Religious Conversion and Perceived Childhood Attachment: A Meta-Analysis

In this article we review previous work on religious conversions, relate this work to attachment system dynamics, and present a meta-analysis of results from 11 cross-national questionnaire studies (N = 1465) that have investigated links between religious conversions and perceivedchildhoodattachmenthistorywithparents.Twogeneralhypothesesderived from attachment theory were tested. Based on the compensation hypothesis, it was predicted that sudden religious conversions would be associated on average with insecure, rather than secure, attachmenthistories.Basedon the2-level correspondencehypothesis, itwaspredicted that nonsudden conversions and gradual religious changes would be associated with a secure attachment history. Both predictions were supported in the meta-analyses, with small to medium effect sizes. It was concluded that attachment theory is a valuable framework for integrating previous findings and guiding future research on religious conversions, but that several methodological improvements should be made in future research.