Doctoral Dissertation Research: Religiosity and Subjective and Psychological Well-being in Contemporary Society

博士论文研究：当代社会的宗教性与主观和心理幸福感主要调查者：克里斯托弗·G·埃里森共同首席调查者：迈克尔·罗梅尔摘要近几十年来，学者们分析了美国以基督教为主的人口中宗教与幸福感之间的联系。总体而言，这项工作表明，宗教参与的各个方面对心理健康都有有益的影响。尽管这些研究结果令人信服，但尚不清楚它们是否可以在完全不同的社会和文化背景下推广到其他宗教传统。为了解决这个问题，本文考察了日本的宗教习俗和信仰与幸福之间的联系。本研究结合了多种方法，包括焦点小组和深度访谈，以及心理测量学测试和多变量分析，这些数据来自作者设计的自我管理的邮件调查和来自国家大型数据集的数据，以解释个人宗教信仰与抑郁、焦虑、掌握感、社会支持、生活满意度和幸福感之间的交集。这项研究的多方法方法和主题有望让人们更广泛地了解宗教信仰如何与当代日本的幸福感联系在一起，以及帮助解释这些联系的潜在机制可能与之前基于美国的研究有何不同。此外，这个项目分析和揭示了日本人表达、解释和维持心理健康的一些关键手段，为我们提供了更多关于心理健康的文化差异的洞察。另一个目标是推进日本宗教信仰的量化测量，并在未来将它们添加到正在进行的调查中，从而使研究人员能够研究宗教行为和信仰与各种结果之间的相关性，如态度、行为和取向。最后，由于中国和韩国等邻国的宗教传统与日本相似，都强调地方性和情境化的仪式，而不强调宗教组织的遵守和一神论信仰，因此预计提出具体文化问题的过程和结果也可以为其他社会的宗教调查提供参考。通过这些方式，这项研究旨在为我们对宗教信仰和灵性、福祉以及这些社会力量之间的交叉做出独特的经验、理论和方法论贡献。

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Religiosity and Subjective and Psychological Well-being in Contemporary SocietyPrincipal Investigator: Christopher G. Ellison Co-Principal Investigator: Michael RoemerAbstractIn recent decades, scholars have analyzed associations between religion and well-being among predominantly Christian populations in the United States. Overall, this body of work suggests that aspects of religious involvement have salutary implications for psychological well-being. Although these research findings are compelling, it remains unclear whether they are generalizable to other religious traditions, in quite different social and cultural contexts. To address this issue, this dissertation examines connections between religious practices and beliefs and well-being in Japan. This research incorporates multiple methods, including focus groups and in-depth interviews as well as psychometric testing and multivariate analyses of data from self-administered mail surveys designed by the author and from large national datasets, to interpret intersections between individual religiosity and depression, anxiety, sense of mastery, social support, life satisfaction, and happiness. The multi-method approach and topic of this study are expected to provide a broader understanding of how religiosity is connected to well-being in contemporary Japan and how underlying mechanisms that help explain these associations may differ from previous U.S.-based research. Furthermore, this project analyzes and reveals some of the key means by which Japanese express, interpret, and maintain psychological wellness, providing us with more insight into cultural variations of mental health. Another goal is to advance quantitative measures of religiosity in Japan and add them to on-going surveys in the future, thus enabling researchers to study correlations between religious acts and beliefs and a variety of outcomes, such as attitudes, behaviors, and orientations. Finally, because the religious traditions of neighboring countries such as China and South Korea resemble Japan in terms of their emphasis on local and contextualized rituals and de-emphasis on religious organizational adherence and monotheistic beliefs, it is expected that both the process and results of asking culturally specific questions can inform investigations of religion in other societies as well. In these ways this study aims to make unique empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions to our overall understanding of religiosity and spirituality, well-being, and intersections between these social forces.