The Institute for University School Partnership, a division of the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration, utilizes its unique blend of resources to provide a broad array of support to schools across North America. Directly responding to the emerging needs of schools, the Institute staff collaborates with and harnesses the expertise of the faculty and experts in schools and communities to create, implement and research ways to address the academic, religious, social, emotional and behavioral health of students in schools. The RUACH (Religious Understanding in Adolescent Children) project, funded by a generous grant from the AVI CHAI Foundation, is an example of this work.

For the past two and a half years, we have been in the unique position to learn from an engagement with six Modern Orthodox religious day schools.  The focus of RUACH, has been to develop and deepen religious education within those six schools.   Towards those ends, we used qualitative and quantitative tools to assess and understand the religious beliefs and religious actions of the students attending these six Modern Orthodox high schools and worked with these schools to understand and address the strengths and weaknesses in their programs.

Our data about Jewish day school students, while far-ranging, has been particularly useful in terms of analyzing a phenomenon that has been called ‘half-Shabbos’.  Whereas some reporting about this phenomenon has been primarily conjecture, our quantitative study has provided a clear window into the beliefs and actions of a representative sample of Jewish youth.  We have shared some of our findings with the Jewish community in a Letter to the (Jewish Week) Editor. 

Our findings are drawn from the JewBALE (Jewish Beliefs Actions and Living Evaluation) which is a quantitative tool developed by Scott Goldberg, Ph.D.  This measurement tool consists of over 100 questions asking students to describe the degree to which they agree with belief statements and the level to which they perform religious actions.  We invite you to learn more about the development and content validity of the scale or learn more about the content, reliability, and participants in our survey at the bottom of this page. 

Question: I do not keep Shabbat in public?

 

In particular, we have found that:

• 17.7%  of adolescents attending Modern Orthodox Yeshiva High Schools are texting on Shabbos
• There are no differences between males and females when it comes to texting on Shabbos
  
• 16-year-olds report texting the most on Shabbos
  
• 13.5% also use cell phones on Shabbos
• 15.5% go on the internet on Shabbos
• 10% of students surveyed attending M.O. schools don’t keep Shabbos in public
• The mean for texting on Shabbos (1.18) was significantly higher than that for those who violate Shabbos in public (.88) implying that significantly more adolescents than just those who violate are texting on Shabbos (using paired samples t-test)

Question: I go on the internet on Shabbat.

Content Validity

Items were constructed by interviewing a group of ten Orthodox Rabbis and three women in leadership positions in the Jewish community.    This was done in order to ascertain that the categories of belief and action would represent traditional Orthodox beliefs and activities.  Based on feedback from these experts and based on the results of a confirmatory factor analysis, 16 factors were identified, including 10 categories of action and 8 categories of belief.  These experts helped identify the constructs as comprising religious beliefs and actions as mentioned above.

Reliability

This study looked at three composite scores from the JewBALE measure: Total Actions, Total Beliefs, and Spirituality.  The Total Beliefs variable was constructed by taking the average scores of each belief subscale and then dividing that score by the total amount of belief subscales.  Similarly, the Total Actions variable was constructed by taking the average scores of each actions subscale and dividing that number by the total amount of actions subscales.  Cronbach’s alphas for this study were .86 and .89 for Total Actions and Total Beliefs, respectively.

Participants

The sample consisted of 1253 participants who came from six modern Orthodox Jewish high schools.  Three of the six schools were co-educational and the remaining three were single gender (2 all-male, 1 all-female).  Nearly two-thirds of the participants, 63.9%, were male and 36.1% were female.  The age ranged from 13 to 18 with the mean age being 15.59 (SD=1.25).  Although the participants attended Modern Orthodox Schools, not all of the students affiliate with Modern Orthodoxy.  Nearly 91% associate with being Modern Orthodox while the remaining 9% was split between Chasidish, Charedi/Yeshivish, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and not affiliated.  Eighty-four and a half percent (84.5%) of the participants were of Ashkenazi descent, 9.2% were of Sephardi descent, 2.7% were of Persian descent, and 3.5% were of another ethnic background.