A comparison of the perceptions of male students at coeducational and single gender Catholic high schools in regard to Catholic identity

The problem for the present study was that The Second Vatican Council mandated that Catholic schools manifest a strong Catholic identity. For the purposes of this study, Catholic identity was operationally defined in four categories: message, community, service, and worship. The purpose of this study was to compare the perceptions of boys in coeducational Catholic high schools to boys in single gender Catholic high schools in regard to Catholic identity. The researcher sought to examine the perceived manifestation of Catholic identity in the two educational models in order to discern whether the educational model may have some effect on student perception of Catholic identity.;The research methodology of this study was survey research. A researcher-designed survey instrument (The Catholic Identity Student Survey) was generated and distributed to senior male students in 25 Catholic secondary schools in the 13 regions of the National Catholic Education Association. One coeducational Catholic high school and one male single gender Catholic high school were chosen from each region with the exception of Region 8, in which no single gender school would consent to participate.;The survey instrument was made up of 20 items in a Likert scale format, one question in regard to the religion of the respondent, and one question in regard to the nature of the school (coeducational or single gender). The Likert scale had five ordered categories including the options of: strongly disagree, agree, no opinion, agree, and strongly agree. The 20 main items of the instrument revolved around the four aspects of Catholic identity: message, community, service, and worship. There were five items pertaining to each aspect of Catholic identity.;Using the ordinal logistic model to address the eight research questions of the present study, a probability was established for the most likely response for a given category (that is, message, community, service, worship) as a function of school type (that is, single gender or coeducational). An odds ratio was also analyzed for each category at each level of response, comparing single gender schools to coeducational schools.;The present study found that male students in coeducational Catholic high schools perceived a greater degree of Catholic identity in their school communities than did male students in single gender Catholic high schools. The categories of service and worship demonstrated differences in student perception between the two groups that were statistically significant (p values of .0335 and .0231 respectively).