Exploring the stress-buffering effects of religiousness in relation to social and economic change: evidence from Poland

Abstract

Religiousness has been found to act as a protective factor against the adverse effects of stressors originating from a variety of sources. Despite ample precedent in sociological theories of religion, however, the potential stress-buffering role of religiousness in relation to stressors arising from macrolevel societal trends has not received empirical scrutiny. Recent psychological conceptualizations of social and economic change (SEC) suggest that such change manifests itself in people's lives in the form of perceived demands that act as individual-level stressors and impinge on subjective well-being (SWB). Building on this line of research, we examined whether religious attendance and subjective religiosity buffered the negative association between perceived work-related demands of SEC and depressive symptoms, life satisfaction, and work satisfaction in a sample of 1,581 Polish adolescents and adults aged 16 to 46 years. Analyses revealed that both dimensions of religiousness were positively related to SWB and buffered the impact of work-related demands on depressive symptoms. Contrariwise, no buffering effect of religiousness on either life or work satisfaction was found. Taken together, results partly confirm religiousness as a protective factor for SWB in relation to SEC but underscore the importance of taking the multifaceted nature of the construct into account in evaluating the interplay of stressors and religiousness.