Religious service attendance, health behaviors and well-being—an outcome-wide longitudinal analysis

Abstract

Background Previous studies of relationship between religiosity, health behaviors and well-being have showed mainly positive relationships, however, are very often limited to results of associative nature and subject to unmeasured confounding. This study focused on evaluating evidence for a positive association between religious service attendance (RSA), health behaviors and well-being in a longitudinal setting and robustness of these associations to unmeasured confounding. Methods Three waves (2009, 2011 and 2015) of the biennial longitudinal Polish household panel study with response from 6400 respondents were analyzed. Evidence for a positive and robust association between RSA and outcome variables was evaluated using outcome-wide regression analysis with control of all variables temporally prior to the exposure and sensitivity measures (E-values) to give information on the extent to which an unmeasured confounder would need to be associated with both the exposure and the outcomes. Results RSA is associated with reduced risk of unhealthy behaviors (smoking, alcohol use) and higher emotional well-being. These relationships are robust to substantial unmeasured confounding and difficult to explain by reference to other, unknown, variables. Evidence for a positive relationship between RSA and other well-being variables (social, physical) was less clear. Conclusions Religiosity may play an important role in public health, particularly in prevention of non-communicable diseases. The strong and robust associations between RSA and some health behaviors (i.e. tobacco use, alcohol abuse) and emotional well-being should arguably be taken into account in health education, health promotion programs, health prevention policy and psychotherapeutic approaches, particularly in more religious populations.

Connections between Family Assets and Positive Youth Development: The Association between Parental Monitoring and Affection with Leisure-Time Activities and Substance Use

“…Previous studies have found results with similarities and differences with ours. Most of them found that church attendance is negatively associated with substance use [43,[62][63][64][65]. Religious salience has been found to have less effect on substance use [62,65] or even no effect [43], which would be in accordance with our results.…”

The Role of Financial Fragility and Financial Control for Well-Being

“…An outcome-wide approach was applied, in which multiple outcomes were considered for a single exposure (VanderWeele 2017a). This approach has been theoretically argued (VanderWeele 2017a;VanderWeele et al 2020b, a) and empirically confirmed as effective in presenting temporal associations across the whole spectrum of outcomes (Białowolski et al 2019;Chen et al 2019;Chen and Vanderweele 2018;Kim et al 2020;Pawlikowski et al 2019;Steptoe and Fancourt 2020;Węziak-Białowolska et al 2018). It has the advantage of avoiding cherry-picking of significant results only, limits the risk of p-hacking (Head et al 2015;Lakens 2015) and seems to facilitate reporting of the so-called 'negative' or 'non-significant' findings, which has been already proven problematic in scientific publishing due to resistance of journal editors to publish negative results (Fanelli 2010(Fanelli , 2012Ioannidis 2005;Matosin et al 2014).…”

“…Community engagement, volunteering, voting in the last elections and religious service attendance (self-reported; from Wave 1) were also considered in this study because of their associations with well-being (Bloemraad and Terriquez 2016;Lim and Putnam 2010;Van-derWeele et al 2016a, b), and the protective role against financial distress (Krause 1987;Peirce et al 1996;Renneboog and Spaenjers 2012). Since there is some empirical evidence supporting their discriminatory role, the analysis accounted for labor market status (employed, looking for a job, not working), and perception of financial situation and material deprivation (worrying about expenses, food, safety, and housing) (Arber et al 2014;Green and Leeves 2013), as well as lifestyle factors (practicing a sport, drinking and smoking [Pawlikowski et al 2019]). Finally, in each regression, we controlled for the baseline values of the outcome variables (in 2017; Wave 1) to reduce confounding and the possibility of reverse causation.…”

Psychological Climate for Caring and Work Outcomes: A Virtuous Cycle

“…This methodological approach to establish relationships has been successfully adopted in the fields of well-being in work life [ 25 ], households’ financial behaviors [ 116 ], religiosity [ 117 , 118 ], social psychiatry [ 115 , 119 ], and epidemiology [ 120 , 121 ], among others.…”