Human Flourishing Program, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
PLoS One. 2022 Nov 29;17(11):e0278178. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0278178. eCollection 2022.
We used prospective data (spanning 8 years) from a national sample of older U.S. adults aged > 50 years (the Health and Retirement Study, N = 13,771) to evaluate potential factors that lead to subsequent religious service attendance. We applied a lagged exposure-wide epidemiologic design and evaluated 60 candidate predictors of regular subsequent religious service attendance. Candidate predictors were drawn from the following domains: health behaviors, physical health, psychological well-being, psychological distress, social factors, and work. After rigorous adjustment for a rich set of potential confounders, we observed modest evidence that changes in some indices of physical health, psychological well-being, psychological distress, and social functioning predicted regular religious service attendance four years later. Our findings suggest that there may be opportunities to support more regular religious service attendance among older adults who positively self-identify with a religious/spiritual tradition (e.g., aid services for those with functional limitations, psychological interventions to increase hope), which could have downstream benefits for various dimensions of well-being in the later years of life.
我们使用了一项全国性的美国 50 岁以上老年人样本（健康与退休研究，N = 13771）的前瞻性数据（跨越 8 年），以评估导致随后参加宗教服务的潜在因素。我们应用了滞后的广泛暴露流行病学设计，并评估了 60 个可能预测定期参加宗教服务的候选预测因素。候选预测因素来自以下领域：健康行为、身体健康、心理健康、心理困扰、社会因素和工作。在对一组丰富的潜在混杂因素进行严格调整后，我们观察到一些身体健康、心理健康、心理困扰和社会功能指数的变化，适度地预示着四年后定期参加宗教服务。我们的研究结果表明，对于那些与宗教/精神传统有积极自我认同的老年人（例如，为有功能障碍的人提供援助服务，增加希望的心理干预），可能有机会支持更定期地参加宗教服务，这可能对晚年生活的各个方面的幸福感产生下游影响。
