Background

Scholars have found that as a multi-facet phenomenon, religion has a complicated relationship with people’s health well-being. However, current research on health and religion has left a vacuum in understanding why we observe widespread health disparities between the majority and minority religious groups.

Purpose

The present study is aimed at two purposes. First, we conduct a cross-national comprehensive examination of the relationship between religious minority/majority status and self-rated health. Second, we investigate the moderating potential of political contexts on the relationship in question.

Methods

Drawing from the 2010–2014 wave of World Values Survey, we construct an analytic sample containing about 70,000 individual cases nested within 51 countries, and apply multilevel modeling to account for the hierarchical data structure.

Results

We first find that religious minorities are less likely to report good/very good health status relative to members of majority group. However, we note that the religious minority health disadvantage is driven by a few country outliers. After exclusion of any of these country outliers from the analysis, there is no significant health difference between majority and minority groups. Moreover, we find that political contexts moderate the health effect of being a religious minority. In countries with low levels of democracy or heavy religious restriction on minority groups, people of minority groups are less likely to report good/very good health compared with those belonging to majority group. By contrast, in societies with high levels of democracy or low levels of religious restriction, the health dispartities between religious majority and minority groups become non-significant. A series of sensitivity analysis, including using multiple-imputation sample and different ways of coding key variables, provides credibility to the results.

Conclusions and Implications

This study’s findings suggest that religious minorities experience health disadvantage, only when minority groups are denied of political and religious freedom. Compared with past works that mostly focused on a single or a few societies, this study provides large-scale, cross-national evidence for the issue of religious minority health. This study also adds to our understanding of how political context shapes the health impacts of religion.

中文翻译：

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宗教多数和少数之间的健康差异：跨国分析

背景

学者们发现，作为一种多方面的现象，宗教与人们的健康福祉有着复杂的关系。然而，当前关于健康和宗教的研究在理解为什么我们观察到多数和少数宗教群体之间存在广泛的健康差异方面留下了空白。

目的

本研究旨在实现两个目的。首先，我们对宗教少数/多数地位与自评健康之间的关系进行了跨国综合检验。其次，我们调查了政治背景对相关关系的调节潜力。

方法

根据 2010-2014 年的世界价值观调查浪潮，我们构建了一个分析样本，其中包含嵌套在 51 个国家/地区的约 70,000 个个案，并应用多层次建模来解释层次数据结构。

结果

我们首先发现，相对于多数群体的成员，宗教少数群体不太可能报告良好/非常好的健康状况。然而，我们注意到宗教少数群体的健康劣势是由一些国家异常值造成的。在从分析中排除任何这些国家异常值后，多数群体和少数群体之间的健康状况没有显着差异。此外，我们发现政治背景缓和了作为宗教少数群体的健康影响。在民主水平较低或对少数群体有严格宗教限制的国家，与属于多数群体的人相比，少数群体的人报告健康状况良好/非常好的可能性较小。相比之下，在民主程度高或宗教限制程度低的社会中，宗教多数群体和少数群体之间的健康差异变得不显着。一系列敏感性分析，包括使用多重插补样本和对关键变量编码的不同方式，为结果提供了可信度。

结论和启示

这项研究的结果表明，只有当少数群体被剥夺政治和宗教自由时，宗教少数群体才会经历健康劣势。与过去主要关注单个或少数社会的工作相比，本研究为宗教少数群体的健康问题提供了大规模的跨国证据。这项研究还增加了我们对政治背景如何影响宗教健康影响的理解。