Religion and Infant Mortality in the U.S.: A Preliminary Study of Denominational Variations
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2011, Vol 2, Issue 3
Abstract
Prior research has identified a number of antecedents to infant mortality, but has been focused on either structural (demographic) forces or medical (public health) factors, both of which ignore potential cultural influences. Our study introduces a cultural model for explaining variations in infant mortality, one focused on the role of community-level religious factors. A key impetus for our study is well-established religious variations in adult mortality at the community level. Seeking to extend the growing body of research on contextual-level effects of religion, this study examines the impact of religious ecology (i.e., the institutional market share of particular denominational traditions) on county-level infant mortality in the U.S. Analyses of congregational census and Kids Count data reveal that a high prevalence of Catholic and most types of conservative Protestant churches are associated with lower rates of infant mortality when compared with counties that feature fewer Catholic and conservative Protestant congregations. However, communities with a large proportion of Pentecostal churches exhibit significantly higher infant mortality rates. After discussing the implications of these findings, we specify various directions for future research.
Authors and Affiliations
John P. Bartkowski, Xiaohe Xu and Ginny E. Garcia
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25197
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel2030264
- Views 324
- Downloads 13
Relating with God Contributes to Variance in Happiness, over that from Personality and Age
A previous study on university students reported that personal, communal, and environmental spiritual well-being contributed to happiness over and above personality but that relating with God did not. In this study, ha...
Sensing Hinduism: Lucian-Indian Funeral “Feast” as Glocalized Ritual
Migrant narratives of Indo-Caribbean religious practices in the smaller island states of the Caribbean are rare, and that Diaspora’s funerary traditions are even less explored. This scholarly lacuna is addressed here b...
Poem as Endangered Being: Lacostian Soundings in Hopkins’s “Hurrahing” and Stevens’s “Blackbird”
This essay situates the recent phenomenology of French Heideggerean-priest Jean-Yves Lacoste in Être en Danger (2011) in a wider discussion of the sacramentology of “things” to pursue the hypothesis that the being of a...
From Religious Diversity to Political Competition: The Differentiation Process of Pentecostalism in Brazil
The growing religious diversity in Brazil has more to do with a differentiation process within Pentecostalism itself than with the presence of very diverse religious groups. Starting with the analysis of such different...
Spirituality as a Resource to Rely on in Chronic Illness: The SpREUK Questionnaire
The SpREUK questionnaire (SpREUK is an acronym of the German translation of "Spiritual and Religious Attitudes in Dealing with Illness") was developed to investigate how patients with chronic diseases living in secular...