Center for the Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 4412 Sewell Social Sciences Building, Madison, WI, 53706, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2020 Oct;262:113048. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113048. Epub 2020 May 19.
A body of research dating back to Durkheim has linked religious environments to population health and mortality rates. Scholars have argued that local religious subcultures influence population health through important pathways, including a community's propensity to invest in health-shaping institutions - such as public hospitals. A noticeable shortcoming of this literature, however, is a lack of evidence that these mechanisms exist as proposed. This study uses county-level data from the 2010 Religious Congregations and Membership Study and the 2012 U.S. Census of Governments to examine contextual religion's relationship with public investment in health-shaping institutions. Findings suggest that associations between religious traditions and institutional investment explain a significant and notable portion of the total effect of these traditions on mortality rates. This manuscript applies a more refined approach to studying health-shaping investment, and the results suggest interesting new directions in the study of cultural determinants of population health.
从涂尔干（Durkheim）时代开始，就有大量研究将宗教环境与人群健康和死亡率联系起来。学者们认为，地方宗教亚文化通过重要途径影响人群健康，包括社区投资于健康塑造机构的倾向，例如公立医院。然而，这一文献的一个明显缺陷是缺乏证据表明这些机制如所提议的那样存在。本研究使用 2010 年宗教教派和成员调查以及 2012 年美国政府普查的县级数据，考察了背景宗教与健康塑造机构公共投资之间的关系。研究结果表明，宗教传统与制度投资之间的关联解释了这些传统对死亡率总影响的显著部分。本研究采用了一种更精细的方法来研究健康塑造投资，结果表明，在研究人口健康的文化决定因素方面，有一些有趣的新方向。
