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

Suzanne Hoogeveen, MARP Team

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the mostresearched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionalityand robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted amany-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation basedon a new cross-cultural dataset (N=10, 535 participants from 24countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whetherreligious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether therelation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends onperceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considerednormal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stageprocedure, the teamsfirst created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For thefirst research question, all but 3teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervalsexcluding zero (median reported Beta=0.120). For the second researchquestion, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported Beta=0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regressionmodels, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used toconstruct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)237-283
Number of pages47
JournalReligion, Brain & Behavior
Volume13
Issue number3
Early online date6 Jul 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 Oct 2023

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