sample and to any sample comprised of university or college students.

We thank you for your thorough reading of our manuscript and insightful comments.

 

Yours faithfully.

Authors.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I think they did a reasonable job addressing my concerns. 

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

Brief Summary. This paper aimed to investigate environmental determinants of Polish emerging  adults’ religiosity, with a focus on family variables. The paper provides an insightful review of extant literature and findings on determinants of emerging adults’ religiosity in a way that is both comprehensive and pertinent to the current study. Surveys administered to 215 Polish 19-27 year olds provide a compelling argument for the role of parents in Polish emerging adults’ religiosity.

 

Dear Author(s)

Thank you for the opportunity to review your article on the topic of family determinants of emerging adults’ religiosity. I would recommend changing the title to “Family Determinants of Religiosity in Polish Emerging Adults” or “Family Determinants of Religiosity in Emerging Adults in Poland”.

I thought that the literature review was a very insightful and strong part of this paper. It thoroughly yet purposefully discussed research that is most pertinent to your own study, while also doing a good job of shedding light on trends in religiosity among emerging adults. The statement in the introduction describing the characteristics and diversity of emerging adults’ interaction with religion was helpful – since it mentions possible diversity among emerging adults’ religiosity and so sets a good foundation for the study to fill gaps in knowledge. The hypotheses were clearly described and reasonably chosen, and they were supported by the literature well.

I also found the discussions of how the results can be explained by Polish society and culture to be an insightful and important for this paper.

I would recommend the following modifications to the paper. I hope they are helpful.

1. Organization/Structure. I was surprised to see procedures and measure to be discussed after the results as this is not the usual way that articles are presented. In particular, I looked for a description of the participants and procedure and measures first. The Tables were hard to interpret when placed in the current order because the scales ranges were not meaningful. So, in addition to reordering the sections, I’d recommend placing scale ranges in the notes below each table.

2. Some Language and Succinctness. This paper is well written. However, some minor tweaks could improve the presentation.

·       For example: Overall, I think it is possible to make the language more brief when reporting analyses and results in some places. I think the most important thing is for the reader to come away with the most impactful and important results, which should ideally give less attention to other preliminary or smaller analyses. For example, in a few sections the statistical analyses were reported, followed by results (e.g., correlations run between variables, then a report of the findings, followed by another mention of correlations run between other variables and reports of the findings, etc.). Instead, you might consider a section that discusses all the analyses that will be run, followed by more succinct discussion of results.

·       For example: The language could also achieve more brevity in some places by avoiding run-on. For example, in this sentence (Line 385):

“In order to address hypothesis H2 according to which Religiosity in emerging adulthood is positively related to closeness to parents and the experience of acceptance and 386 attitudes of autonomy on the part of each parent, an analysis was performed of the correlation of global religiosity and its dimensions in the respondents with the sense of close-388 ness to mother and father and with the parental attitudes of mothers and fathers as assessed by the respondents.”

·       For example:  On Line 53 use of the word “cultic” struck me as unusual as a native  English speaker in relation to religion. In my understanding, cults and religions are distinguished. A religion often has more formal criteria than a cult and a cult is generally considered to have harmful or destructive practices. Even though you don't distinguish the two, this is definitely a study of religion and cults. Possibly the word rituals or practices is better? I am not aware of the article referred to and how it might use the term (i.e. citation of Motak, 2010), but I would still recommend modifying this word for its lay meaning.

·       For example: On Lines 151-153 It’s unclear which study is being referred to? (i.e., this one or the one cited? I assume the one cited, so this should be written differently to avoid confusion: “The results of the study have shown that social influences, particularly family factors, play a much 152 greater role than genetics in shaping teenagers’ religious beliefs and practices (Eaves et al. 2008).” The same occurs on Lines 159-160: “The study suggests that parents play a more important role in shaping the system of values and religious beliefs of teenagers in comparison with peers (de Vaus, 1983).”

3   3. Interpreting Scale Results.
On Line 490 it is written that ”The religiosity of the students, as well as the perceived religiosity of each of their parents, represents a level described by Huber (2003) as heteronomy.” It wasn’t clear to me from the preceding what ratings on the Huber measure would support this – or why (i.e., from previous research). This needs some explanation. Also, could results on other measures benefit from similar explanation?

      4. Adaptation of Measures. The measures used were These measures were apparently adapted to be relevant to Polish society, and translated/back-translated? Subjected to a language analyses or other approaches? I noticed that a few were already published, and I expect they were validated in these articles to some extent? I recommend discussing their applicability and validity to the Polish emerging adult population with some details as this lends strength to the paper, especially for replicability. For example, I wondered what methods were used and literatures and good practices support the approaches? What more could or should be done? This seems important to discuss since claims are made about whether how participants’ ratings on the measure lead to conclusions about religiosity for example.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Dear Author(s),

as I noted above, I think this article is well written overall. In fact, you provide many details in your writing about the findings and are thorough in explaining the results and ideas. My only suggestions are the ones I mentioned above (and pasted below), including:

1. A final edit for re-organization/structure (as suggested above);

2. editing for brevity/succinctness - such as by considering how to not restate the analysis methods and putting them - or some - in their own section before reporting results;

3. editing for sentences that may be run on - and simplifying them. Making sure all language is direct rather than indirect in sentence word order;

and

4. use of the word "cult"

Author Response

Reviewer 1:

First and foremost we would like to thank you for your thorough reading of our manuscript and for appreciation of our work, especially for your comments on our literature search and hypothesis. We are even more grateful for all critical remarks, which contributed to improvement of our research article. In the following part of our letter we would like to describe how we have addressed and implemented your suggestions.

Reviever’s statement: I would recommend changing the title to “Family Determinants of Religiosity in Polish Emerging Adults” or “Family Determinants of Religiosity in Emerging Adults in Poland”.

Answer: We thank you wholeheartedly for your remark concerning title of out manuscript. We have changed the title to ‘Family determinants of religiosity of people in emerging adulthood in Poland’. We consider that change very valuable because the more specific out title is, the easier it will be for potential reader to say whether out manuscript fits someone’s interests.

Reviever’s statement:: 1. Organization/Structure. I was surprised to see procedures and measure to be discussed after the results as this is not the usual way that articles are presented. In particular, I looked for a description of the participants and procedure and measures first. The Tables were hard to interpret when placed in the current order because the scales ranges were not meaningful. So, in addition to reordering the sections, I’d recommend placing scale ranges in the notes below each table.

Answer: Thank you for another useful remark. We agree that placing the method section after the introduction and before the results sections facilitates understanding of presented research as the contents of the method section provide context necessary to interpret and critically reflect on presented results. In line with your suggestions we have placed the method section after the introduction and before the results section. We have also added value ranges for measures used in the method section.  

Reviever’s statement: Instead, you might consider a section that discusses all the analyses that will be run, followed by more succinct discussion of results.

Answer: Following your suggestion we have added the statistical analysis plan at the end of the method section. The results are now displayed in an order mirroring the order in which  statistical analyses are mentioned in the plan. We recon it has bought more clarity to presentation of the results.

 Reviever’s statement:: The language could also achieve more brevity in some places by avoiding run-on.

Answer: We considered your suggestions and revised our English. As far as the world ‘cult’ is concerned, we intended to refer to the whole range of public religious practices. We have recognized that our choice of words was inadequate and replaced the term ‘cult’ with the term ‘public practice’. We also abstained from mentioning genetic influences in religiosity so the sentence previously found in lines 151-153 has been reformulated and simplified.

Reviever’s statement:: On Line 490 it is written that ”The religiosity of the students, as well as the perceived religiosity of each of their parents, represents a level described by Huber (2003) as heteronomy.” It wasn’t clear to me from the preceding what ratings on the Huber measure would support this – or why.

Answer: Owing to your remark, we have complemented the method section with more detailed description of Huber’s Centrality of Religiosity Scale. Namely, we have shown sample items for each dimension of religiosity described by Huber, we have briefly described the adaptation process and cited relevant literature confirming that CRS has been successfully used in research of Polish emerging adults’ religiosity for the last decade. To facilitate understanding of our results, we have provided sample items and scale ranges of the CRS in our method section. We also explicitly cite Huber’s cutoff points customarly used to distinguish between participants with marginal, heteronomous and autonomous religiosity. We also have added sample items for other measures so as to facilitate understanding of measured constructs.

            We hope you will find our answers comprehensive. We greatly appreciate your kind and insightful reception of our manuscript. As mentioned in the introduction to out letter, your remarks contributed greatly to the improvement of our work.

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

General Comments:

The current study sought to understand the relationship between religiosity in emerging adults with the religiosity and attitudes of, and closeness to, their parents. I think this is a very interesting study and hope authors continue to work on this manuscript. Overall, the paper needs extensive work to improve the clarity and strength of the study. The introduction requires reorganization to more clearly identify the study variables of interest, how they are related, and why the current study is necessary. As it stands, many different aspects of religiosity are discussed and is is challenging to understand what the current study is evaluating and why there is a need to understand more in this area.

Additionally, the organization of the methods and results are inaccurate. The method section needs to follow the introduction, not come after the discussion section. The data analysis section is completely missing and there is important information missing when describing your measures. The results section seems to report research questions in a different order than listed in the introduction which increases confusion. The paper additionally needs to be generally reviewed for clarity of language and basic formatting (e.g. tables incorrectly formatted, inconsistent font size). I have included some specific suggestions below that I wrote down while reviewing the paper. Please note I did not review the discussion section as this will likely change once the introduction, methods, and results are improved.

 

Introduction

1.2

·       You include a citation talking about religion including “cultic activities”. Please explain further what you mean by this has a very negative connotation.

·       “Religiosity is understood as man’s individual reference to the Transcendent manifested in 55 the sphere of beliefs, feelings and behaviours.” Is this process different for women, trans, or gender non-conforming folks? If not, please change “man” to “person”.

·       The first paragraph of this section is confusing and doesn’t seem as directly related to the topic of the paper. It additionally includes discussion about individual’s personality in relation to religiosity. Were there measures of personality in this study? If not, I would remove/condense this information as it’s leading the reader down a different path and is confusing. The second paragraph seems to be getting more directly to the point of the paper.

·       How are you defining religiosity for the purposes of this study specifically? Public practice? Self-report of religiosity? Personality characteristics? Provide information about this at the beginning but not clear what you are specifically defining for this study.

1.3

·       “The results of the study have shown that social influences, particularly family factors, play a much greater role than genetics in shaping teenagers’ religious beliefs and practices (Eaves et al. 2008).” The mention of genetics here is confusing since this is the only time genetics is mentioned in the paper.

·       This section could use some organization to increase clarity and flow. Moving back and forth between parent influences, social context, genetics etc.

·       Authors move back and forth in the discussion between adolescence and emerging adulthood. I might suggest reorganizing to focus on the developmental trajectory from relationships adolescents have with parents and religiosity and how this shifts over their transition into emerging adulthood.

1.3.2

·       “Depending on their intensity and configuration, these dimensions form four parenting styles, i.e. authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful (Maccoby & Martin’s, 1983).” You are missing an important citation here - Baumrind, 1967 - who initially developed the first three parenting styles (authoritative, authoritarian, permissive). Maccoby and Martin later added neglectful parenting style.

·       Very interesting section on parenting styles and religiosity.

·       “parenting interactions will be considered in this paper within the framework of the concept of attitudes” what does this mean?

Research Questions (RQs)

·       The primary variables in your study, outlined in your research questions, should be clearly delineated in your introduction. Some of the variables in your RQ’s are not mentioned at all in the introduction.

·       For RQ 3, you are asking about the relationship of many different variables and their potential predictive relationship with religiosity level in emerging adulthood. Some of these variables are not discussed in the introduction and therefore there is no clear argument as to why they are a part of your analysis. There is nothing in the introduction related to having a religious friend, and sex of the respondent being related to religiosity. Even though these are exploratory questions, you need to include some basis for why you are analyzing these variables. Otherwise this appears to be completely random.

·       RQ’s 4-5 You have discussed aspects of these questions in your introduction, so why can’t you formulate hypotheses about the expected relationships here?

Method

·       The Method section is in the wrong location in the paper. Your analytic plan is missing from this section.

Results

·       Centrality of Religiosity Scale is not properly cited, nor is there sufficient information about the adaptation. There is also no information about the subscales, Cronbach alpha scores, sample items, etc. This information should be present for any measure used, and should be in the method section.

·       Why did you suddenly start using the term “students”. Do you mean emerging adults?

·       What is the rationale for looking at mothers and fathers separately? This rationale for doing analyses in this way should be in the introduction and method sections.

·       Table 3 and 4 missing numeric values.

·       Table 5 please review the title as it is incorrect.

·       RQ’s seem to be addressed out of order in the results section

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Moderate editing of English language required

Author Response

Reviver 2

            First and foremost we would like to thank you for your thoughtful remarks concerning our manuscript. Those remarks have significantly contributed to the improvement of our paper. In the following part of our letter we would like to describe how we have addressed and implemented your suggestions.

Reviever’s statement: You include a citation talking about religion including “cultic activities”. Please explain further what you mean by this has a very negative connotation.

Answer: As far as the world ‘cult’ is concerned, we intended to refer to the whole range of public religious practices. We have recognized that our choice of words was inadequate and replaced the term ‘cult’ with the term ‘public practice’.

Reviever’s statement: Religiosity is understood as man’s individual reference to the Transcendent manifested in 55 the sphere of beliefs, feelings and behaviours.” Is this process different for women, trans, or gender non-conforming folks? If not, please change “man” to “person”.

Answer: Our usage of the term man was intended to denote the mankind in general so people of all gender as well as gender non-conforming people. We have changed our word choice according to your suggestion to avoid further confusion.

Reviever’s statement: The first paragraph of this section is confusing and doesn’t seem as directly related to the topic of the paper. It additionally includes discussion about individual’s personality in relation to religiosity. Were there measures of personality in this study? If not, I would remove/condense this information as it’s leading the reader down a different path and is confusing. The second paragraph seems to be getting more directly to the point of the paper.

Answer: Our mention of personality 79 is a tribute to the theoretical foundations of Huber’s Centrality of Religiosity Theory, which takes its roots in Kelly’s personal construct theory. Both in our research and in Huber’s theory, religiosity is understood as as ‘a disposition to perceive meanings in the environment pertaining to the sphere of the sacred and to relate to this sphere in one’s concepts, actions and affects’, as it was explicitly stated in our manuscript (line 89). Considering, that the concept of centrality of religious construct in one’s personality structure is crucial for interpreting the results of the Huber Centrality of Religiosity Scale, we left aforementioned part of the manuscript unchanged except from changing the phrase ‘present paper’ to ‘our paper’ to clearly show that we refer to the understanding of religiosity we utilise in our research.

Reviever’s statement: The results of the study have shown that social influences, particularly family factors, play a much greater role than genetics in shaping teenagers’ religious beliefs and practices (Eaves et al. 2008).” The mention of genetics here is confusing since this is the only time genetics is mentioned in the paper.

Answer: We agree that referring to genetics was both confusing and unnecessary so we focused to reporting research concerning familial influences on emerging adults religiosity.

 

Reviever’s statement: Authors move back and forth in the discussion between adolescence and emerging adulthood. I might suggest reorganizing to focus on the developmental trajectory from relationships adolescents have with parents and religiosity and how this shifts over their transition into emerging adulthood

Answer: Owing to that remark, we decided to reorganize the introduction section of our paper. In our revised manuscript first we present our definition of religiosity and its’ theoretical underpinnings as clearly as possible, then we outline the trajectory of development of religiosity to emerging adulthood and lastly we show how variables describing functioning of the family are related to religiosity of the offspring.

Reviever’s statement: Depending on their intensity and configuration, these dimensions form four parenting styles, i.e. authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful (Maccoby & Martin’s, 1983).” You are missing an important citation here - Baumrind, 1967 - who initially developed the first three parenting styles (authoritative, authoritarian, permissive). Maccoby and Martin later added neglectful parenting style

Answer: In our manuscript we do not cite the work of Baumrind (1967) as our understanding of parenting practices is not derived from the concept of parenting style. We base our understanding of parenting practices upon the concept of attitude. We understand attitude as emotional evaluation of a particular object - in this case a child (Aronson, Wilson, Sommers, 2021; Plopa, 2011). Tradition of measuring treating parental practices as indicators of particular emotional atmosphere of the household runs parallel to the idea of parenting styles. We evoke ideas of Maccoby and Martin as they are the most similar to the idea of attitudes. Our reasons for choosing parental attitudes over parenting styles are twofold: firstly, we conceive religiosity as a disposition to perceive meaning pertaining to transcendence, which is similar to concept of attitude towards transcendence – evidenced for example by Ulrich Riegel, (2020) who showed the correlation between measure of attitudes towards Christianity and CRS equal to 0,92 in the context of predominantly Christian, German society. We recon it justifies using CRS as measure of religious attitudes, so in order to measure constructs of similar nature, we decided to frame both religiosity and parenting practices as attitudes. The second reason is the fact, that to our knowledge, there is no validated measure to accurately measure parenting styles in Polish reality. The only exception is the Parental Authority Questionary developed by Cierpka and Wierzbicka in 2013. We know only about two instances of using that Questionary: Cierpka and Wierzbicka 2013 and Bąk, 2017 and none of them was conducted on emerging adults and there was an issue with reliability of permissive parenting subscale in that questionary. Considering abovementioned reasons we opted for using Parental Attitude Scale as more psychometrically robust tool.  

Reviever’s statement: Very interesting section on parenting styles and religiosity.

Answer: Thank you for your appreciation.

Reviever’s statement: For RQ 3, you are asking about the relationship of many different variables and their potential predictive relationship with religiosity level in emerging adulthood. Some of these variables are not discussed in the introduction and therefore there is no clear argument as to why they are a part of your analysis. There is nothing in the introduction related to having a religious friend, and sex of the respondent being related to religiosity. Even though these are exploratory questions, you need to include some basis for why you are analyzing these variables. Otherwise this appears to be completely random

Answer: We decided to refocus our analysis only on parental religiosity, parental attitudes and emerging adults religiosity. In presently submitted version of our manuscript we omitted other variables. We hope that now all relevant variables are described with sufficient clarity.

Reviever’s statement: RQ’s 4-5 You have discussed aspects of these questions in your introduction, so why can’t you formulate hypotheses about the expected relationships here?

Answer: To our knowledge our manuscript was the first in Polish studies with Huber’s CRS to employ mediation and moderation analysis in transgenerational transmission of religiosity in sample of Polish emerging adults so we wanted to tread carefully. Owing to your remark we searched for data pertaining to mediation and moderation analyses in samples similarly homogenous in aspects of religiosity and ethnicity to the Polish society and we formulated hypothesizes.

Reviever’s statement: The Method section is in the wrong location in the paper. Your analytic plan is missing from this section.

Answer: Our decision concerning the structure of our article was based upon information for authors provided on the Religions Journal homepage. On the page there are parts of manuscript enumerated in a particular order, namely:  Introduction, Results, Discussion, Materials and Methods, Conclusions (optional). Such order is mirrored in the MS Word template for authors so we assumed that placement of Materials and Methods section at the end of the manuscript is required by the Journal. We contacted the Editorial Office in this regard and in reply the editor stated that it is up to the author to decide on the order of particular parts of manuscript. As so, we changed placement of the Materials and Methods section in our paper.

Reviever’s statement: Centrality of Religiosity Scale is not properly cited, nor is there sufficient information about the adaptation. There is also no information about the subscales, Cronbach alpha scores, sample items, etc. This information should be present for any measure used, and should be in the method section.

Answer: Owing to your remark, we have complemented the method section with more detailed description of Huber’s Centrality of Religiosity Scale. Namely, we have shown sample items for each dimension of religiosity described by Huber, we have briefly described the adaptation process and cited relevant literature confirming that CRS has been successfully used in research of Polish emerging adults’ religiosity for the last decade. To facilitate understanding of our results, we have provided sample items and scale ranges of the CRS in our method section. We also explicitly cite Huber’s cutoff points customarly used to distinguish between participants with marginal, heteronomous and autonomous religiosity. We also have added sample items for other measures so as to facilitate understanding of measured constructs.

Reviever’s statement: Why did you suddenly start using the term “students”. Do you mean emerging adults?.

Answer: As it was stated in the method section, the subjects were university students so we use term emerging adults and students interchangeably when referring to our sample. 

 Reviever’s statement: What is the rationale for looking at mothers and fathers separately? This rationale for doing analyses in this way should be in the introduction and method sections.

Answer: Our reason is the deference in magnitude of centrality of religiosity between mothers and fathers evidenced by mean differences testing.

Reviever’s statement: Table 3 and 4 missing numeric values.

Answer: Those tables are not meant to display numeric variables. Instead, they are designed to inform the reader about directions of differences in magnitude of parental attitude, which are displayed to facilitate the reader interpretation of our results.

Reviever’s statement:  Table 5 please review the title as it is incorrect

Answer: The title was indeed incorrect. It has been changed.

Reviever’s statement: RQ’s seem to be addressed out of order in the results section

 Answer: Following your suggestion we have added the statistical analysis plan at the end of the method section. The results are now displayed in an order mirroring the order in which  statistical analyses are mentioned in the plan. We recon it has bought more clarity to presentation of the results