A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being

Hoogeveen S., Sarafoglou A., Aczel B., Aditya Y., Alayan AJ., Allen PJ., Altay S., Alzahawi S., Amir Y., Anthony FV., Kwame Appiah O., Atkinson QD., Baimel A., Balkaya-Ince M., Balsamo M., Banker S., Bartoš F., Becerra M., Beffara B., Beitner J., Bendixen T., Berkessel JB., Berniūnas R., Billet MI., Billingsley J., Bortolini T., Breitsohl H., Bret A., Brown FL., Brown J., Brumbaugh CC., Buczny J., Bulbulia J., Caballero S., Carlucci L., Carmichael CL., Cattaneo MEGV., Charles SJ., Claessens S., Panagopoulos MC., Costa AB., Crone DL., Czoschke S., Czymara C., D'Urso ED., Dahlström Ö., Rosa AD., Danielsson H., De Ron J., de Vries YA., Dean KK., Dik BJ., Disabato DJ., Doherty JK., Draws T., Drouhot L., Dujmovic M., Dunham Y., Ebert T., Edelsbrunner PA., Eerland A., Elbaek CT., Farahmand S., Farahmand H., Farias M., Feliccia AA., Fischer K., Fischer R., Fisher-Thompson D., Francis Z., Frick S., Frisch LK., Geraldes D., Gerdin E., Geven L., Ghasemi O., Gielens E., Gligorić V., Hagel K., Hajdu N., Hamilton HR., Hamzah I., Hanel PHP., Hawk CE., K. Himawan K., Holding BC., Homman LE., Ingendahl M., Inkilä H., Inman ML., Islam CG., Isler O., Izydorczyk D., Jaeger B., Johnson KA., Jong J., Karl JA., Kaszubowski E., Katz BA., Keefer LA.

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset ((Formula presented.) participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether the relation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends on perceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considered normal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stage procedure, the teams first created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For the first research question, all but 3 teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervals excluding zero (median reported (Formula presented.)). For the second research question, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported (Formula presented.)). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regression models, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used to construct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates.

DOI

10.1080/2153599X.2022.2070255

Type

Journal article

Journal

Religion, Brain and Behavior

Publication Date

01/01/2022

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