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We used classification analysis to examine change in religiosity among baby boomers from young adulthood to early old age and how religiosity transition patterns are associated with psychological well-being in later life. In addition, we tested the gender difference in the above association. We applied latent class and latent transition analysis to...
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Purpose
To examine whether trajectories of health (depressive symptoms, psychological wellbeing, self-rated health, and body mass index) and health behaviors (smoking, heavy alcohol consumption, physical inactivity, and cannabis use) changed for individuals who first reported at least monthly religious attendance and then in subsequent study waves...
Citations
"Studies examining religiosity/spirituality (R/S), gender, parental education level and psychological well-being report divergent findings, most of them being on North American populations. This research aimed to explore the relationship between R/S and psychological well-being of Romanian emerging adults. The relationship between R/S and demographical variables such as gender and parents’ educational level was investigated. We explored these relationships in a sample of Romanian emerging adults, (N=468 female, 54.2%; Mage=24; Sd=8.68), 57.9% from theological faculties of various denominations and 42,1 % non-theological. Our findings show that R/S is higher as parents’ educational level is lower, with male emerging adults being more religious than female ones and theology students being more religious than non-theology ones. Moreover, the results revealed a significant relationship between R/S and some facets of psychological well-being. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, with emphasis on the particularities relevant for the Romanian sociocultural context."
BACKGROUND: Human flourishing offers a more inclusive and comprehensive assessment of well-being beyond the absence of mental illness. Research on religion and well-being has generally focused on singular measure of mental or physical well-being and emphasized different stages rather than longer stretches of the life course. This study seeks to address these gaps.
PURPOSE: We focus on the interaction between transitions in religiosity and educational attainment in predicting flourishing in mid-life adults. By positioning the effects of transitions in religiosity across levels of education—a common axis of stratification for religious belief and behavior—we test the enhanced resource perspective that the better educated may benefit more from sustained or increased religiosity over the life course.
METHODS: Data for this study come from MIDUS, a nationally representative sample of United States adults (N = 3,030). We created a composite measure of flourishing across the psychological, social, and emotional domains and conducted a series of regression models.
RESULTS: We observed that people with stable high religiosity between childhood and adulthood had the best flourishing profiles, suggesting that the association between religiosity and flourishing may begin to take shape in childhood. We found that both stable high or increases in religiosity between childhood and adulthood were found to be most beneficial for the flourishing scores of the college educated compared to those with less than a college degree. We found no support for the hypothesis that the less educated “substitute” religion as a compensatory mechanism for their deficiency in secular resources.
CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS: While flourishing has typically been excluded as an outcome of study in the burgeoning religion-health literature, the results of the current study suggest much could be learned from its inclusion. At the population level, studying flourishing—with attention to differences by educational and religious dimensions—might represent a more useful way to understand how people can achieve a state of happiness and come to realize more meaningful lives.
This is submission is the introduction to complement the special issue on “Forgotten Variables in Religiosity and Spirituality Inquiry”
