Abstract
This chapter introduces a set of 13 empirical review chapters contained in Part I of this volume. Each review focuses on relations between religious and spiritual (R/S) factors and health variables. This present chapter explains the reviews’ collective purpose, distinctive public health focus, and common structure. The first of these reviews (chapter “Model of Individual Health Effects from Religion/Spirituality: Supporting Evidence”) examines evidence that supports a widely used generic model of the effects of R/S on individual health. Next is a review of R/S effects on morbidity and mortality (chapter “Religious/Spiritual Effects on Physical Morbidity and Mortality”). After that, the next two review chapters focus on R/S and social factors, such as socioeconomic status and income inequality (chapter “Social and Community-Level Factors in Health Effects from Religion/Spirituality”) and social identity and discrimination (chapter “Social Identity and Discrimination in Religious/Spiritual Influences on Health”). Then, the next seven review chapters examine evidence relevant to major public health subfields: nutrition, infectious diseases, environmental health, maternal/child health, health policy and management, public health education and promotion, mental health, and clinical practice. Drawing on data from the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH), each subfield is contextualized in relation to proportions of enrolled students in US schools of public health.
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Oman, D. (2018). Reviewing Religion/Spirituality Evidence from a Public Health Perspective: Introduction. In: Oman, D. (eds) Why Religion and Spirituality Matter for Public Health. Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73966-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73966-3_2
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