Três ensaios sobre valores pessoais, religião e educação

Abstract

The present doctoral thesis had the general objective of analyzing the effect of religious consumers' personal values on education. Written in four parts, first, a literature review was carried out on the relationship between personal values, religion and education. In the second part, Essay 1 was carried out, with an investigation into the role of personal values, according to the Rokeach and Schwartz scales, particularly, values related to religion in the decision to "consume" a higher education courses, in the areas of Economics and Administration, in the city of Uberlândia, Minas Gerais. The hypothesis to be evaluated is that religion, by influencing personal values, would affect the choice to attend a degree in management and economics. The research was carried out using laddering in higher education institutions in Uberlândia. The results show that religious groups have an important relationship with the desire to earn income to take care of the family, follow the purpose of life, through training aligned with the vocation, converging on a final value of tradition/spirituality, the attributes that allow reaching these values are mainly an institution with the “federal” brand, low cost, good location. The third part was related to Essay 2, which aimed to analyze the impacts of the effect of religion as a proxy for personal values, specifically how they influence spending on education and health, having as counterfactual spending on tobacco and alcoholic beverages, products considered harmful to health. Using a quantile regression analysis, with data from the POF (2008-2009), considering some particularities, the results show that, in general, religious groups consume all products, in line with the values of the literature. In Essay 3, a survey was carried out to investigate whether students from public schools with religious orientation, as a proxy for values, provide statistically different school performance. The criterion adopted to assess this was proficiency in Portuguese and mathematics, with multilevel hierarchical regressions being carried out, with information from students, family members and schools from the SAEB (2019), the results indicate that the negative influence of confessionality is more present in Mathematics and and Portuguese Language in the 5th year of high school.