On Including Religious and Spiritual Faith and Practice in Gerontological Research

Abstract

ELIGION and spirituality are important in the lives of most elders, but until the mid-1990s, gerontological research had little to say about these areas of life. This has changed dramatically, in part because both government- and private foundation-sponsored research is developing and using measures of religiousness and spirituality in surveys of older people. There are two particularly important perspectives that need to be included in research: faith and practice. These are not interchangeable concepts. Faith evolves through adult development and is conditioned by worldview and direct experience of the divine. Practice, on the other hand, involves a wide variety of activities that express devotion, ask for help, enhance clarity of purpose, or open oneself to direct religious or spiritual experience. Faith and practice are dimensions of religion and spirituality that introduce enormous diversity, both within individuals and within population subgroups. This complexity of ideas, experiences, and activities—and their multiplicity of meanings—represents a significant challenge if we are to avoid reductionist assessment. We need to be sensitive to social class, ethnic, and gender differences within and across religious groups (as well as individual differences) within the many cross-sections of the general population. In my experience, religious and spiritual practices over decades of adult life can have major effects on how people respond to life changes. Likewise, persons of mature faith tend to have a very different worldview compared with people with rudimentary faith or no faith at all. But to sort out how the many developmental and social influences serve to produce these results requires that we have much more complex conceptual maps than we have developed thus far. We also must develop ways to assess these factors so we can make appropriate comparisons between people at different stages of development, in various birth cohorts, and across religious traditions.