Eleventh International Conference on Health, Wellness & Society

Abstract

The hypothetic influence that religion plays on personal and social wellbeing has been at the centre of several discussions, and the gathered evidence until now is still fragmentary and does not allow to settle this issue. Recent tendencies and changes in the religious panorama, especially in Europe, allows for a distinct approach to this question, after most Western societies have become more secular and religion is no longer compulsory or consuetudinary. A recently collected dataset for the project Religiosity and Wellbeing, comprising 10535 cases from 24 countries, offers the possibility to perform new tests which could assist in better discerning which are the current trends and to what extent religion could be related to personal satisfaction. The analysis clearly reveals a moderate correlation between both factors, which is confirmed by alternative tests practiced on this data. The obtained results add some nuances to the existing views and allow for deepening in the current research trying to better assess the role religion still plays in secularized societies regarding physical and psychological health.