Abstract: Countries differ in their religiosity and these differences have been found to moderate numerous psychological effects. The burgeoning research in this area creates a demand for a country-level religiosity index that is comparable across a large number of countries. Here, we offer such an index, which covers 166 countries and rests on representative data from 1,619,300 participants of the Gallup World Poll. Moreover, we validate the novel index, use it to examine temporal change in worldwide religiosity over the last decade, and present a comprehensive analysis of country-level religiosity’s nomological network. The main results are as follows. First, the index was found to be a valid index of global religiosity. Second, country-level religiosity modestly increased between 2006 and 2011 and modestly decreased between 2011 and 2017—demonstrating a curvilinear pattern. Finally, nomological network analysis revealed three things: it buttressed past evidence that religious countries are economically less developed; it clarified inconsistencies in the literature on the health status of inhabitants from religious countries, suggesting that their psychological and physical health tends to be particularly good once economic development is accounted for; and finally, it shed initial light on the associations between country-level religiosity and various psychological dimensions of culture (i.e., Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and country-level Big Five traits). These associations revealed that religious countries are primarily characterized by high levels of communion (i.e., collectivism and agreeableness). We are optimistic that the newly presented country-level religiosity index can satisfy the fast-growing demand for an accurate and comprehensive global religiosity index.
Concluding Remarks
Countries differ widely in their degree of religiosity, and those country-level differences qualify numerous psychological effects that have been deemed universal (e.g., psychological health benefits of religiosity – Gebauer, Sedikides, et al., 2012; psychological health benefits of income – Gebauer, Nehrlich, et al., 2013; life satisfaction benefits derived from affective experience – Joshanloo, 2019). Hence, there is a great demand for a valid index of country-level religiosity that is available for a large number of countries. The present study provided such an index. The index is based on representative data from 1,619,300 individuals and spans 166 countries worldwide. We made use of that index to examine temporal change in worldwide religiosity over the last decade and to gain a more complete understanding of country-level religiosity’s nomological network. We found strong evidence that our country-level religiosity index is a valid and robust index of global religiosity. More precisely, its correlation with an external four-item index of global religiosity was near-perfect.10 Moreover, we randomly divided the full GWP sample into two independent subsamples and used those subsamples to compute two additional country-level religiosity indices. Those two entirely independent country-level religiosity indicators, too, correlated near-perfectly with the external country-level index of global religiosity. That finding speaks for the robustness of our index. The two independent country-level religiosity indices also demonstrated a near-perfect correlation, a finding that attests to the validity and reliability of our index. In addition, we estimated the worldwide temporal change in religiosity between 2006 and 2017. We found a quadratic trajectory (Figure 2). For the year 2006, we estimated that 73.039% of the world population considered religiosity an important part of their daily lives. From 2006 to 2011, we found an increase in worldwide religiosity levels. By 2011, we estimated the highest level of religiosity worldwide – 74.044% of the world population considered religiosity an important part of their daily lives. Finally, from 2011 to 2017, we found a decrease in worldwide religiosity. By 2017, the worldwide level of religiosity was (descriptively) lower than in 2006 – 72.725% of the world population considered religiosity an important part of their daily lives. Additional analyses identified a subset of 101 countries which drove the just-described quadratic trajectory (Figure 3). Finally, we estimated the worldwide temporal changes in Christianity and Islam between 2008 and 2017. We found a small linear decline in Christianity from 41.753% in 2008 to 40.582% in 2017 and no significant change in Islam within the same period of time (25.484% in 2008 and 25.508% in 2017). The small temporal change over the last decade buttressed our decision to base our country-level religiosity index on the cumulative data from 2005 to 2017. A detailed analysis of why we observed the just-described pattern of temporal change is beyond the scope of the present work, but it certainly is an interesting and timely topic for future research. We acknowledge that the temporal patterns we discovered in the present analyses may be subject to unexpected changes in the near future, and at present, it does not seem possible to predict the future of worldwide religiosity.
Moreover, the present research includes the most complete analysis of country-level religiosity’s nomological network ever conducted, involving 36 external variables. First, in replication of much previous research, country-level religiosity was associated with lower economic development. It is noteworthy that previous research typically capitalized on a single indicator of economic development, whereas we used several complementary indicators and found highly convergent results. Second, we examined the association between country-level religiosity and a large array of country-level health indicators (psychological health, physical health, and health security). The results were less consistent than in the case of economic development. However, on the whole it seems fair to conclude that country-level religiosity was mostly negatively related to health, but that negative relation was driven almost entirely by the poor economic conditions in most religious countries. In fact, after accounting for country-level differences in economic conditions, religious countries were by and large healthier than non-religious countries. Mediation analyses were largely consistent with Oishi and Diener’s (2014) proposal that the health benefits of country-level religiosity are partly due to higher levels of purpose in life in religious countries. Finally, little has been known about the associations between country-level religiosity and psychological dimensions of culture (i.e., Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and country-level Big Five traits). We found that religious countries primarily differed from their non-religious counterparts on dimensions that belong to the fundamental communion dimension (i.e., collectivism and agreeableness; Abele & Wojciszke, 2014). This finding squares with the high importance that all world religions place on communal values and norms (Gebauer, Paulhus, et al., 2013; Gebauer, Sedikides, & Schrade, 2017). Overall, the nomological network analysis conducted here buttressed previous research, increased the confidence in our country-level religiosity index, and expanded our understanding of country-level religiosity.
In conclusion, the present research introduced and validated the most extensive country-level religiosity index to date, examined its worldwide temporal trajectory over the last decade, and clarified its nomological network. We (optimistically) hope that our country-level religiosity index will be helpful for the large and fast-growing community of scholars interested in the powerful role of country-level religiosity for human thought, feelings, and behavior.
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