Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Mar 23;19(7):3835. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19073835.
Older persons are often confronted with challenging events in their lives. Religion can offer them a way to deal with these challenges. The study of religious coping styles helps us to understand how people find support in their religion or wrestle with aspects of their religion when they are confronted with difficulties. Especially when older adults face illness and hospitalization, religious coping styles might be triggered. Despite the fact that the public role of religion, especially Christianity, is diminishing in West European societies, a large group of Belgian geriatric patients call themselves religious. Previous studies have shown that there is a link between positive/negative religious coping styles and the depressive symptoms that often occur in older adults. More recently, some scholars have emphasized that this relationship is more complex. Therefore, this paper investigates the role of one possible underlying mechanism between positive/negative religious coping styles and depressive symptoms in geriatric patients, namely the developmental process of integrity and despair as two factors within this mechanism. One hundred thirty-nine geriatric inpatients from three hospitals in Belgium who reported to feel religiously affiliated were involved in this study. Our results indicate that experiences of integrity and despair function as an explanatory pathway in the relationship between negative religious coping styles and depressive symptoms. Further, a direct link was found between both when accounting for experiences of integrity and despair. For positive religious coping styles, no direct or indirect relationship with depressive symptoms was found. In healthcare, geriatric caregivers need to be aware of the interaction between positive and negative religious coping styles, the developmental process of integrity and despair, and depressive symptoms.
老年人在生活中常常会面临各种挑战。宗教可以为他们提供一种应对这些挑战的方式。研究宗教应对方式可以帮助我们理解人们如何在面临困难时从宗教中获得支持，或者如何与宗教的某些方面作斗争。特别是当老年人面临疾病和住院时，宗教应对方式可能会被触发。尽管宗教，尤其是基督教在西欧社会中的公共角色正在减弱，但很大一部分比利时老年患者自称是宗教信徒。先前的研究表明，积极/消极的宗教应对方式与老年人中经常出现的抑郁症状之间存在关联。最近，一些学者强调这种关系更加复杂。因此，本文探讨了在老年患者中，积极/消极宗教应对方式与抑郁症状之间可能存在的一种潜在机制，即完整性和绝望这两个因素在这一机制中的发展过程。本研究共纳入了来自比利时三家医院的 139 名老年住院患者，他们报告自己有宗教信仰。我们的研究结果表明，完整性和绝望的体验是消极宗教应对方式与抑郁症状之间关系的一个解释途径。此外，当考虑到完整性和绝望的体验时，还发现两者之间存在直接联系。对于积极的宗教应对方式，没有发现与抑郁症状之间存在直接或间接关系。在医疗保健中，老年护理人员需要意识到积极和消极宗教应对方式、完整性和绝望的发展过程以及抑郁症状之间的相互作用。
