Religious Involvement and Allostatic Resilience: Findings from a Community Study of Black and White Americans

This study asks: How does religion factor into these inequities? We approach this open question from a biopsychosocial perspective, developing three hypotheses for the stress-coping effects of religiosity between groups. We then test our hypotheses with survey and biomarker data from the Nashville Stress and Health Study (2011 –2014), a probability sample of Black and White women and men from Davidson County, Tennessee. We find that Black women score the highest on all indicators of religiosity, followed by Black men, White women, and White men. We also find that increased divine control and religious coping predict hig her levels of resiliency biomarkers for Black women only and lower levels for White respondents, especially White men. We discuss how our findings inform broader population health inequities and outline several avenues for future research.
Source: Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research