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How Religious Coping is Used Relative to Other Coping Strategies Depends on the Individual’s Level of Religiosity and Spirituality

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Abstract

Results from empirical studies on the role of religiosity and spirituality in dealing with stress are frequently at odds, and the present study investigated whether level of religiosity and spirituality is related to the way in which religious coping is used relative to other coping strategies. A sample of 616 university undergraduate students completed the Brief COPE (Carver in Int J Behav Med 4:92–100, 1997) questionnaire and was classified into groups of participants with lower and higher levels of religiosity and spirituality, as measured by the WHOQOL-SRPB (WHOQOL-SRPB Group in Soc Sci Med 62:1486–1497, 2006) instrument. For participants with lower levels, religious coping tended to be associated with maladaptive or avoidant coping strategies, compared to participants with higher levels, where religious coping was more closely related to problem-focused coping, which was also supported by multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. The results of the present study thus illustrate that investigating the role of religious coping requires more complex approaches than attempting to assign it to one higher order factor, such as problem- or emotion-focused coping, and that the variability of findings reported by previous studies on the function of religious coping may partly be due to variability in religiosity and spirituality across samples.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health & Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, North Shore Campus, Private Bag 92006, Auckland, 1142, New Zealand

    Christian U. Krägeloh, Penny Pei Minn Chai, Daniel Shepherd & Rex Billington

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  1. Christian U. Krägeloh
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  2. Penny Pei Minn Chai
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  3. Daniel Shepherd
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Correspondence to Christian U. Krägeloh.

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Krägeloh, C.U., Chai, P.P.M., Shepherd, D. et al. How Religious Coping is Used Relative to Other Coping Strategies Depends on the Individual’s Level of Religiosity and Spirituality. J Relig Health 51, 1137–1151 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-010-9416-x

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