Citation
Hummer, Robert A. (2005). Commentary: Understanding Religious Involvement and Mortality Risk in the United States: Comment on Bagiella, Hong, and Sloan.
International Journal of Epidemiology, 34(2), 452-453.
Abstract
In high profile academic outlets and the popular press, Bagiella, Hong, and Sloan (hereafter BHS, based on the authorship of the article in this issue) have been very outspoken critics of the scientific literature on religion and health/mortality, as well as the implications that such literature may or may not have for the practice of health care and medicine in the United States. While praising a very limited number of empirical studies in the area, including mine, that have shown a protective relationship between public religious involvement and mortality, their essays have strongly critiqued much of the methodological work in the religion–health area and they have used such critiques as part of their rationale for efforts to keep religion out of medical and health care practice. Seemingly, their critiques were written without doing any of their own previous empirical work in the area. This article, then, is a very interesting foray for this group into such empirical work. Using data from four US communities, they investigate the relationship between selfreports of public religious attendance and subsequent mortality risk, first using pooled data from the four sites and then investigating each separate site. They find, as others have, that frequent religious attendance is related to lower overall adult mortality risk in the United States, that the baseline relationship is reduced with the inclusion of a large set of control variables, and that the relationship varies somewhat across the study sites. None of this is a surprise and, in and of itself, is a welcome addition to the literature. The technical aspects of the statistical analyses also seem to be mechanically well done. There are, however, several very important critiques that should be taken into account when placing this article in the context of this literature.
URL
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyi037Reference Type
Journal Article
Year Published
2005
Journal Title
International Journal of Epidemiology
Author(s)
Hummer, Robert A.
ORCiD
Hummer - 0000-0003-3058-6383
