Communicative Dissonance Management Among Religious Young Adults in Nightlife Contexts

Abstract

Religious identity and nightlife participation represent competing normative demands that many young adults navigate simultaneously. This study examined how religious young adults experienced value–behavior inconsistency when engaging in nightlife drinking and clubbing, and how they managed the resulting tension through communicative strategies. Cognitive dissonance theory and accounts theory served as complementary analytic frameworks, positioning dissonance reduction as both a psychological and an inherently communicative process. A qualitative design was employed, with semi-structured interviews conducted with eight college students aged 18 to 19 years at an Indonesian university, comprising four male and four female participants from Muslim and Christian backgrounds. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings revealed three central patterns. First, participants consistently positioned religion as a foundational moral framework within which nightlife drinking and clubbing were interpreted as inconsistent with religious expectations. Second, dissonance was experienced primarily as post-behavioral emotional and identity-based discomfort, including guilt, shame, and feelings of hypocrisy, intensifying after leaving nightlife settings rather than during participation. Third, participants employed two broad communicative account-making strategies to reduce dissonance: justification accounts, involving boundary-setting and moral reframing that repositioned nightlife participation as conditionally acceptable, and apology and conciliation accounts, involving repentance, prayer, and compensatory religious practices that restored moral self-consistency. These findings demonstrated that dissonance reduction operated as an ongoing communicative regulation process rather than a single resolution, enabling participants to sustain a workable religious identity across competing social contexts.