Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 52, Issue 6 S294-S305, Copyright © 1997 by The Gerontological Society of America
Religion among disabled and nondisabled persons I: cross-sectional patterns in health practices, social activities, and well-being
EL Idler and SV Kasl
Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, USA. idler@rci.rutgers.edu
What is the relationship between religious involvement and functional
disability among elderly people? Is being disabled different for those who
frequently attend religious services? Does religious involvement have an
effect on subsequent change in disability? Deriving our hypotheses from
traditional theories in the sociology of religion, these questions are
explored in these two related articles. Both employ data from the New Haven
site of the Established Populations for the Epidemiologic Study of the
Elderly (N = 2812). In the first, cross- sectional correlates of religious
involvement and disability are examined at the baseline of the study,
including multiple indicators of health practices, social activities, and
subjective well-being. We test for interactions between religious
attendance and disability. Findings are (a) that religious involvement in
1982 is tied to a broad array of behavioral and psychosocial resources, (b)
that these resources are associated primarily with attendance at services,
and not with subjective feelings of religiousness, and (c) that some of
these associations are especially pronounced among disabled respondents.
