Antecedents of adult wellbeing: adolescent religiosity and health

Abstract

An extant of literature has demonstrated an apparent connection between religiosity and physical and psychological health, yet there is a scarcity of studies focussing on the impact of religion on health among children and adolescents. The current study examined associations between self‐report data on self‐image, physical and psychological health and death‐related cognitions in a large representative sample of German high‐school students. Almost 1,000 German adolescents (aged 14‐18 years) were administered a comprehensive series of questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety/depression, trait addiction, smoking and drinking behaviour, physical ill‐health reports, and self‐perception of self‐image, parental acceptance and educational attainment. Several statements were incorporated to assess self‐injury and suicidal ideation. Just over half of the adolescents (56.9 per cent) did not attend church at all. Level of school influenced church attendance with secondary school adolescents attending least. Religious denomination also exerted a major role on church attendance with Muslims attending most regularly followed by Roman Catholics and then Protestants. Males were more likely to be non‐attendees. Regular church attendees tended to adopt more healthy life‐styles, they exercised more regularly, smoked less, were more likely to display higher school grades in linguistic – but not mathematical – competency. Conversely, there was some indication that negative affect, reflected by higher scores on the social problems scale was higher among church attenders. Religiosity was scarcely related to suicidal ideation among adolescents.

Religious Activity and Pastoral Counseling Among Protestant Youth with SED

“…In terms of the characteristics of those youth that attend religious activities, previous studies have found that female teens attend more religious activities than males (Francis, 2000;Martin, Kirkcaldy, & Siefen, 2003;Office of Applied Studies, 2004;Steinman & Zimmerman, 2004). The present study did not find any gender differences; however, this may be due to the younger age of this sample (mean age 11.5 years) compared to the sample used by others (primarily adolescent).…”

“…However, only 15% met with a spiritual leader to aid in coping (Larson & Larson, 2003). Compared to other studies of youth, in general, these youth were more frequent participants in religious activities (Christian & Barbarin, 2001;Martin, Kirkcaldy, & Siefen, 2003). Specifically, a greater proportion of youth in this sample report participating in religious activities than youth of other samples.…”

Is it God or Just the Data that Moves in Mysterious Ways? How Well-Being Research may be Mistaking Faith for Virtue

“…Public religious activity (e.g., church attendance) also predicts well-being (Ferriss 2000;French and Joseph 1999;Laurencelle et al 2002;Martin et al 2003;Maselko and Kuzansky 2006)-however, the direction of causality is not obvious (i.e., healthier believers are more able to attend services). Furthermore, positive (e.g., acceptance and forgiveness, see Pargament et al 2004), but not negative religious coping (e.g., discontent, pleading, passivity/deferral etc.…”

Management of employee wellness in South Africa: Employer, service provider and union perspectives

“…Corbin, Lindey, Welk and Corbin (2002) describe wellness as a person's state of well-being that contributes to an improved quality of life. In addition, the literature uses the terms wellness and well-being interchangeably (Korhonen et al, 1998;Martin, Kirkcaldy & Siefen, 2003). This absence of a universal definition, and confusion about a preferred term to describe wellness, pose great difficulties to developing guidelines for good wellness practices in organisations.…”