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Religious Coping and Depression in Young Adulthood: Effects of Global Stress Exposure and Pre-Teenage Religious Service Attendance

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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

This paper builds upon previous research on the association between religiosity and depressive symptomatology in young adults by focusing on the coping aspects of religious involvement (use of beliefs, comfort seeking, and prayer). Data come from a representative sample of Miami-Dade County, Florida, youths interviewed initially at around age 11 and then at age 19 to 21 (N = 1,210). OLS regression models demonstrate an inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship between religious coping and depression which, in subgroup analyses, applies only to females, and specifically to those young women reporting above-average stress exposure who had attended religious services at least once a week during their middle school years. No association is found among those reporting lower stress exposure or less frequent pre-teenage service attendance. These results provide evidence that early religious exposure on a regular basis and high global stress exposure may be essential preconditions for a relationship at the aggregate level between current religious coping and depressive symptomatology in young adults.

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Notes

  1. This study found no significant interaction of either race/ethnicity or parental socioeconomic status with subjective religiosity in predicting depressive symptomatology.

  2. The Eliassen et al. (2005) index of subjective religiosity (internal reliability = .84) combines the three indicators of Young Adult religious coping being used in the present analyses with a basically cognitive measure of religious self-perception.

  3. The original 1990–92 early adolescent study (Waves 1–3) had been funded as an all-male investigation. However, discomfort with this arrangement, in the context of emerging inclusiveness policies, led Vega and colleagues to add the small sample of girls. Detailed analyses by these investigators provided assurance that those completing the questionnaires in grades 6–7 were highly representative of the population from which they were drawn, and that this was also true of those successfully surveyed in grades 8–9, despite a nearly 20 percent attrition across the three data points (Vega and Gil 1998).

  4. To supplement the Wave 4 sample of females, 1,000 new girls were randomly selected from 1990 Miami-Dade class rosters for grades 6 and 7 and stratified to achieve target ethnic distributions. However, since no data on Pre-Teen religious service attendance were obtained from them, girls added at Wave 4 are not included in the analyses reported in this paper.

  5. Items 12, 15, 16, 17, and 36 from the Turner and Avison (2003:502) Chronic Strain inventory are omitted in the present analyses. Replacing them are the following: “Your partner/boyfriend/girlfriend doesn’t understand you”; “You are not sure you can trust your partner/boyfriend/girlfriend”; “One of the worst things about being a parent is that you feel you can’t get out”; “Children get on your nerves if you have to be with them all day”; and “You often feel that you can’t stand the child(ren)/kids a moment longer.”

  6. Correlations between the three religious coping items are strong, ranging from +.605 to +.668, yet not so strong as to suggest problematic duplication in measurement. Reliability testing for the religious coping index (alpha = .839 with 1,207 valid cases) shows that, if turning to religion or spiritual beliefs were omitted, alpha would be reduced to .801; if seeking comfort from religion were omitted, alpha would be reduced to .754; or if praying more than usual were omitted, alpha would be reduced to .773.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by grant 5 R01 DA10772-03 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to R. Jay Turner. I thank John Taylor, Don Lloyd, Jay Turner, Don Barrett, Marie Cornwall, Anthony Blasi, and several anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and advice. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2004 annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, GA.

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  1. Department of Social Sciences, University of Houston-Downtown, One Main Street, N1067, Houston, TX, 77002-1014, USA

    A. Henry Eliassen

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Correspondence to A. Henry Eliassen.

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Eliassen, A.H. Religious Coping and Depression in Young Adulthood: Effects of Global Stress Exposure and Pre-Teenage Religious Service Attendance. Rev Relig Res 55, 413–433 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-013-0110-9

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