To that extent, her research shows that students in families with higher intrinsic religiosity in Pakistan, where Islam is the predominant religion, have produced students who have done better in school and are more likely to spend their time studying. Specifically, Malik wanted to compare test scores from those students with parents who have a high degree of intrinsic religiosity, to those who practiced Islam for social or other reasons.
“We found that outward religiosity, where you go for prayer or you're reciting the Quran, that has literally no impact on test scores. Schooling is completely unaffected by it. But it is the deeper motivation of religion, which is what we call the intrinsic religiosity, which actually has a positive effect – it is associated with increased child's attendance in school, better performance in test scores, and less chance of engaging in various forms of work early in their life. In sum, intrinsic religiosity is a positive force in human capital development,” she said.
The findings of this paper go one step further to show that religion relative to many traditional factors, such as household’s income, parents’ and children’s cognitive abilities, and parents’ own education background, by far plays the most important role in children’s human capital outcomes. Malik said that more needs to be done to explore a relatively unknown field, which is currently dominated by associating religious denominations with various outcomes. In Pakistan, and other predominantly Muslim countries, the concept of deep spirituality is a common guiding force for day-to-day activities, decisions, and interactions, and such factors could shed light on society as a whole.
“I started off by thinking that it's going to have some negative effect on the child's allocation of hours. But turns out research showed a different path that instead religiosity can be a positive strong guiding force in deciding student's human capital decisions,” she said.
She found that students from households with a high degree of inward religiosity or youth who came from families with that belief system performed better in school and were likely to attend more classes.
But what was equally surprising is that Muslim youth in countries whereby Islam was not the majority religion were also managing to maintain healthy childhoods without feeling confused about their identity.