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Religious Attendance, Stress, and Happiness in South Korea: Do Gender and Religious Affiliation Matter?

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An Erratum to this article was published on 13 November 2013

Abstract

Is religious attendance positively associated with happiness in South Korea? If yes, can religious attendance buffer against the harmful effect of stress on happiness? Moreover, do gender and religious affiliation modify these associations? This study addresses these questions with data from 2009 Korean General Social Survey which is a nationally representative survey (N = 1,599). Ordinal least square regression analyses reveal that although the effect size is relatively small, religious attendance is associated with a higher level of happiness in South Korea. However, this positive effect holds only for women and only for Protestants. In addition, an interaction effect between religious attendance and stress is observed for women only; the negative association between stress and happiness is weakened among those women who report more frequent church attendance. In this regard, a high level of church attendance buffers against the deleterious effects of stress on happiness for women. I discuss the implications of the findings with regard to theories about religion, mental health, and gender in South Korean context.

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Notes

  1. The question assessing the household income per month in the original survey was asked based on the Korean currency (won). This study, for the sake of reader’s convenience, converts Korean currency to US dollars, with the conversion rate of 1,000 won to 1 dollar.

  2. Those affiliated with other religion are excluded from ANOVA because they are too few in numbers (N = 12).

  3. As one of the reviewers pointed out, one needs to be cautious in interpreting the statistically non-significant coefficients of the interaction terms for Buddhists (model 3 in Table 4) and for Protestants (model 6 in Table 4). Given that the magnitude of the unstandardized coefficients of these interaction terms are close to and even greater than that of the unstandardized coefficient of the interaction term for women (model 6 in Table 3), one cannot quickly reach the conclude that there is no significant interaction effect for Buddhists and Protestants. In addition, the sample size for Buddhists and Protestants is smaller than that of women, which may lead to incorrectly rejecting the null hypothesis. Taken together, one needs to be open to the possibility that there may be some significant interaction effects for Buddhist and for Protestants, in spite of the fact that the coefficients are not statistically significant.

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks Daniel Olson and his informal seminar group for their helpful comments as well as the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Purdue University, 700 W. State St, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Jong Hyun Jung

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Jung, J.H. Religious Attendance, Stress, and Happiness in South Korea: Do Gender and Religious Affiliation Matter?. Soc Indic Res 118, 1125–1145 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-013-0459-8

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