Running Head: Faithful Health Norms
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2018, Vol 9, Issue 4
Abstract
Religious communities influence health-related behaviors of adherents in important ways for public health promotion. Questions remain about the processes involved and resultant health promotion actions of the religious adherents. This study applied a structural theory analysis to understand the ways by which religious adherents adopt and enact health norms. Structural theory proposes systemic influences on behavioral predispositions at the latent, interpretive, and elective levels. Latent influences on health norms occur through a process of social mediation, predisposing the religious adherents to impute faith-aligned meanings to their health norms. Religious adherents also might adopt interpretation to guide their health norms in those grey areas in which faith-based guidelines are not apparent or open to contestation. Moreover, religious adherents may elect to construct health norms combining faith-aligned and prevailing secular community standards. Public health promotion with religious adherents should address their faith-aligned health beliefs while also addressing their evolving personal health norms.
Authors and Affiliations
Elias Mpofu
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25984
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9040119
- Views 337
- Downloads 10
The Idea of a Highest Divine Principle—Founding Reason and Spirituality. A Necessary Concept of a Comparative Philosophy?
By reference to the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neo-Platonic philosophical traditions (and then to German Idealism, including Husserl and Heidegger), I will indicate the way in which the concept of reason—on the one si...
Tsipporah, Her Son, and the Bridegroom of Blood: Attending to the Bodies in Ex 4:24–26
Through the centuries, scholars and readers have looked through a variety of lenses to discover what might be revealed by the story of Tsipporah’s circumcision of her son in Exodus 4, and to assign meanings to it. The...
Anger toward God(s) Among Undergraduates in India
Many people report occasional feelings of anger toward God. However, most evidence pertains to western, predominantly Christian populations. In this study, Indian university students (N = 139; 78% Hindu) completed a su...
Holy Dung: Comic Signs of Consubstantiality in Martin Luther Films
One problem with the religious sub-genre of Hagiographic films is that they frequently romanticize, sentimentalize, or idealize the lives of saints. Our purpose is to excavate three major film biopics on the life of Pr...
The Quaker Sanctuary Tradition
In the beginning of the Religious Society of Friends, in the seventeenth century, Quakers sought sanctuary from persecution in England and its American colonies. Later they provided sanctuary to people fleeing persecut...