Sometimes people don’t quite understand how strong and pointed the relationship between religion and health is, so I ran some numbers using both the PRLS and CES using percent of people who self-identify as having good health.
Sometimes people don’t quite understand how strong and pointed the relationship between religion and health is, so I ran some numbers using both the PRLS and CES using percent of people who self-identify as having good health.
Comments
4 responses to “Religion and Health by Attendance”
Interesting data. Hindus seem to have quite a disparity between the two datasets, I wonder why. I’m not familiar enough with either dataset to say, but wonder if they’re under represented and it’s just noise.
In my experience, health is a very good predictor of weekly attendance among faithful Latter day saints. From the data here, that would seem to hold true among other faiths as well.
I suspect Hindu numbers are so small that there’s a lot of noise there.
Are you saying that people have better health if they’re more religious? Or is it just that people aren’t able to attend church as much when they’re in poor health?
There is probably some of that reverse causality, but we get similar results if we look at other measures like religious salience (e.g. “how important is religion in your life, etc.”)