RT Article
T1 Psychological Resilience After Cancer via Religion/Spirituality: Spiritual Capital Through a Life Course Lens
JF Journal for the scientific study of religion
VO 61
IS 1
SP 119
OP 141
A1 Upenieks, Laura
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2022
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1799698114
AB Religious beliefs and practices are thought to help people confront problems that push the limits of human life. Integrating the life course perspective, we assess whether the accumulation of religiosity (“spiritual capital”) between childhood and adulthood had any bearing on its ability to cushion the mental health insults of a cancer diagnosis, factoring in age-at-diagnosis. Using two waves of data from National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (N = 1431), results suggest that stable high religious importance between childhood and adulthood weakened the deleterious mental health consequences of a cancer diagnosis. For individuals under the age of 45, the relationship between a cancer diagnosis and psychological distress was considerably weaker for those reporting stably high or increasing religious importance between childhood and adulthood. We discuss the implications of our results for research at the intersection religion and the life course perspective.
K1 Spiritual Capital
K1 religious importance
K1 Mental Health
K1 Cancer
K1 Life Course
DO 10.1111/jssr.12765