Attachment to God, Spiritual Coping, and Alcohol Use

Abstract

We examined the effect of emotional God attachment on undergraduates' alcohol use generally and for coping purposes and whether spiritual coping styles (collaborative, deferring, and self-directing) drive this effect. As hypothesized, people who feel secure in their emotional relationship with God use significantly more deferring, more collaborative, and less self-directing coping styles than people who feel anxious-ambivalent in their emotional relationship to God. Anxious-ambivalents use significantly more deferring, more collaborative, and less self-directing coping than people who feel disengaged from God (avoidants). Secures use alcohol significantly less than anxious-ambivalents, who use alcohol significantly less than avoidants. The effect of God attachment on general alcohol use was mediated by the use of self-directing (but not deferring or collaborative) spiritual coping style.

Notes

¹Later, Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) reconceptualized attachment along two orthogonal dimensions of avoidance and dependence, revealing that the best categorization scheme involves four, not three, adult romantic attachment styles. The Bartholomew and Horowitz categories are secure (positive view of self and others), preoccupied (i.e., negative view of self and positive view of others—formerly anxious/ambivalent), dismissing (i.e., positive view of self and negative view of others—formerly avoidant), and fearful (i.e., negative view of self and others—formerly a subset of avoidant). We employed the original three-group distinction to enable us to make a direct comparison to prior studies that have investigated God attachment specifically (Belavich & Pargament, 2002). That is, Kirkpatrick and Shaver (1992) conceptualized God attachment as theoretically parallel to Hazan and Shaver's (1997) adult romantic attachment and thus measured it with a three-item scale.

²We excluded an additional 183 participants who indicated that they fell into at least one (and sometimes more than one) of the following categories: (a) “strongly not religious” (n = 38), (b) Atheists (n = 37) or Buddhists (n = 9), (c) one participant who answered the religious denomination question “will find later,” and/or (d) participants who indicated that they never drink alcohol (n = 115). There were 183 participants who were in at least one (and sometimes more than one) of these categories. We excluded those in the first three categories because their lack of belief in God would make the attachment question irrelevant. We reconducted our analyses with the people who do not drink alcohol, and the results did not change (i.e., the significant effects of God attachment on the three types of spiritual coping and on frequency of alcohol use were still significant, all Fs > 4.07, all ps ≤ .02, and the nonsignificant effect of God attachment on alcohol coping was still nonsignificant, F(2, 313) = .83, p = .43.

³Bivariate correlations revealed that neither religiosity, r(246) = −.07, ns, nor church attendance, r(245) = −.12, ns, were related to alcohol use, and neither religiosity, r(246) = −.48, ns, nor church attendance, r(245) = −.08, ns, were related to alcohol coping. Thus, as others have done (Belavich & Pargament, 2002), we did not include either variable in our analyses.