The role of perceived control as a mediator between religious coping and psychological well-being of the elderly

As people age they must often adapt to stressful changes in their health and social environments. In order to manage the stress associated with these changes, the elderly must mobilize a wide range of coping strategies. Many older adults use religion as one of these coping strategies. There is a scarcity of research that has specifically focused on the possible explanation for the effects of religious coping on psychological well-being. Theorists have speculated an important role of religious coping may be to increase the elderlys' sense of perceived control.; In order to better understand this relationship, a conceptual model was developed for this dissertation that integrated religious coping, primary control beliefs and psychological well-being so that primary control beliefs mediated the relationship between certain types of religious coping and psychological well-being. Therefore, a major objective of this dissertation was to determine if beliefs in primary control mediated the relationship between self-directive, collaborative and petitionary religious coping and depression and/or positive affect of the elderly after controlling for social support and other demographic data. Another major goal was to assess whether race moderated the relationship between religious coping, primary control beliefs and psychological well-being.; Hierarchical regression analyses were utilized to test the hypotheses. No support was found for the predicted mediation effect of primary control beliefs. Nor was there any evidence for the moderating effect of race. Interestingly, the data revealed that higher levels of deferred religious coping were associated with depression and lower levels of positive affect; this relationship was partially mediated by primary control beliefs for the White group only. The findings of this study highlight the need for future investigators to not only explore this relationship, but also to assess for other mediator and moderator variables that may better elucidate the process by which self-directive, collaborative, petitionary and deferred religious coping impact the psychological well-being of older individuals.