Attachment to God and Religious Coping as Mediators in the Relation between Immigration Distress and Life Satisfaction among Korean Americans

Abstract

ABSTRACT We investigated the effect of immigration distress on Korean Americans’ life satisfaction, using attachment to God and religious coping as mediators. A sample of 214 participants was recruited from urban ethnic churches in various states, and they responded to online or offline surveys. There were two serial multiple mediation models (Models A and B) developed based on the attachment system activation model and empirical evidence. Each of the models included a pair of the two mediators: avoidant attachment to God and positive religious coping for Model A, and anxious attachment to God and negative religious coping for Model B. We initially examined the overall model fit as well as the direct and indirect effects using AMOS 21. Upon finding significant aggregated indirect effects, we examined individual indirect effects using the PROCESS macro for SPSS. Results demonstrated that Model A showed a poor model fit and Model B showed a good model fit to the observed data. Serial multiple mediation analyses provided some support for our conceptualization that distress activates the attachment to God system as an internal working model that is translated into religious coping as attachment behavior. As expected in Model B, distress was inversely associated with life satisfaction through anxious attachment to God and negative religious coping. Model A demonstrated rather complicated relations. The implications of cultural, theoretical, and methodological issues, with special regard to attachment to God and religious coping in Korean Americans as immigrants, were discussed.