The Relationship of Protestant Ethic Beliefs and Values to Achievement

Weber's Protestant ethic thesis is more concerned with a person's beliefs and values than his affiliation per se. To test the thesis, an index of Calvinist beliefs and values was constructed and administered to a randomly selected sample of 252 males in a midwestern rural city. The index was found to correlate positively with both occupational status and educational achievement. But when religious affiliation was used as an independent variable, its relationship to occupational status was found to be minimal. These results suggest that religious affiliation is a less adequate measure of the independent variable in assessing religion's effect upon secular behavior than the religious beliefs suggested by Weber's analysis.