Religious Coping With Interpersonal Hurts : Psychosocial Correlates of the Brief RCOPE in Four Non-Western Countries

Religious coping has emerged as a guiding paradigm for understanding ways in which religion shapes how people adapt to life's most difficult experiences. Although research on religious coping has advanced substantially over the last two decades, there has been a disproportionate focus on noninterpersonal stressors with samples from predominantly Western societies. In this study, we draw on a relational spirituality perspective to examine religious coping in the aftermath of interpersonal hurts among participants from four non-Western countries. With samples from Colombia, Indonesia, South Africa, and Ukraine (N = 3,244), we examined associations of religious coping (as measured by the Brief RCOPE) with anxiety, depression, perceived posttraumatic growth, and well-being. The general patterns that emerged from the country-specific analyses of psychosocial correlates indicated that positive religious coping evidenced its strongest associations with indices of positive functioning (i.e., perceived posttraumatic growth and well-being), whereas negative religious coping yielded its strongest associations with indices of psychological distress (i.e., anxiety and depression). Hierarchical regressions for each country indicated that the dimensions of religious coping were incrementally associated with all indices of functioning, over and above variance explained by state forgiveness. Overall, the findings were largely comparable to those of prior research with samples from Western societies. Further cross-cultural research is needed to extend our understanding of the role of religious/spiritual coping in dealing with negative life events, particularly in non-Western cultures.