University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Interrelations Between Religiosity, Mental Health, and Children Stephen Cranney University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Demography, Population, and Ecology Commons Recommended Citation Cranney, Stephen, "Interrelations Between Religiosity, Mental Health, and Children" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1671. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1671 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1671 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Interrelations Between Religiosity, Mental Health, and Children Abstract This dissertation consists of three independent but related research articles dealing with religiosity, mental health, and children. The first uses the General Social Survey to perform the first large-N, non- convenience-sample analysis of the relationship between belief in God and sense of purpose. Using logistic regression analysis I find that there is a positive association, expanding our knowledge of the association between religious frameworks on a particular facet of mental health. The second article uses OLS to test the relationship between belief in God and fertility intentions in the Czech Republic and Slovenia using the European Fertility and Family Survey, once again finding positive relationships between belief in God or belief in a higher power and fertility intentions. This finding is theoretically important because the prior literature has tended to invoke directly institutional mechanisms in the fertility/religion relationship without considering the possibility that more individuated forms of religiosity may have independent associations. Finally, the third article uses the General Social Survey (and, once again, OLS) to test the role of religiosity as a moderator in the relationship between number of children and happiness.