Religious involvement, spirituality and personal meaning for life: existential predictors of psychological wellbeing in community-residing and institutional care elders

The psychosocial model of mental health postulates that wellbeing in late l ife is significantly influenced by several externally generated factors suc h as social resources, income and negative life events. More recently, the gerontological literature is drawing attention to the increasingly influent ial role of existential factors such as religiosity, spirituality and perso nal meaning in the psychological wellbeing of older adults. This study exam ined the unique and combined contribution of specific dimensions of religio sity, spirituality and personal meaning in life as predictors of wellbeing in samples of community-residing and institutionalized older adults. Using hierarchical regression analyses, the results showed that personal meaning, involvement in formal religion, participation in spiritual practices, impo rtance of religion, degree of comfort derived from religion, sense of inner peace with self, and accessibility to religious resources were significant predictors of wellbeing for the combined sample. The pattern of associatio ns between wellbeing and the preceding psychosocial dimensions was, however , stronger for the institutionalized elders. The findings confirmed that ex istential measures of personal meaning, religiosity and spirituality contri buted more significantly to the variance in wellbeing than did demographic variables or other traditional measures such as social resources, physical health or negative life events. The importance of existential constructs of religiosity, spirituality and personal meaning in helping older adults to transcend old age stresses and sustain wellbeing are discussed.