Abstract
Research suggests that people with a strong sense of belonging in a congregation tend to rate their health in a more favorable way. However, relatively little is known about how a sense of belonging arises in a congregation. The purpose of the current study is to see if five different dimensions of church-based social support are associated with a sense of belonging in a congregation. In the process, an effort is made to contribute to the literature in two potentially important ways. First, the relationship between church-based support and belonging is evaluated with data from a nationwide survey of older Mexican–Americans. Second, tests are conducted to see if there are gender differences in the relationship between church-based support and belonging. The findings suggest that for the sample as a whole, receiving more of each type of church-based social support is associated with a stronger sense of belonging. Moreover, the results reveal that the relationship between all five types of church-based support and belonging is stronger for older Mexican–American men than for older Mexican–American women.
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Notes
A logistic regression analysis was conducted to get a preliminary sense of whether the item non-response in this study occurred randomly. First a binary variable was created that contrasts study participants who had a missing value on one or more of the indicators that assess belonging, church-based support, or acculturation (scored 1) with study participants who did not have any missing values on these measures (scored 0). Second, this binary variable was regressed on age, sex, church attendance, the frequency of private prayer, and affiliation with the Catholic Church (only two cases had missing values on any of these independent variables). The data suggest that only church attendance was significantly associated with the binary outcome. More specifically, the results indicate that older Mexican Americans who attend church more often have less item non-response. Although it is not possible to make a conclusive statement based on these data, it appears that bias arising from item non-response is not substantial.
Some readers may wonder why tests for all five statistical interactions were not conducted in the same regression equation. The reason is straightforward. Centering variables on their means reduces the size of the correlation between the components that make up a multiplicative term (e.g., emotional support received from fellow church members and gender) but it does not reduce the correlations among two or more multiplicative terms (see Aneshensel 2002). As a result, the correlations among the multiplicative terms may become prohibitively high. We explored this possibility and found that the multiple correlation among sex, the church-based support measures and all five multiplicative terms was .959. Therefore, in order to avoid problems arising from multicollinearity, each interaction effect was evaluated with a separate equation.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging (RO1 AG026259) and the John Templeton Foundation.
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Krause, N., Hayward, R.D. Church-Based Social Support and a Sense of Belonging in a Congregation Among Older Mexican–Americans. Rev Relig Res 55, 251–273 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-012-0054-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-012-0054-5