Abstract
This chapter describes background and methods used in a set of 13 empirical review chapters contained in Part I of this volume (chapters “Model of Individual Health Effects from Religion/Spirituality: Supporting Evidence”, “Religious/Spiritual Effects on Physical Morbidity and Mortality”, Social and Community-Level Factors in Health Effects from Religion/Spirituality”, “Social Identity and Discrimination in Religious/Spiritual Influences on Health”, “Environmental Health Sciences, Religion, and Spirituality”, “Infectious Diseases, Religion, and Spirituality”, “Public Health Nutrition, Religion, and Spirituality”, “Maternal/Child Health, Religion, and Spirituality”, “Health Policy and Management, Religion, and Spirituality”, “Public Health Education, Promotion, and Intervention: Relevance of Religion and Spirituality”, “Mental Health, Religion, and Spirituality”, “Clinical Practice, Religion, and Spirituality” and “Weighing the Evidence: What is Revealed by 100+ Meta-Analyses and Systematic Reviews of Religion/Spirituality and Health?”).
Each of these thirteen review chapers focuses on relations between religious and spiritual (R/S) factors and health variables. This present chapter addresses the following 12 questions:
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1.
What common methods were employed across reviews?
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2.
What was done if systematic reviews were unavailable?
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3.
How do the reviews cover qualitative findings?
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4.
What are strengths and weaknesses of utilizing systematic reviews as “building blocks”?
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5.
How are religion and spirituality defined?
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6.
How do the reviews interpret findings that religious/spiritual factors have both favorable and unfavorable associations with health variables?
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7.
What about ethics?
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8.
How do religion and spirituality express themselves as living forces?
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9.
How many “dimensions” do religion and spirituality possess?
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10.
Who is religious/spiritual, and in what ways?
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11.
Were any public health subfields omitted?
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12.
How do religion/spirituality and stress “get into the body”?
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Notes
- 1.
At least one R/S-health study has been conducted in Antarctica, documenting stable mental health but a depletion over time of spiritual coping resources among 23 winter-over personnel (Joshi et al. 1998).
- 2.
For example, Adler et al. (1994), in discussing socioeconomic gradients, wrote that “The concept of individual control over existing life circumstances… might be a higher order variable that synthesizes or renders coherent a number of the factors reviewed here” (p. 22), also noting that “In a few diseases such as malignant melanoma and breast cancer, a reverse gradient is found…. study of the variation in the direction and degree of association of SES with specific diseases across time and countries would be valuable” (p. 16).
- 3.
As problematized here, the explanatory gap resides at an intermediate level of abstraction: The needed theoretical explanation is at a lower level of abstraction than theological questions of theodicy (explanations for the existence of evil), but at a higher level of abstraction than attributing, for example, worse outcomes in specific religious groups to specific group-level factors (e.g., religious doctrines mandating avoidance of blood transfusions or other medical procedures).
- 4.
Chapters that mention this dynamic model besides Chapter “Social and Community-Level Factors in Health Effects from Religion/Spirituality” include Chapter “Model of Individual Health Effects from Religion/Spirituality: Supporting Evidence” (some unfavorable health behaviors, such as obesity), Chapter “Social Identity and Discrimination in Religious/Spiritual Influences on Health” (mixed discrimination associations), Chapter “Environmental Health Sciences, Religion, and Spirituality” (mixed environmental attitude/practice associations), and Chapter “Health Policy and Management, Religion, and Spirituality” (mixed links with healthcare utilization).
- 5.
Other R/S dimensions were entered unabbreviated into the Handbook appendices, and therefore do not appear in Table 1. Several reviews of religious/spiritual measures and some annotated collections are available, although none is exhaustive (de Jager Meezenbroek et al. 2012; Fetzer Institute/National Institute on Aging Working Group 1999; Hill and Hood 1999; Kapuscinski and Masters 2010; Lewis 2008; Lucchetti et al. 2013; Monod et al. 2011; Selman et al. 2011a, b).
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Oman, D. (2018). Questions on Assessing the Evidence Linking Religion/Spirituality to Health. 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_16
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