Are Latter-day Saint Women Happy, Healthy, and Thriving?

Stephen C

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Note: After working on this piece I realized that Janet Erickson, Justin Dyer, and Barbara Morgan Gardner, all at BYU, did a similar piece for the the Deseret News using the PRLS to look at the happiness of LDS women here. 

Recently I posted a piece that analyzed the recently released Pew Religious Landscape Data to measure whether former, lifelong, and convert Latter-day Saints reported being happier, healthier, and having better family lives, finding that that was indeed the case.

However, another piece asked the interesting question as to whether this applied to women in particular. The gender differential analysis wasn’t the original emphasis of my piece, but it’s a good question.

On one hand growing up in Utah I’m used to hearing the demeaning jabs about frazzled religious housewives chained to their kitchens while Sex in the City type gentiles live freewheeling liberated professional lives where they answer to no man in their professional or dating lives and their Mr. Darcey lies waiting in the wings … (I’m exaggerating a little for effect. But only a little). The trope of the depressed religious–and by extension Latter-day Saint–woman looms large in our popular gendered discourse.

But is it true? This can essentially be broken down into two separate questions.

  1. Are Latter-day Saint women happier than non-Latter-day Saint women?
  2. Is the Latter-day Saint effect in happiness the same for men as it is for women?

While some might see these as asking the same question, a careful read will show that’s not the case. For example, Latter-day Saint women could be much happier than their non-Latter-day Saint counterparts, but Latter-day Saint men could be much, much happier than their non-Latter-day Saint counterparts.

Again, one sometimes hears that the benefits of the Church accrue particularly to men. Of course I as a man am happy in the Church, I might become a bishop and make decisions about my ward! (Obviously I’m being facetious, but the gendered narrative about what is supposed to make us happy is real). To test this out I will perform an interaction analysis, where I look at whether the “Latter-day Saint” happiness effect is bigger or smaller for men than it is for women.

There are 3 flourishing measures that we will use:

  • “Generally, how happy are you with your life these days?” [Very happy, pretty happy, not too happy]
  • “Would you say your health in general is excellent, very good, good, fair or poor”
  • “Would you say your family life is excellent, very good, good, fair or poor?”

In the original post I dichotomized the variable to just look at the highest level, since such charts are more comprehensible for a lay audience, but if we are going to test interactions we need to take advantage of all the variation in the question, so for this analysis I am using the dependent variables on a continuos measure. This also has the advantage of allowing us to run a simple linear regression.

The tables for the regressions are in the Appendix [note, Appendix tables are in the original SquareTwo article]. What do they say? Women in general, LDS or not, report being about as happy as men, and are less healthy and less satisfied with their family lives than men, which is itself noteworthy.

However, in regards to the Latter-day Saint effect, when we subsample and only take the women in the subsample, Latter-day Saint women are indeed happier than non-Latter-day Saint women. Specifically, they score about .1 points higher on a 3-point happiness scale. They also score higher on family life quality (.18 points higher on a five-point scale), but they don’t score higher on health.

To the second question, is there something particular to women? I don’t find any evidence for that. It looks like Latter-day Saint women are beneficiaries of a generic Latter-day Saint effect. None of the interaction effects are significant. Now, interaction effects are hard to get significant results for, you either need a really large sample size, which we don’t have, or a huge effect size. So we can say that the Latter-day Saint effect isn’t tremendously different between men and women, but admittedly in the same way that a middle school microscope can’t see atoms, we could be missing smaller differences.

And what about non-binary folks? There are only two Latter-day Saints in this sample that identify as non-binary, so not enough to do anything with statistically.

So, in conclusion, yes, Latter-day Saint women do appear to be happier and to report better family lives than non-Latter-day Saint women (although they do not report any better health). Furthermore, the flourishing bump they get from Church membership doesn’t appear to be any different, as far as we can tell, from the bump that men get; by the same token we can’t argue that the Church is particularly deleterious to women more than it is to men in regards to these variables.

Code here.

Comments

7 responses to “Are Latter-day Saint Women Happy, Healthy, and Thriving?”

  1. anon for this

    I’m an active, never married, childless LDS woman. 58 years old. I feel my life is going great right now and I am happy. The only time I feel bad is when I go to Church or listen to Conference and they tell me that my life is meaningless because I didn’t marry and have no children.

  2. ReTx

    Interesting. I’m always a tad skeptical of self-reported happiness surveys. Within an LDS context, it’s because happiness is tied to righteousness. So if you are righteous you are *supposed* to be happy. Admitting unhappiness is then admitting unrighteousness. I remember as a teen learning this lesson in a backwards kind of way in YW and for years afterwards randomly wondered if the inner-circle ward families were really as happy as they seem or if it was more performance based. (Years later, I now know some were, some were not.)

    To really understand happiness, I’d rather look at things like use of anti-depressants and/or the percentage of people with medical conditions related to stress and anxiety. It be interesting to know what kind of research methodologies that are more hard-science have been tried in demonstrating happiness.

    I hope that the gospel does make people happy. I think it absolutely has the potential to do so. At the very least if we follow basic precepts about caring for our bodies, avoiding some of the more destructive behaviors of modern society, living within our means, and seeking kindness and Deity, it should remove some of the worst factors of unhappiness. Of course things like toxic-positivity and the LDS obsession with appearances do get in the way anyway.

  3. RLD

    I cordially dislike treating categorical outcomes as numeric–there are some implicit but strong assumptions made in doing so–but I doubt a more complicated model would add any insight in this case. Especially since, to preempt some possible criticisms, Stephen isn’t making any causal claims here. The analysis is purely descriptive. The difference between LDS and non-LDS could plausibly be due to socioeconomic status differences, for example. What’s less plausible is that the gospel is actually making women miserable and something else is exactly offsetting it.

    It’s fair to be skeptical of self-reported happiness, but other measures have problems too. For example, higher rates of anti-depressant use could be due to higher rates of depression, but they could also be due to improved access to mental health care or lower levels of stigma about seeking treatment. There are no easy answers here and self-reports are generally considered legitimate, if imperfect, measures of happiness.

    Nerd notes; the stargazer package sure is nice when it just works! A leitmotif of my summer was digging into the Stata equivalents for tables that aren’t so well-behaved. I’d still suggest replacing the tidyverse %>% pipe with the (newish) base R |> pipe, but for what you’re doing the performance difference almost certainly won’t be noticeable.

  4. Stephen C

    “The only time I feel bad is when I go to Church or listen to Conference and they tell me that my life is meaningless because I didn’t marry and have no children.”

    I’m sorry that you hear that.

    ReTx: Yes, self-report is the worst measure besides all the others, but it’s nice that it correlates with all sorts of other things, so it’s clearly tapping into something (also, self-rated health is amazing, what you self-rate your health as on a scale from 1-10 predicts your risk of death better than an equation that takes into account more objective measures of health). As RLD notes, I’m dubious about completely relying on diagnoses because that is also quite fraught and subject to all sorts of biases, but the question that you sometimes see on health surveys of “have you ever been diagnosed with XYZ” probably has some additional value.

    RLD: “I cordially dislike treating categorical outcomes as numeric–there are some implicit but strong assumptions made in doing so–but I doubt a more complicated model would add any insight in this case.”

    Yes, I know the purists bristle at this kind of treatment that we often see in social science journals, but to your other point, for me I’m generally mostly interested in results that are pretty robust to however the heck you cut up the data (and to give a interaction analysis a fair shake we need to capture all the variation in a continual measure). My eyes tend to glaze over when we deal with results that collapse at the slightest touch, because at that point I just kind of assume they’re p-value hacking.

    “Stephen isn’t making any causal claims here. The analysis is purely descriptive…What’s less plausible is that the gospel is actually making women miserable and something else is exactly offsetting it.”

    Exactly.

    And yes, I should try to switch over from the tidyverse pipe, but at this point I’m working against muscle memory.

  5. L

    In response to ReTx, I don’t think that stress or anxiety necessarily mean someone isn’t happy. Or even anti-depressant use. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about this lately even prior to this post. I’ve been under a significant (and even at times extreme) amount of stress for years due to parenting a mentally ill child and some marital challenges, financial issues, etc. I have also been a fairly anxious person most of my life and have bouts of mild to moderate depression. My husband is currently unemployed, and it is very stressful. I’ve been in therapy for several years. But I consider myself to be a generally happy person. It’s not a performance, it’s not because I’m “supposed to”, it’s not toxic positivity, and it’s not because I’m righteous. (Accepting my imperfection has actually increased my happiness.) I’m certainly not happy every moment, every day, or even every week. But overall, I am happy. It’s due to two things: 1) absolutely my faith, my relationship with God, and the peace that the gospel gives and 2) my understanding that my happiness is my responsibility and not dependent on my life circumstances. Some of the stressors in my life (parenting a child with severe mental illness being the biggest one) aren’t likely to end any time soon, if ever. I accepted that a couple of years ago and have embraced the idea that I choose and create my happiness and that I have to take care of myself emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually in order to have peace and joy.

  6. Stephen C.

    Not to ruin a heartfelt account with nerdy technicalities, but the literature supports your point. While we tend to see positive psychological concepts as simple antonyms/ flip sides of negative things like depression, they’re technically distinct concepts. While yes, they are correlated, it’s not a perfect correlation. Then there are different kinds of happiness. Affective happiness (emotions and moods) is distinct from eudaemonic happiness (sense of purpose, etc.), for example even though again, they are obviously correlated.

  7. ReTx

    L, I totally agree and using anxiety, etc to link to unhappiness was short sighted on my part.

    Especially as I could have written your post and have a massive daily reminder on my office wall explaining how happiness works through choices.

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