Religious Commitment and Paranormal Beliefs across Gender and Educational Stream

Religious Commitment is an “internal” quality that reflects the individual’s self-rating on “religiousness” as well as the degree to which the individual seeks to follow religious teachings in everyday life, finds religion to be personally helpful, and gains personal strength by trusting in a higher power. Whereas paranormal phenomena are defined as events that violate the boundaries of current scientific belief. Religious commitment and paranormal beliefs share important qualities and generally are positively related. In the present study these variables were studied i.e. religious commitment and paranormal beliefs among University students. Purposive sampling technique was employed. 100 students from Jammu University,50 from each educational stream, i.e. from arts and science stream were taken. Religious commitment and paranormal belief was compared across the gender too. Results were non-significant between males and females in paranormal beliefs but significant results in both males and females in religious commitment was found. The results were significant among arts and science students in paranormal beliefs and non – significant in religious commitment. A positive relationship was found between religious commitment and paranormal beliefs.