HOUSTON — (Sept. 21, 2023) – Religious discrimination from one’s friends has a far better impression on a person’s psychological well being than exclusionary organizational insurance policies, in line with a brand new research from Rice University’s Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance.

“The Association between Religious Discrimination and Health: Disaggregating by Types of Discrimination Experiences, Religious Tradition, and Forms of Health” will seem in an upcoming version of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Elaine Howard Ecklund, director of the Boniuk Institute, the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences and one of many research’s authors, stated that earlier analysis has illustrated how spiritual discrimination is linked to poorer well being. However, she and her fellow authors wished to study the way it impacts spiritual majority vs. minority teams, the way it harms psychological versus bodily well being and whether or not particular varieties of discrimination have totally different well being impacts.

Using survey knowledge from a chance pattern of U.S. adults with a wide range of totally different discrimination experiences, the researchers discovered sure varieties of discrimination affected psychological well being extra severely than others.

“We found that experiences with more interpersonal forms of religious discrimination—such as being verbally or physically assaulted—have negative consequences for both an individuals’ physical and mental well-being,” Ecklund stated. “On the other hand, experiences with more organizational forms of discrimination, such as being denied employment or refused services at a business, negatively impacts an individual’s mental well-being but is less clearly connected to their physical well-being.”

The researchers stated these findings had been true throughout all of the totally different spiritual teams they examined, together with Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists. There weren’t important variations in well being impacts from group to group. In addition, discriminatory practices of any form had been extra dangerous to psychological than bodily well being.

Christopher Scheitle, affiliate professor within the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University, is the research’s lead writer. Jacqui Frost, assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University, is a co-author.

This analysis was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (Award #1754015 and #1753972; Christopher P. Scheitle and Elaine Howard Ecklund, principal investigators) and by a grant from Rice’s Faculty Initiatives Fund (Elaine Howard Ecklund, principal investigator).

The research is on-line at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jssr.12871.