Life Satisfaction and Religion: A Reanalysis

Author(s): Christopher Kirk Hadaway

Source: Social Forces, Vol. 57, No. 2, Special Issue (Dec., 1978), pp. 636-643
Published by: Oxford University Press
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Life Satisfaction and Religion:
A Reanalysis

CHRISTOPHER KIRK HADAWAY, Universityof

Massachusetts

ABSTRACT
Findings by Campbellet al. in The Quality of American Life
suggestingthat religiouspeopletendto be somewhatless satisfiedwith their
lives than the nonreligiousarereexaminedin this paper.Using thesamedata
sourceandvariablesit is shownthat theirinterpretation is in error,and that
to the contrary,religionfunctionsmoreas a resourcethanas compensation.

In recent years the quality of life in American society has received a good
deal of attention. But for the most part studies of life satisfaction and
happiness have relied either on local samples or the few subjective items
found in such national samples as the National Opinion ResearchCenter's
general social surveys and the Survey ResearchCenter's national election
studies. Fortunately,however, the recent Quality of AmericanLife Survey
conducted by the Survey Research Center has made possible much more
complete analyses of life satisfactionin the United States. The first body of
findings to be reported from this survey was The Qualityof AmericanLife
(Campbellet al.).
Campbell et al. treated a great range of issues, but my primary
interest is with their findings about the relationship between religiosity
and life satisfaction. A number of these findings contradictedearlierworks
that had shown religious persons to be more satisfied with their lives than
is the tendency for nonreligious people. In this research note I report a
reanalysis of their results in order to examine more fully the empirical
relationship among religiosity and feelings of satisfaction.

Research into Religion and Quality of Life

PREVIOUS STUDIES

The earliest sociological investigations into the relationship between reli-

gion and quality of life were conducted at the community level. A num-
*The data used in this paper were made available through the Inter-University Consortium
for Political Research. The author is solely responsible for analysis and interpretation. I thank
Wade Clark Roof and James D. Wright for suggestions and helpful criticism.

636

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 Life Satisfaction & Religion / 637

ber of studies (Angell; Thorndike; Weir) tried to relate community-level

rates of religious participation or church membership with rates of mental
health, adjustment, suicide, and various forms of deviance. But these
studies proved inconclusive because of inconsistent results and the relative
meaninglessness of "community religiosity."
Later studies treated religion chiefly as an indicator of social partici-
pation and looked at religiosity at the individual level rather than as an
aggregate characteristic. The most extensive of these was conducted by the
Joint Commission on Mental Illness and reported that church attendance
was positively associated with various indicators of adjustment, happi-
ness, and satisfaction (Gurin et al.; McCann). In another study, Wilson
looked at what could best be called "religious traditionalism" and found
that religious students tended to be happier than nonreligious students.
Recent national survey data were used by Spreitzer and Snyder, and
Clemente and Sauer to determine what social background factors were the
best predictors of life satisfaction. In both cases church attendance was
found to be positively associated with life satisfaction, even under a series
of statistical controls. The consistent finding that emerges is that religious
persons tend to be somewhat happier and more satisfied with life than
nonreligious individuals. And this supports the common interpretation
that religious faith adds something to an individual's life, whether in terms
of personal meaning or social integration.

THE FINDINGS OF CAMPBELL ET AL.

Religion was not a major variable in The Quality of American Life but was
included as a possible resource which could lead to feelings of life satisfac-
tion along with many other factors. Thus, although not central in the
Campbell et al. study, a fairly large number of findings are reported
concerning religion and its influence on quality of life. A number of these
findings are consistent with the literature and with their expectations of
religion as a personal resource, such as the relationship between satisfac-
tion with religion and a measure of overall life satisfaction. However, in
their analysis of self-reported religious mindedness, the results appear to
be strikingly different. Campbell et al. report negative relationships be-
tween religious mindedness and both a composite scale of personal com-
petence and a composite scale of mental well-being. About the former the
authors state:
People who express relatively little religious faith tend to express stronger feelings
of personal competence, a fact which might well be expected given the atmosphere
of control over life lying outside one's hands that is characteristicboth of many
religious views and of the less personally competent alternatives in the original
scale (364-5).

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638 / Social Forces / vol. 57:2, december 1978

And as to the latter they state:

It seems most probable that people, whose life situations are, for other reasons,
relativelyunfortunateand who lack thereforeeven average feelings of well-being,
may be more disposed to cling to religious values as a compensatory resource. In
any event, it seems quite clear that religious faith does not function as a resourcein
the same way as our other resource variablesdo (370).
Since these findings seemed to contradict most of the previous
empirical literature on religion and life satisfaction it seemed appropriate to
check the results using the same survey data and items. What follows is a
report on the findings of this reanalysis.

Methods and Analysis

THE SAMPLE

The source of data is the Quality of American Life Survey conducted by the
Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan during July and
August, 1971. The sample was drawn from the national population of
persons 18 years or older, living in households within the coterminous
United States, exclusive of households on military reservations. A total of
2,164 personal interviews were collected. Nine questions in the survey
dealt in some way with religiosity plus the usual question on religious
group identification. Also, a very large number of life satisfaction items
were included. In this analysis I look at four measures of religiosity and
four indicators of life satisfaction.

FaithandPersonalCompetence
My primary concern is with those variables used by Campbell et al. which
produced the negative relationships that were mentioned. Table 1 shows
the relationship between faith, an item which asked the individual about
his level of religious mindedness,l and a scale of personal competence.2
The correlation between the two variables in Table 1 is weak, but it is
clear that those to whom religion is important tend to express stronger
feelings of personal competence. This finding is, of course, the opposite of
that reported by Campbell et al. using the same measures. Apparently The
Quality of American Life is in error since it reported that "people who
express relatively little religious faith tend to express stronger feelings of
personal competence" (364). At this point it also seemed likely that the
other unusual finding was incorrect since it involved the same measure of
religiosity.

Faithand Well-Being
The index of well-being3 was perhaps the best measure of overall satisfac-
tion with life that was used in the original study. It was constructed from

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 Life Satisfaction & Religion / 639

Table 1. RELIGIOUSMINDEDNESS BY PERSONAL COMPETENCE(N = 2,128)

Religious Mindedness

Personal More Than Less Than Not

Competence Very Average Average Average At All
Score (N = 334) (N = 449) (N = 900) (N = 319) (N = 126)

Low* 20.7% 23.2% 19.00% 20.7% 12.77%

31.7 33.2 23.9 25.1 30.2
20.0 20.0 26.1 24.1 25.4
21.3 15.6. 20.0 21.0 23.8
High 6.3 8.o 11.0 9.1 7.9

100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

r = . 07
(P <.01)

*A low score in this case means more positive feelings of

personal competence.

nine highly related indicators of life satisfaction and probably gets at life
satisfactionbetter than does any one item alone. Table2 shows the relation-
ship between faith and the index of well-being, which in this case is
recoded into four categories.
As is reported in The Quality of American Life, this relationship is
strongerthan the previous one. However, the authors again incorrectlycall
the relationship negative. Actually, stronger religious faith is associated
with greaterfeelings of personal well-being ratherthan the opposite. Table
3 gives a further indication of the consistency of the relationship between
religiosity and life satisfaction. In addition to the variables already dis-
cussed, three religion items and two more life satisfaction measures are
added in the table.
Referring directly to the table, the correlationswithin the box are
those between the four religion items and the four life satisfaction mea-
sures. As can be seen, in each case there is a weak to moderate positive
relationship between the indicators. By far the weakest relationships are
between personal competence and the religiosity items, but this is not so
surprising since the conceptual link between religion and feelings of con-
trol over one's life is not as clearas the link between religion and feelings of
life satisfaction. Religion is traditionally seen as giving hope, meaning,
security, and optimism to the individual but religion is rarely connected
with the ability to plan ahead and to control the direction of one's life.
However, the relationship would remain positive because of the tendency

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 640 I Social Forces / vol. 57:2, december 1978

Table 2. RELIGIOUS
MINDEDNESS
BYTHEINDEXOFWELL-BEING
(N = 2,154)

Religious Mindedness

More Than Less Than Not

Well-Being Very Average Average Average At All
Score (N = 341) (N = 455) (N = 908) (N = 300) (N = 130)

Low* 39.3% 31.2% 31.8% 22.5% 20.7%

25.2 33.4 30.9 29.4 23.1
25.2 26.2 27.8 37.2 33.1
High 10.3 9.2 9.5 10.9 23.1

100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

r = .17
(P <.001)

*A low score in this case means more positive feelings of

wel l-being.

Table 3. INTERCORRELATION
OFMAJORVARIABLES
(N - 2,164)

Variable 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1. Rel&igious Mindedness .59 .60 .46 .07 .12 .07 .13
2. Importance of Faitha .74 .50 .02* .16 .10 .15
3. Religious
satisfactionb .57 .04* .20 .14 .21
4. Church attendance .o8 .17 .13 .16
5. Personal competence .34 .30 .30
6. Index of well-being .91 .67
7. Total life
sat i sfact ionc .44
8. Life: rewarding
or disappointing?d

Note: The figures within the box represent the correlations between the
four religion variables and the four life satisfaction variables. All
correlations are Pearson's r coefficients.
*P>.01, all other correlations significant at the .001 level.
aThis was a self-rating scale in which the respondent rates the importance
of "having a strong religious faith." The scale ranged from (1) "'extremely
important" to (5) ''not at all important."
bThis was another self-rating scale in which the respondent rated the
amount of satisfaction he receives from his religion. The scale ranged from
(1) ''a very great deal'' to (7) "none.''
CThis item was a major component of the index of well-being. It was a
scale which ranged from (1) "completely satisfied" to (7) "completely
dissatisfied" with life as a whole.
dThe respondent was asked to describe his present life by rating it on a
seven-point scale which ranged in this case from (1) "rewarding" to (7)
"d i sappo i nt i ng. "

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 Life Satisfaction & Religion / 641

of satisfied people (who are more religious on the average) also to have
more control over their lives.
Further analysis reveals essentially the same results as Table 3. I
have not found a single instance in which any measure of religiosity was
negatively associated with any of the life satisfaction items among the
general population of respondents. Always there is a positive relationship,
though of course the magnitude of the relationship is in some instances
quite small.

Discussion

The focus of this inquiry is on the part played by religion in the life of the
individual. Is religion something which helps Americans to be happier
with their lives, or is it a compensation for those suffering various sorts of
deprivation? Theoretical traditions in sociology point to both effects, but
recent empirical research tends to provide more support for the resource
interpretation than for the deprivation argument (Bibby and Brinkerhoff;
Demerath and Roof; Stark). Cambell et al. in their study initially looked at
religion expecting it to act as a resource, but their findings seemed to
indicate the opposite-religion as compensation. This reanalysis shows
their original expectations are supported since the religiosity variables
consistently produced positive relationships with measures of happiness,
satisfaction, and feelings of well-being. Thus, rather than being problem-
atic, The Quality of AmericanLife is another in a consistent series of findings
which reveal religion as a resource.
Undoubtedly religion has different meanings to individuals, and for
some individuals compensation may be the primary function of religion.
My analysis in no way is intended to deny that religion may function to
meet the needs of the deprived, but only to note that in the general popu-
lation religion is not something that persons tend to seek out in reaction
to their misery. Exactly how and why religion has this overall effect may
be a result of providing meaning and belonging (Greeley) or it may be a
result of a religious ideology which expresses an optimistic view of life
(McCready). To answer questions of how and why, we need to probe the
relationship between religiosity and quality of life in various ethnic groups,
different religious traditions, and other collectivities where religion may
have a different meaning.
It is best to be cautious in generalizing from zero-order correlations;
there is always the possibility of a spurious association. In this analysis I
have not controlled for the other well-known predictors of life satisfaction
because it has been my primary purpose to correct an error and point to the
consistency of a relationship, rather than argue the merits of religious faith
as a strong predictor relative to health, income, age, ethnicity and the like.

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642 / Social Forces / vol. 57:2, december 1978

Still, there are grounds for stating that the relationship does not seem
spurious. Several previous studies that included religion in their search for
the best correlates of happiness and life satisfaction employed partial
correlation (Spreitzer and Snyder) and multiple regression procedures
(Clemente and Sauer), and found that church attendance was significantly
related to life satisfaction while statistical controls were in effect. Further,
the relationships between religion and life satisfaction as reported in The
Qualityof AmericanLifeinvolved multivariateprocedures. Thus if the incor-
rect signs reported in the text are ignored the tables can be seen to give
support for a non-spurious positive relationship between faith and the
index of well-being.
These findings are not meant to reflect adversely on the overall
value of The Quality of American Life. In fact they add to the study by
showing that faith does indeed act as a resource in the way that Campbell
et al. originally anticipated. The errors were the simple result of incorrect
signs for two relationships rather than a serious problem with the entire
analysis.4

Notes
1. This question read as follows: "In general how religious minded would you say you are-
very religious minded, more than average, average, less than average, or not at all religious
minded?"
2. The personal competence scale was based on four items having to do with the degree of
control that an individual feels he can exercise over the terms of his life. For the questions
employed see Campbellet al. (363).
3. The index of well-being was a composite scale composed of nine life satisfactionitems
including an overallsatisfactionwith life question and eight items which asked the individual
to ratehis life on a continuumbetween two opposites. Forthe formulaand the questions used
see Campbellet al. (50).
4. The authors have acknowledged in a personal communication that their findings are
incorrectand that they resulted froma mistakenassumption as to the recoding of the "faith"
item.

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