Religious Values and the Development of Trait Hope and Self-Esteem in Adolescents

@article{ciarrochi2012religious,
  author = {Ciarrochi, Joseph and Heaven, Patrick C. L.},
  title = {Religious Values and the Development of Trait Hope and Self‐Esteem in Adolescents},
  year = {2012},
  journal = {Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion},
  volume = {51},
  number = {4},
  pages = {676-688},
  publisher = {Wiley},
  doi = {10.1111/j.1468-5906.2012.01675.x}
}

In plain language

Many studies have found that religious people tend to report better psychological adjustment, but most of that research is a snapshot in time — it cannot say whether religious sentiment leads to well-being, or whether people who are already doing well are simply more drawn to religion. This study tackled the direction-of-influence question in adolescence, a period when both identity and belief are taking shape.

The researchers followed 640 Australian high school students (306 boys, 333 girls; average age about 16) across grades 11 and 12, measuring how much they valued religion, their self-esteem, and their trait hope — the tendency to generate goals, plans, and the motivation to pursue them. Using structural equation modeling with cross-lagged data, they could test whether religious values predicted later changes in hope and self-esteem, and vice versa.

Religious values in grade 11 predicted improvements in hope by grade 12, but did not predict improvements in self-esteem. The reverse pathway did not hold: hope did not lead to increases in religious values. These effects survived controls for the Big Five personality traits and Eysenck's psychoticism factor, suggesting that valuing religion may play a genuine role in fostering a hopeful outlook during the teenage years.

Key findings

• Religious values, self-esteem, and trait hope all showed moderate rank-order stability from grade 11 to grade 12.
• Religious values in grade 11 predicted improvements in trait hope in grade 12.
• Religious values did not predict improvements in self-esteem.
• Hope did not lead to increases in religious values, pointing to a one-directional influence from religious values to hope.
• The results held after controlling for personality (Big Five factors and Eysenck's psychoticism factor).
• The study followed 640 adolescents (mean age 16.16 in grade 11) attending Catholic schools in Australia, making it one of the first cross-lagged studies of religiosity and adjustment during adolescence.

Related work

• All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
• Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis

Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.