The Religious Practices of Vietnamese Catholic Youth: The Case of the Diocese of Xuan Loc

Abstract

Every religion includes a whole series of beliefs and practices and we should start by concentrating our attention on religious practices to understand a religion. This paper intended to clarify the religious practices of Vietnamese Catholic Youth. Based on the theory of Glock and Stark and by using survey method, descriptive statistics, this is the first study to demonstrate the religious practices of youths in a diocese of Vietnam. This issue considered as an interesting research topic in the context of Vietnamese research because it explores youths lives from a different perspective by focusing on the micro level of analysis. The respondents in this study were total of 388 young adults between 18 and 30 years of ages from 24 parishes who were randomly selected through Probability Proportional to size sampling method. The findings of the research indicate that the ritualistic dimension of religiosity among Vietnamese Catholic youth is still so high in the context of change in Vietnam.