Religion, Spirituality, and Health Status in Geriatric Outpatients Essay

Daaleman, Perrera and Studenski wished to re-examine the effect of religiosity and church property on perceptions of older persons, operationalized as geriatric outpatients.The authors proceeded from two conceptual constructs. The initiative is that self-reported health place is central to aging research. The old know whereof they speak. Self-ratings are valid because they correlate well with health status over time and, consequently, health service utilization. The second construct is that, no matter how morally they lived as young adults, those in late middle age come to embrace religious belief and spirituality with more fervor.Prior research had scrutinized the relationship between religion and health perceptions. Some results were inconclusive, an outcome that the authors attri only ifed to failure to control for such covariates as spirituality.Definitions vary, the authors acknowledged, but they proposed defining religiosity as principally revolving on organized faith whil e spirituality has more to do with giving humans meaning, purpose, or author either from within or from a transcendent source. In turn, the dependent variable was measured by a single-item global health from the Years of estimable Life (YOHL) scale, a self-assessment of general health (would you say your health in general is ) and a 5-item Likert response from excellent to poor.Fieldwork consisted of including a 5-item measure of religiosity15 and a 12-item spirituality instrument in a 36-month health service utilization, health status, and functional status study among 492 outpatients of a VA and HMO network, all residents of the Kansas City metropolitan area.The authors were tumble-down in not formally articulating their hypotheses for the study though one gleans that the alternative hypothesis could have stated, Structured religion, a deep sense of spirituality, mental status and mobility, and personal and demographic variables materially influence measures of health status an d physical functioning.In the end, the data was subjected to univariate and multivariate best-fit statistics. The key findingsTable 2. Predictors of Self-Reported Good Health positioning (N = 277)Factor*Unadjusted OR (95% CLAdjusted OR (95% CI)Age0.94(0.890.99)Male0.72(0.411.25)White race2.79(1.515.17)3.32(1.338.30)Grade schooltime0.1(0.020.49)Some high school0.28(0.061.44)High school graduate0.24(0.051.14)Technical/business school0.29(0.061.43)Some college0.31(0.061.49)Not depressed (GDS)32.4(4.03261)Physical functioning(SF36-PFI)1.04(1.031.05)1.03(1.011.04)Quality of life (EuroQol)1.69(1.412.01)1.36(1.091.70)Religiosity (NORC)0.93(0.851.02) otherworldliness (SIWB)1.15(1.101.21)1.09(1.021.16)OR = odds ratio CI = confi dence interval GDS = Geriatric Depression Scale SF36-PFI= Physical Functioning Index from SF-36 NORC = National Opinion Research CenterSIWB = Spirituality Index of Well-Being.*Referent factors age-1 year younger female, nonwhite college graduate GDS score of0-9 PFI-i ndex of 1 less EuroQol-score of 0.1 less SIWB-score of 1 less. P = .01. P = NS. P