Religion, Volunteerism and Health: Are Religious People Really Doing Well by Doing Good?

Jerf W. K. Yeung ()
Additional contact information
Jerf W. K. Yeung: City University of Hong Kong

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2018, vol. 138, issue 2, No 19, 809-828

Abstract: Abstract While the religion-health connection has been accumulatively established by research findings in one hand, the contribution of volunteering to health is well confirmed empirically on the other hand. Nevertheless, although religion has been long accepted as a feeder system and source of volunteerism, paucity of research has attempted to investigate religious effects on health benefits through the mediation of volunteering. In this study, I examined religious effects on the health outcomes of mental and physical health and life satisfaction through the mediation of other-oriented and self-oriented volunteering based on a statewide representative sample of general adults in Texas. Results showed that both other-oriented and self-oriented volunteering significantly mediated the relationships between participants’ religiosity and health outcomes, but more robust indirect effects through other-oriented volunteering were noted by bootstrap estimates. In addition, the direct effects of religiosity on health outcomes were significantly remained even taking the mediation of volunteering into account, connoting the distinctive role of religion in health that cannot be explained away by secular pathways. Implications of the findings, limitations, and future research directions are also discussed.

Keywords: Religiosity; Volunteering; Social integration; Social role; Health outcomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-017-1671-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:138:y:2018:i:2:d:10.1007_s11205-017-1671-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-017-1671-8

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().